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Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales
This revised, expanded, and updated edition of the 1979 landmark Breaking the Magic Spell examines the enduring power of fairy tales and the ways they invade our subjective world. In seven provocative essays, Zipes discusses the importance of investigating oral folk tales in their socio-political context and traces their evolution into literary fairy tales, a metamorphosis that often diminished the ideology of the original narrative. Zipes also looks at how folk tales influence our popular beliefs and the ways they have been exploited by a corporate media network intent on regulating the mystical elements of the stories. He examines a range of authors, including the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Ernst Bloch, Tolkien, Bettelheim, and J.K. Rowling to demonstrate the continuing symbiotic relationship between folklore and literature.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
40 people are currently reading
1482 people want to read
About the author
Jack D. Zipes
152 books243 followersJack David Zipes is a retired Professor of German at the University of Minnesota. He has published and lectured extensively 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 reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society." His arguments are avowedly based on the neo-Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
Zipes enjoys using droll titles for his works like Don't Bet on the Prince and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Ridinghood.
He completed a PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University. Zipes taught at various institutions before heading German language studies at the University of Minnesota. He has retranslation of the complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Zipes enjoys using droll titles for his works like Don't Bet on the Prince and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Ridinghood.
He completed a PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University. Zipes taught at various institutions before heading German language studies at the University of Minnesota. He has retranslation of the complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
August 24, 2023
At the start of the year I reviewed a number of books on fairytales and mentioned I might try to work on a book using various social theories to interpret Cinderella. A friend of mine asked me if I would like to present a lecture on the idea. He has posted my lecture on YouTube if anyone is curious or interested in hearing me stutter and stammer my way through an online lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUw-z...
This is a remarkably good book. It is a post-Frankfurt school, Marxist look at the significance of fairy tales. I’ve recently read The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales – a neo-Freudian interpretation of fairy tales and it is very lucky I read these books this way around, as if I’d read this one first there is very little chance I would have read the other. Not only does this book mention Bettelheim’s little problems with faking his qualifications and abusing children, but also provides a remarkable critique of the limitations of Bettelheim’s understanding of Freud, while also criticizing the substance of his arguments using the work done by Sociolinguists and Basil Bernstein’s work in one of my favourite series of books: Class, Codes and Control.
Okay, so what does a Marxist critique of fairy tales look like? One of the key things a Marxist critique asks is that ever-popular, but all too rarely asked question, cui bono? Who benefits? This book provides a wonderful history of fairy tales, looking particularly at who collected them and how they might have changed them in their retelling for publication.
Many people may see Marxism as a kind of original conspiracy theory where the evil class enemies are constantly at it to undermine and repress the glorious working classes. However, no conspiracy is actually necessary.
Prior to the Enlightenment there basically were no fairy tales. There were folk tales instead. These had not really been written down. These were stories created by people (peasants mostly) and told about situations they found themselves in, often harsh and nasty situations not of their choosing or under their control. Often these stories involved starvation. The example given here is of Hansel and Gretel, interestingly the same story which Bettelheim gives a Freudian interpretation of in his book. But here this story is not about overcoming Oedipal desires or striving for independence from the ‘bad mother’ – rather this is literally about starvation and children going into the forest where they find the house of a feudal master with more food than they can eat. This is pretty much a ‘The Liberal Party (Republicans / Conservatives) are evil bastards’ story, condemning those who have too much who happily do nothing while others are starving. Or rather, who, in fact do worse than nothing in being prepared to fatten and then eat children whose only crime is not wanting to starve to death. You know, think Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, you can't go too far wrong.
During the Enlightenment such stories were frowned upon, because they clearly did not fit with the rationalism of early Capitalism. Science was capable of explaining and transforming the world and such childish stories only got in the way of the vision splendid. This was a world where Capitalism was asserting itself against a powerful aristocracy. That aristocracy was all too willing to put upstart merchants and other capitalists in their place. Stories like Beauty and the Beast – where a merchant falls on hard times and agrees to send his daughter to a castle where a beast lives, but who turns out to be not nearly so bad, is here interpreted as the aristocracy showing that although they may look like beasts from a distance, everything is much better on closer inspection. And that everything is also better all round when it is all left in its proper sphere.
