When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition

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?

InWhen 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 orThe Thousand and One Nights,The Happy PrinceorPinocchio, 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''sPeter Panand E.T.A. Hoffman''sThe Nutcracker and the Mouse King.