For centuries fairy tales have been a powerful mode of passing cultural values onto our children, and for many these stories delight and haunt us from cradle to grave. But how have these stories become so powerful and why?

In When Dreams Came True, Jack Zipes explains the social life of the fairy tale, from the sixteenth century on into the twenty-first. Whether exploring Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or The Thousand and One Nights, The Happy Prince or Pinocchio, L. Frank Baum or Hermann Hesse, Zipes shows how the authors of our beloved fairy tales used the genre to articulate personal desires, political views, and aesthetic preferences within particular social contexts. Above all, he demonstrates the role that the fairy tale has assumed in the civilizing process-the way it imparts values, norms, and aesthetic taste to children and adults.

This second edition of one of Jack Zipes's best-loved books includes a new preface and two new chapters on J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and E.T.A. Hoffman's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.

About the Author

Jack Zipes is Professor of German at the University of Minnesota. An acclaimed translator and scholar of children's literature, his most recent books include Why Fairy Tales Stick, Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller, Beautiful Angiola, and The Robber with the Witch's Head, all published by Routledge.

Reviews

"A fascinating social history of the uses and abuses to which fairy tales have been put in the course of their transformation from tales told orally by adults to adults into written (and frequently homogenized) bedtime stories parents read to the children. Zipes persuasively argues that fairy tales keep alive our 'longing for a better world that can be created out of our dreams and actions'."-New York Times Book Review

"Zipes has forged a career out of brilliant and subversive analyses of fairy tales...Intelligent and thoughtful fun, without deconstructing the land of Faerie into dust and ashes."-Booklist

Book Information
ISBN 9780415980074
Author Jack Zipes
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 460g