However, the ongoing development of the printing press and the need for amusements, particularly by the Bourgeois, saw a growth in both novels and the transition of folk tales into fairy tales. Fairy tales being the ‘improvement’ of folk tales by the educated men who would collect, transcribe and elaborate on them. This is much the same problem Bettelheim discussed with Perrault, but with a more historically situated explanation. That explanation being that if you are of a particular class and you are publishing stories in a press that is owned by people of the same class, then your own ‘taste’ will have been formed by the interests and consciousness of that class. So, if you are going to ‘improve’ folk stories, it will be to remove the ‘ugly’ things about those stories – and things likely to appear ‘ugly’ to your class sensibilities might be the very things that made the story worth telling according to the sensibilities of the peasant you originally heard the story from.
And this is the heart of his criticism of Bettelheim. Bettelheim presents a universalist interpretation of the meaning of fairy tales. They have this universalist meaning because all children go through oral and Oedipal phases. All children need to resolve their Id, Ego and Super-egos. All children repress their sexual fantasies regarding their parent of the opposite sex – and so these stories can be universal and applicable as something approaching ‘self-help’ manifestos.
BUT…
Bernstein was able to show that children approach language differently according to the social location they are being groomed to fulfil. So that when the child of middle class parents hears a story like Little Red Riding Hood they might well hear it as there is always a protective father figure to get you out of trouble when things go wrong, but you have to try new things anyway, while working class kids might hear it as a tale about what happens if you do not submit to the control implied in sticking to the correct and narrow path – and these readings depend not on changes in the words the children hear, but in their life experiences of familial control structures.
There is a really interesting discussion on Harry Potter as an anti-feminist text reasserting masculine power structures that it is just for the best that my youngest daughter does not read - not a good time for her love of Harry to come into direct conflict with her blossoming feminism, it could get ugly. There is also a fascinating discussion on Rocky and Bullwinkle – which I hadn’t realised was basically removed from television in the 1960s. He discusses the subversive nature of elements of the show, particularly my favourite bit when I was growing up – Fractured Fairy Tales. This is what Deleuze and Guattari would refer to as ‘lines of flight’ – where even in the most controlled of situations there are possibilities for subversive moves, but that these generally tend to be ‘re-captured’. Nonetheless, as he explains, shows like The Simpsons and films like Shrek have taken the ideas in Rocky and Bullwinkle to quite another level.
His reading of Sleeping Beauty – the Disney cartoon – is priceless and his situating it within New Deal depression era America is utterly gobsmacking.
Now, I certainly don’t think that a Post-Marxist interpretation of fairy tales is the only possible reading of them. But rather, I really do believe that fairy tales are like diamonds – that they have facets that only become visible when a particular light is shone upon them. There is no right light that reveals all of their truth and mystery – but I suspect there is no necessarily wrong light either. Knowing something about the time and struggles of people that existed when a story was written can hardly be said to distract from an understanding of the story. It won’t tell you everything – but it certainly won’t tell you nothing, either.
Really, this comes highly recommended. Bugger, and I haven’t even mentioned the whole chapter on German Romanticism and how he uses this to overcome overly ‘structuralist’ accounts of Marxism…
This is a remarkably good book. It is a post-Frankfurt school, Marxist look at the significance of fairy tales. I’ve recently read The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales – a neo-Freudian interpretation of fairy tales and it is very lucky I read these books this way around, as if I’d read this one first there is very little chance I would have read the other. Not only does this book mention Bettelheim’s little problems with faking his qualifications and abusing children, but also provides a remarkable critique of the limitations of Bettelheim’s understanding of Freud, while also criticizing the substance of his arguments using the work done by Sociolinguists and Basil Bernstein’s work in one of my favourite series of books: Class, Codes and Control.
