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15th out of 45 books
—
30 voters
The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre
by
Jack Zipes
If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread--or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. In this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes present...more
Hardcover, 235 pages
Published
April 8th 2012
by Princeton University Press
(first published April 4th 2012)
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Jack Zipes is a leading authority on fairy tales, but he is trading on his reputation in this carelessly written book. It is more of a pastiche than an academic study. Instead of paraphrasing secondary sources, he almost always offers long quotations. This suggests that he has not entirely assimilated their ideas, and interferes with the flow of the text. The book has no central thesis, and the chapters are disconnected from one another. I am being a bit generous in giving it three stars, but Zi...more
I really love the way Jack Zipes makes fairy tale scholarship both learned and accessible - this book does not really add anything new but it builds on a strong foundation and, really, I find anything to do with fairy tales fascinating
Excessively readable and Zipes is brilliant as always, but this is a collection of essays about topics that he's covered well in the past. These essays seem to be written for vastly different audiences so if you are new to Zipes, I recommend Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion first.
I'm finding this to be unbearably dry. Love the topic, but I don't think I can bring myself to slog through it.
Prof. Zipes draws on many theories (anthropology, evolutionary theory, psychology, literary theory...) and uses a very large panel of examples to discuss the origin, nature and appeal of the fairy-tale. As always with Zipes's work, it is well written, engaging and convincing.
My only criticism would be his praise of Breillat's rewriting of Bluebeard which I found terrible. I am never against innovative rewritings of famous tales, but I found Breillat's work dull and cheap. Maybe the actors were...more
My only criticism would be his praise of Breillat's rewriting of Bluebeard which I found terrible. I am never against innovative rewritings of famous tales, but I found Breillat's work dull and cheap. Maybe the actors were...more
Interesting but disjointed on the whole. I think it really would have benefited from a conclusion tying everything together.
Um...yeah. Zipes wrote another book. The best bits were the appendices.
Academically oriented. Too much is devoted to an "argument" with other authors for the general reader to follow.
What a wonderful, enthralling resource. Really, very interesting. My favorite chapters were 1.The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Taless, 4.Witch as Fairy/Fairy as Witch and 5.Tales of Innocent Persecuted Heroines and Their Neglected Female Storytellers and Collectors
While I don't agree with every idea presented in this book, it was an illuminating read. If you enjoy cultural and literary analysis and/or fairy tales, you should definitely pick this book up.
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Jack David Zipes is an American retired Professor of German at the University of Minnesota, who has published and lectured on the subject of fairy tales, their linguistic roots, and argued that they have a "socialization function". According to Zipes, fairy tales "serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales r...more
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“Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.”
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