By Jack Zipes. 2006. London: Routledge. 272 pages. ISBN: 9780415976701 (soft cover).

Reviewed by Lee Haring, Brooklyn College (Emeritus)

[Review length: 1140 words • Review posted on December 12, 2007]

Jack Zipes, setting forth a framework for the social history of the literary fairy tale (10), puts the genre back into history. The fairy tale genre, he says, consistently has a potentiality for subversion, a word referring to the transformation of values previously associated with the genre: what Oscar Wilde does to Hans Christian Andersen, what Nazi Germany did to the family image in the Grimm tales, what twentieth-century writers have done “to expand the possibilities to question the fairy-tale discourse” (181). Seeking to fill with historical realities the gap left by the critical agreement to dehistoricize the fairy tale, Jack Zipes applies to this genre the search for an ideological code propounded for European literature by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). With its two new chapters, one on the innovative Straparola and Basile, the other on the infamous Disney, this important book reorders the field of fairy tale studies.