Okay, so what does a Marxist critique of fairy tales look like? One of the key things a Marxist critique asks is that ever-popular, but all too rarely asked question, cui bono? Who benefits? This book provides a wonderful history of fairy tales, looking particularly at who collected them and how they might have changed them in their retelling for publication.
Many people may see Marxism as a kind of original conspiracy theory where the evil class enemies are constantly at it to undermine and repress the glorious working classes. However, no conspiracy is actually necessary.
Prior to the Enlightenment there basically were no fairy tales. There were folk tales instead. These had not really been written down. These were stories created by people (peasants mostly) and told about situations they found themselves in, often harsh and nasty situations not of their choosing or under their control. Often these stories involved starvation. The example given here is of Hansel and Gretel, interestingly the same story which Bettelheim gives a Freudian interpretation of in his book. But here this story is not about overcoming Oedipal desires or striving for independence from the ‘bad mother’ – rather this is literally about starvation and children going into the forest where they find the house of a feudal master with more food than they can eat. This is pretty much a ‘The Liberal Party (Republicans / Conservatives) are evil bastards’ story, condemning those who have too much who happily do nothing while others are starving. Or rather, who, in fact do worse than nothing in being prepared to fatten and then eat children whose only crime is not wanting to starve to death. You know, think Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, you can't go too far wrong.
During the Enlightenment such stories were frowned upon, because they clearly did not fit with the rationalism of early Capitalism. Science was capable of explaining and transforming the world and such childish stories only got in the way of the vision splendid. This was a world where Capitalism was asserting itself against a powerful aristocracy. That aristocracy was all too willing to put upstart merchants and other capitalists in their place. Stories like Beauty and the Beast – where a merchant falls on hard times and agrees to send his daughter to a castle where a beast lives, but who turns out to be not nearly so bad, is here interpreted as the aristocracy showing that although they may look like beasts from a distance, everything is much better on closer inspection. And that everything is also better all round when it is all left in its proper sphere.
However, the ongoing development of the printing press and the need for amusements, particularly by the Bourgeois, saw a growth in both novels and the transition of folk tales into fairy tales. Fairy tales being the ‘improvement’ of folk tales by the educated men who would collect, transcribe and elaborate on them. This is much the same problem Bettelheim discussed with Perrault, but with a more historically situated explanation. That explanation being that if you are of a particular class and you are publishing stories in a press that is owned by people of the same class, then your own ‘taste’ will have been formed by the interests and consciousness of that class. So, if you are going to ‘improve’ folk stories, it will be to remove the ‘ugly’ things about those stories – and things likely to appear ‘ugly’ to your class sensibilities might be the very things that made the story worth telling according to the sensibilities of the peasant you originally heard the story from.
And this is the heart of his criticism of Bettelheim. Bettelheim presents a universalist interpretation of the meaning of fairy tales. They have this universalist meaning because all children go through oral and Oedipal phases. All children need to resolve their Id, Ego and Super-egos. All children repress their sexual fantasies regarding their parent of the opposite sex – and so these stories can be universal and applicable as something approaching ‘self-help’ manifestos.
BUT…
Bernstein was able to show that children approach language differently according to the social location they are being groomed to fulfil. So that when the child of middle class parents hears a story like Little Red Riding Hood they might well hear it as there is always a protective father figure to get you out of trouble when things go wrong, but you have to try new things anyway, while working class kids might hear it as a tale about what happens if you do not submit to the control implied in sticking to the correct and narrow path – and these readings depend not on changes in the words the children hear, but in their life experiences of familial control structures.
There is a really interesting discussion on Harry Potter as an anti-feminist text reasserting masculine power structures that it is just for the best that my youngest daughter does not read - not a good time for her love of Harry to come into direct conflict with her blossoming feminism, it could get ugly. There is also a fascinating discussion on Rocky and Bullwinkle – which I hadn’t realised was basically removed from television in the 1960s. He discusses the subversive nature of elements of the show, particularly my favourite bit when I was growing up – Fractured Fairy Tales. This is what Deleuze and Guattari would refer to as ‘lines of flight’ – where even in the most controlled of situations there are possibilities for subversive moves, but that these generally tend to be ‘re-captured’. Nonetheless, as he explains, shows like The Simpsons and films like Shrek have taken the ideas in Rocky and Bullwinkle to quite another level.
