A fairy tale is more than just a fairy tale

In focusing on the interaction between various mediations of the fairy tale, Zipes refutes dichotomies of print vs oral controversies that scholars – especially Willem de Blécourt in Tales of Magic, Tales of Print (2011) and Ruth Bottigheimer in Fairy Tales: A New History (2009) – have been promoting to paint a misinformed history of fairy tales as having literary (rather than oral) origins. Zipes changes the terms of the debate by arguing that researchers should turn their attention to recent sophisticated and innovative theories of storytelling, cultural evolution, human communication and memetics to see how fairy tales enable us to understand why we are disposed towards them and how they ‘breathe’ life into our daily undertakings.