Jack Zipes, currently Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and a founding father of the academic discipline of Fairy Tale studies, sees fairy tales as agents of socialization, and as deeply revealing about the historical moment of their telling. His approach, which is interdisciplinary, trans-national and cross-cultural, is based on the cultural studies perspectives of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. He has also published works of fiction, though his creative energies have mainly gone into his translations of works ranging from The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987) to essays by Ernst Bloch.