His reading of Sleeping Beauty – the Disney cartoon – is priceless and his situating it within New Deal depression era America is utterly gobsmacking.
Now, I certainly don’t think that a Post-Marxist interpretation of fairy tales is the only possible reading of them. But rather, I really do believe that fairy tales are like diamonds – that they have facets that only become visible when a particular light is shone upon them. There is no right light that reveals all of their truth and mystery – but I suspect there is no necessarily wrong light either. Knowing something about the time and struggles of people that existed when a story was written can hardly be said to distract from an understanding of the story. It won’t tell you everything – but it certainly won’t tell you nothing, either.
Really, this comes highly recommended. Bugger, and I haven’t even mentioned the whole chapter on German Romanticism and how he uses this to overcome overly ‘structuralist’ accounts of Marxism…
January 4, 2019
This is my first book by Jack Zipes, and, if all of them are as good or better than this one, I gotta get my hands on more.
Analyzing the popularity of folk and fairy tales through a Marxist lens, Zipes challenges critics to analyze these stories through their social and historical contexts. Additionally, he argues that, without looking at their contexts and without critical thinking, these tales can be commodified and used as a weapon to support the oppressive status quo.
Every writer of fairy tales and folklorist should read this book.
Analyzing the popularity of folk and fairy tales through a Marxist lens, Zipes challenges critics to analyze these stories through their social and historical contexts. Additionally, he argues that, without looking at their contexts and without critical thinking, these tales can be commodified and used as a weapon to support the oppressive status quo.
Every writer of fairy tales and folklorist should read this book.
September 8, 2018
My favourite chapter was the one where Jack got salty about Bettelheim.
Read
July 16, 2022mr zipes.... you've done it again. look at bettelheim's wikipedia and you'll see he deserved all the hate and more that he got in this book.
November 10, 2021
"The fantastic form of the fairy tale carries a realistic lode of what is open-ended and fragmentary but can still be realized. It plays upon the imagination not to open it up to escape into a never-never land but to make greater contact with reality."
"The emphasis on play, alternative forms of living, pursuing dreams and daydreams, experimentation, striving for the golden age - this stuff of which fairy tales were (and are) made challenged the rationalistic purpose and regimentation of life to produce profit and expansion of capitalist industry."
Zipes' book offers a socio-political reading on the nature of folk and fairy tales. and their derivatives. It spans broadly from the classic German Volksmärchen and Kunstmärchen of the early industrial age up to Harry Potter. Rather than see such stories as truly timeless as is the cliché, Zipes' central thesis is that they are actually stamped with historical elements, essentially being molded by the social and political contexts in which they were formed. Yet, such stories were not entirely at the mercy of the larger cultural forces. A possibility lingers within the nature of such fantasy worlds for devising radical elements as tacit critiques of social structures. The most striking examples of this were the fairy tales brought forth by the German Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which have an implicitly anti-capitalist purpose, and harking back to a time before arbitrary dictates of modern rationality.
Building upon the key work of Adorno and Horkheimer's concept of the culture industry, Zipes also examines how socio-political factors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have impressed upon many of our familiar fantasy stories. The cultural industry in this instance operates to strip folk and fairy tales of any radical elements, and leave them as watered down shadows of their former selves, serving only to uphold existing social structures. The central culprit for this is, of course, the Disney Corporation, whose "Disneyification" of tales has crafted trite and unimaginative versions of fairy tales (primarily the German Kunstmärchen), eerily devoid of their earlier socio-political contexts and themes. Despite the fact that folk and fairy tales were never just for children, it is this trend that is responsible for the now commonplace conception that fantasy is a child's genre (or looked upon only as childhood nostalgia for adults). This is a feature that would seem to align with the neoliberal tendency to close off possibilities for imaginative alternative worlds, and perhaps, in a sense, also anticipating Mark Fisher's notion of capitalist realism.
