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liana's review
This was so so interesting, I honestly didn't think I would ever read about Bloch, Tolkien, and JKR in the same book, and yet here we are!
sara86's review
5.0
definitely going to come back to this and read it again. some chapters more than other!
bashbashbashbash's review against another edition
4.0
"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.
torts's review against another edition
3.0
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.
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