Fairy tale expert Jack Zipes says that the tales "serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society."
Jack Zipes is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.
His books include The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Bantam, 3rd edition in 2013) and the landmark Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (University Press of Kentucky, 2nd edition in 2002). His newest book is Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales through Picture Postcards (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which describes how key scenes of fairy tales have been rendered over time.