The most interesting chapter here compares the thought of two unlikely individuals: the Marxist Ernst Bloch and the Catholic traditionalist J. R. R. Tolkien. Both can said to have broadly anti-capitalist views, though for drastically different reasons. Through a reading of The Hobbit that compares and contrasts the form of anti-capitalism espoused by Bloch and Tolkien, Zipes highlights the potential for embedding such modern-day fantasy with aspects that serve as imaginative comparisons against the supposed "realism" of the real world.
Zipes' book, thus, serves primarily as a means to give at least an introduction to some alternative means of viewing folk and fairy tales, at least beyond that of popular conceptions. The title itself, after all, refers to breaking the "magic spell" that the culture industry has cast over our modern engagement with folk and fairy tales. The revised 2002 edition is notable for adding many additional works of scholarship, updated references on fantasy works like Harry Potter and Shrek, and an additional chapter on what we term today as "children's literature." Shrek, in particular, is argued in a portion of this chapter as being a satiric inversion of the trend of "Disneyification." Thus, like the German Romantic use of literary fairy tales, the possibility remains for fashioning such stories with a deliberate bent against existing trends.
"The emphasis on play, alternative forms of living, pursuing dreams and daydreams, experimentation, striving for the golden age - this stuff of which fairy tales were (and are) made challenged the rationalistic purpose and regimentation of life to produce profit and expansion of capitalist industry."
Zipes' book offers a socio-political reading on the nature of folk and fairy tales. and their derivatives. It spans broadly from the classic German Volksmärchen and Kunstmärchen of the early industrial age up to Harry Potter. Rather than see such stories as truly timeless as is the cliché, Zipes' central thesis is that they are actually stamped with historical elements, essentially being molded by the social and political contexts in which they were formed. Yet, such stories were not entirely at the mercy of the larger cultural forces. A possibility lingers within the nature of such fantasy worlds for devising radical elements as tacit critiques of social structures. The most striking examples of this were the fairy tales brought forth by the German Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which have an implicitly anti-capitalist purpose, and harking back to a time before arbitrary dictates of modern rationality.
Building upon the key work of Adorno and Horkheimer's concept of the culture industry, Zipes also examines how socio-political factors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have impressed upon many of our familiar fantasy stories. The cultural industry in this instance operates to strip folk and fairy tales of any radical elements, and leave them as watered down shadows of their former selves, serving only to uphold existing social structures. The central culprit for this is, of course, the Disney Corporation, whose "Disneyification" of tales has crafted trite and unimaginative versions of fairy tales (primarily the German Kunstmärchen), eerily devoid of their earlier socio-political contexts and themes. Despite the fact that folk and fairy tales were never just for children, it is this trend that is responsible for the now commonplace conception that fantasy is a child's genre (or looked upon only as childhood nostalgia for adults). This is a feature that would seem to align with the neoliberal tendency to close off possibilities for imaginative alternative worlds, and perhaps, in a sense, also anticipating Mark Fisher's notion of capitalist realism.
The most interesting chapter here compares the thought of two unlikely individuals: the Marxist Ernst Bloch and the Catholic traditionalist J. R. R. Tolkien. Both can said to have broadly anti-capitalist views, though for drastically different reasons. Through a reading of The Hobbit that compares and contrasts the form of anti-capitalism espoused by Bloch and Tolkien, Zipes highlights the potential for embedding such modern-day fantasy with aspects that serve as imaginative comparisons against the supposed "realism" of the real world.
Zipes' book, thus, serves primarily as a means to give at least an introduction to some alternative means of viewing folk and fairy tales, at least beyond that of popular conceptions. The title itself, after all, refers to breaking the "magic spell" that the culture industry has cast over our modern engagement with folk and fairy tales. The revised 2002 edition is notable for adding many additional works of scholarship, updated references on fantasy works like Harry Potter and Shrek, and an additional chapter on what we term today as "children's literature." Shrek, in particular, is argued in a portion of this chapter as being a satiric inversion of the trend of "Disneyification." Thus, like the German Romantic use of literary fairy tales, the possibility remains for fashioning such stories with a deliberate bent against existing trends.
