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Reviewed by:
  • The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes
  • Shira Wolosky (bio)
Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 248 pp.

The next in a long line of core books by Zipes on fairy tales, this study provides an overview of the current metamorphoses of tales as retold, repainted, refilmed, rephotographed, and recriticized in scholarship. Consistent with Zipes’s earlier arguments that link subversion with creativity, feminist transformations of tales and images are particularly prominent, attesting to a central mystery of fairy tales: their seductive and powerful realization of originality exactly as the reworking of cultural figures, as if culture itself (but with new, before unheard voices) were dreaming.

Shira Wolosky

Shira Wolosky is professor of American studies and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is author of Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War; Language Mysticism; The Art of Poetry; The Riddles of Harry Potter; and the volume on nineteenth-century poetry in the Cambridge History of American Literature.

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