Description
The fairy tale may be one of the most important cultural and social influences on children’s lives.
But until the publication of the first edition of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children’s behavior, values, and relationships to society.
As Jack Zipes convincingly shows, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. He asks questions that link the fairy tale to society and to our political unconsciousness. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of our children?
How did they react to the prescribed fairy-tale discourse?
This updated and expanded second edition of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion incorporates important recent research in the fields of folklore and fairy-tale studies. Jack Zipes has added new chapters on the influence of Italian fairy tale authors Basile and Straparola on the classic French writers Perrault and d’Aulnoy and a new essay on Walt Disney’s extraordinary impact on the genre as a ‘revolutionary’ fairy tale filmmaker.