February 20, 2021
Collection of essays analyzing fairy tales (and fantasy more broadly) through a socio-economic/political lens. (Read for my class on storytelling.)
I enjoyed this one significantly more than Bettelheim's and found the theories much more convincing. However, this book is pretty dense and very much in conversation with other literary scholars. I often wasn't super familiar with the other scholars and theories he was refuting, which made it hard to get through at times.
I think it's hard for me to ever get behind a cover-all theory on fantasy/kid lit. I don't think all books have deeper meaning or can all be assigned the same theoretical framework. I do think that some stories are just good entertainment and that's why kid's like them. Maybe that's simplistic of me, but saying that every story intentionally portrays the unconscious yearnings of the lower classes is just too broad for me to get behind. It seems like the themes in these stories are just very broad (good vs. evil, redemption, justice, etc.) and that allows people (and scholars) to assign whatever meaning they want to them--and that's fine! Stories are allowed to mean wildly different things to different people.
I enjoyed this one significantly more than Bettelheim's and found the theories much more convincing. However, this book is pretty dense and very much in conversation with other literary scholars. I often wasn't super familiar with the other scholars and theories he was refuting, which made it hard to get through at times.
I think it's hard for me to ever get behind a cover-all theory on fantasy/kid lit. I don't think all books have deeper meaning or can all be assigned the same theoretical framework. I do think that some stories are just good entertainment and that's why kid's like them. Maybe that's simplistic of me, but saying that every story intentionally portrays the unconscious yearnings of the lower classes is just too broad for me to get behind. It seems like the themes in these stories are just very broad (good vs. evil, redemption, justice, etc.) and that allows people (and scholars) to assign whatever meaning they want to them--and that's fine! Stories are allowed to mean wildly different things to different people.
December 27, 2018
It took me a long time to get through this for some reason, but the final chapters are very good. A Marxist critique of fairy/folk tales, with not much time for Bettelheim and his Freudian analysis (especially of the Cinderella story). Also interesting on The Hobbit, and the early Star Wars films. Others here know rather more about the various aspects than I do, so I'll leave detailed comment to them.
February 18, 2025
To be fair I only read chapter six to get some Bettelheim critique. This dude was a grade A hater. Imagine telling someone “you weren’t even in the concentration camps for that long”.
Bettelheim sucks OK but less personal attacks and more critical counterarguments (he leaves a lot of space for them).
Bettelheim sucks OK but less personal attacks and more critical counterarguments (he leaves a lot of space for them).
January 6, 2020
Helpful for Critical Reading
Although there were more typos than expected (or they are easier to notice when reading more closely), this was a good summary/reminder to pay attention to content, implied moral structure, etc. Also an enjoyable read.
Although there were more typos than expected (or they are easier to notice when reading more closely), this was a good summary/reminder to pay attention to content, implied moral structure, etc. Also an enjoyable read.
November 24, 2018
This was a bit of a hard read for me at times since it could get pretty dry, but I liked the exploration of Tolkien and Bloch. Plus it's always nice to see Bettelheim get a good dunking.
January 17, 2019
Interesting. Thought provoking. At times reads too academic for my taste. Final essays more engaging.
sony-or-android
January 19, 2020For Kunzler's Rumpelstiltskin, probably skim the rest.
February 19, 2021
Fun to see my life in another book besides the one written by our original author here in the Enchanted Forest
March 14, 2021
As per some of the comments below, though this was an intriguing title, it's far too academic for me. I just knew too few of the writers, thinkers and institutions his arguments are built on.
April 16, 2021
Extreme bias towards 1800s german folklore. Ruined the new media and ragged on Harry Potter and Shrek????
Read
January 9, 2024DNF
February 18, 2025
ZIPES, Jack. «Romper el hechizo. Una visión política de los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos». Lumen, Buenos Aires, 2001.
Publicado por primera vez en 1979, Romper el hechizo analiza histórica y críticamente la evolución de los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, su influencia sobre las creencias populares, la ideología que hay detrás de ellos, y el modo en que son incorporados a la cultura mediática de hoy.
