Volume 16, Issue 2 (2002) Jack Zipes and the Sociohistorical Study of Fairy Tales

Preface to the Special Issue on "Jack Zipes and the Sociohistorical Study of Fairy Tales"

As this special issue of Marvels & Tales goes to press, a groundbreaking work of fairy-tale scholarship that introduced the sociohistorical study of fairy tales to English-speaking scholars is being republished in a revised and expanded edition. That work is Jack Zipes’s Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. First published in 1979, Breaking the Magic Spell challenged readers to evaluate the “magic” of fairy tales critically, “to grasp the socio-historical forces” (xi) that shaped the tales, and thereby not only to understand their utopian roots and emancipatory potential, but also to lay bare the false magic and deceptive allure of tales created by the culture industry. Breaking the Magic Spell was in every respect a social and political project, one influenced, as Zipes himself points out, by “the influence of the student and anti-war movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, the resurgence of interest in Marxism, and [his] own study of the Frankfurt School [. . .]” (ix). That an expanded edition of the book should be published over two decades later speaks to its impact, its continuing relevance, and the role of Jack Zipes’s “radical theories” in the field of fairy-tale studies.