Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales
Jack Zipes
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0813190304
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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To grasp the human situation concretely for what it is. Far from delivering the truth of our condition, Pullman exposes “truths” about our society and our selves, and in keeping the world open for children through his poetic words and imaginative vision, he provides their ultimate defense and written testimony to the ways they might cope with the evil in their lives. Francesca Lia Block also seeks to defend children or to depict their desperate lives as candidly as possible to reveal how.
Hofmannsthal's “Geschichte des Kaufmannsohnes and seiner vier Diener” and during the twentieth century in Heinrich Schulz's “Der stille Maschinensaal,” Ödön von Horváth's “Sportmärchen,” and Alfred Döblin's “Märchen vom Materialismus.” By the 1920s it is possible to speak about a proletarian fairy tale.44 Machines, inventions, automatons and cities become standard parts of the settings as Marianne Thalmann has demonstrated in Romantiker entdecken die Stadt.45 Subjectivity assumes a more important.
Images of the home and forest are all clean-cut, suggesting trimmed lawns of suburban America and symmetrical living as models. To know your place and do your job dutifully are the categorical imperatives of the film. Snow White is the virginal housewife who sings a song about “some day my prince will come,” for she needs a dashing male savior to order herself and become whole, and the boys are the breadwinners who need a straight mom to keep them happy. Though the wicked queen—the force of.
With hip, amusing but freakish characters who delight in imaginative antics of live and let live. And, even this Peter Pan world of infantile regression is not as idyllic as it seems. Sexism abounds in the portrayal of men lusting after sexually titillating women. Only men are warriors while women flitter about. Serious enemies such as Nazi lumpenproletariat are depicted as the evil holders of power. The one-dimensional portrayal of imagination = good and technology = bad casts a magic spell over.
Within a child's comprehension” (5). This is, indeed, a grand statement on behalf of the fairy tale's powers. However, despite his good intentions and moral concern in the welfare of children, Bettelheim's book disseminates false notions about the original intent of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and about the literary quality of fairy tales and leaves the reader in a state of mystification. Not only is the manner in which Bettelheim would impose meaning onto child development through the.