Jack Zipes hace hincapié en las fuerzas sociohistóricas que han modificado la función de los cuentos maravillosos en los últimos tres siglos. Además, analiza el uso de los mismos por parte de una amplia gama de autores (incluyendo a los hermanos Grimm, Charles Perrault, los románticos alemanes, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, y J. R. R. Tolkien), y aporta una evaluación de su perdurable importancia.
Nuestras vidas están moldeadas por cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, pero en ese molde nunca completamos el sentido de los cuentos por nosotros mismos. Sigue siendo ilusorio, al igual que nuestra propia historia. Desde que nacemos hasta que morimos, escuchamos y nos embebemos del saber de los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, y sentimos que nos pueden ayudar a alcanzar nuestro destino. Saben y nos dicen que queremos transformarnos en reyes y reinas, ontológicamente hablando, que queremos ser amos de nuestros propios reinos, en contacto con los proyectos de nuestras vidas y nuestras autoproyecciones para destacarnos como hacedores de historia. Los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos iluminan el camino...
Zipes es imprescindible. Recomiendo toda su obra; pero, al lector que le interesa el trasfondo de los #cuentos de hadas y los #estudios de género, su «El irresistible cuento de hadas. Historia cultural y social de un género».
Publicado por primera vez en 1979, Romper el hechizo analiza histórica y críticamente la evolución de los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, su influencia sobre las creencias populares, la ideología que hay detrás de ellos, y el modo en que son incorporados a la cultura mediática de hoy.
Jack Zipes hace hincapié en las fuerzas sociohistóricas que han modificado la función de los cuentos maravillosos en los últimos tres siglos. Además, analiza el uso de los mismos por parte de una amplia gama de autores (incluyendo a los hermanos Grimm, Charles Perrault, los románticos alemanes, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, y J. R. R. Tolkien), y aporta una evaluación de su perdurable importancia.
Nuestras vidas están moldeadas por cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, pero en ese molde nunca completamos el sentido de los cuentos por nosotros mismos. Sigue siendo ilusorio, al igual que nuestra propia historia. Desde que nacemos hasta que morimos, escuchamos y nos embebemos del saber de los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, y sentimos que nos pueden ayudar a alcanzar nuestro destino. Saben y nos dicen que queremos transformarnos en reyes y reinas, ontológicamente hablando, que queremos ser amos de nuestros propios reinos, en contacto con los proyectos de nuestras vidas y nuestras autoproyecciones para destacarnos como hacedores de historia. Los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos iluminan el camino...
Zipes es imprescindible. Recomiendo toda su obra; pero, al lector que le interesa el trasfondo de los #cuentos de hadas y los #estudios de género, su «El irresistible cuento de hadas. Historia cultural y social de un género».
December 27, 2009
"Breaking the Magic Spell" is one of Jack Zipes' earliest books, and an important and useful text. I read a copy published in 1979, but I know there's an updated and annotated version that was released more recently. The book covers the history of German folk and fairy tales, especially the philosophical history (i.e. the historical role of the tales and their resultant ideologies), the history of the romantic fairy tale, the potential utopian function of the fairy tale in contemporary society, fairy tales in American pop culture (well, okay, late 70s pop culture), and, finally, concludes with excellent (though scathing!) criticism of Bruno Bettelheim's classic "The Uses of Enchantment" (Bettelheim's book as about the use of fairy tales in children's psychological and social development).
Zipes' ideas are thrilling and eminently engaging, but his prose can become a slog, due both to the density of ideas present in his work and to the sheer amount of academic jargon he uses. Zipes moves dizzyingly from descriptions of complex Marxist philosophy to fairy tale studies, to psychoanalytic theories, on to an analysis of popular culture, and then back to the beginning again, rendering stunning conclusions. Put another way: he's really smart but his prose can get muddy and pedantic sometimes.
Overall I would highly recommend reading this, especially alongside other fairy tale texts by Maria Tatar, Ruth Bottigheimer, Marina Warner, etc.
Zipes' ideas are thrilling and eminently engaging, but his prose can become a slog, due both to the density of ideas present in his work and to the sheer amount of academic jargon he uses. Zipes moves dizzyingly from descriptions of complex Marxist philosophy to fairy tale studies, to psychoanalytic theories, on to an analysis of popular culture, and then back to the beginning again, rendering stunning conclusions. Put another way: he's really smart but his prose can get muddy and pedantic sometimes.
Overall I would highly recommend reading this, especially alongside other fairy tale texts by Maria Tatar, Ruth Bottigheimer, Marina Warner, etc.
November 24, 2014
Hmm... Actually, I hardly had any knowledge about the works that Zipes mentioned and talked about. Therefore his essays, although interesting, were quite dense to me and their points didn't actually stick with me. With the exception of the last essay, they pretty much went in and went straight out of my mind again.
The last essay, a response to Bettelheim's book "Uses of Enchantment", was so nice to read! First of all because he basically ridiculed Bettelheim's approach (which he called 'pathetic' among other words), but also because of the last 2 versions of Rumpelstiltskin and a short essay about the fairness of the story were added to it. Especially the last essay was very enjoyable to read!
The last essay, a response to Bettelheim's book "Uses of Enchantment", was so nice to read! First of all because he basically ridiculed Bettelheim's approach (which he called 'pathetic' among other words), but also because of the last 2 versions of Rumpelstiltskin and a short essay about the fairness of the story were added to it. Especially the last essay was very enjoyable to read!
February 23, 2015
Zipes makes a lot of interesting and useful points but so much of this is boring. He spends most of his time saying every other scholar of fairy tales is wrong because their perspective isn't historically-based German Marxist enough, and I just really did not care for that.
He also did not have a very strong "why do we care?" aspect to his argument, so I didn't. Care, that is. Because what am I supposed to do with an historically-based German Marxist perspective on fairy tales? Not much. I agree heartily that historical context is important in understanding works, especially ones with such long histories, but it isn't the be all end all of looking at a piece of literature.
He also did not have a very strong "why do we care?" aspect to his argument, so I didn't. Care, that is. Because what am I supposed to do with an historically-based German Marxist perspective on fairy tales? Not much. I agree heartily that historical context is important in understanding works, especially ones with such long histories, but it isn't the be all end all of looking at a piece of literature.
May 9, 2016
I skipped over quite a bit (particularly in the essay about cinematic fairy tales, as I haven't seen Star Wars or any of the films he discussed, really), but what I read was quite good. He's insightful, and I tend to agree with him. To an extent. He's also very very Marxist/anti-capitalist, and I'm less emphatic in my pro-children's-literature and anti-Capitalist stances.
April 11, 2015
I really enjoyed Jack Zipes' theories on fairy tales, and can't wait to read Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. I am also really glad I read his chapter on Bruno Bettelheim before I starting reading The Uses of Enchantment. It gave me some idea of what to expect (i.e. condescending bullshit).
March 27, 2016
A very helpful guide to understanding fairytales and folk tales, and that the two are different from each other. It also sets historical and social context for both tales along with criticism for both genres. It is also a study in utopia and how folk and fairytales are unfulfilled wishes that the storytellers seek to fulfill.
October 23, 2025
Raccolta di saggi nei quali l'autore ripercorre la storia della fiaba dalle origini. Zipes sostiene che bisogna andare alle radici profonde delle fiabe ricollocandole nel contesto sociale dove sono nate per poterne capire appieno il messaggio e il potere sovversivo che ogni fiaba ha in sé.
June 12, 2007
An interesting socialist perspective on the purpose of folk and fairy tales.
September 26, 2007
Intriguing study of the socio-political context of global fairytales.
August 10, 2011
If you love super dense, highly intellecutal books about the inner-workings and impact of fairy tales, then this book is for you!! Sadly, it was not for me...
November 13, 2011
definitely going to come back to this and read it again. some chapters more than other!
July 29, 2011
from one of the few people writing about theories of fairy tales
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September 22, 2013This is a great theoretical book for those who have an interest in fairy/folk tales.
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