Jack Zipes begins this lively and provocative work by exploring the historical rise of the literary fairy tale as genre in the late seventeenth century. In his examinations of key classic fairy tales, Zipes traces their unique metamorphoses in history with stunning discoveries that reveal their ideological relationship to domination and oppression in Western society. The fairy tale received its most "mythic" formation and articulation in America. Consequently, Zipes shows how Walt Disney appropriated Snow White to express notions of American male individualism and how L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz has been interpreted in film and literature as a critique of American myths. Zipes also takes on Robert Bly's Iron John, a myth for the American men's movement created out of Bly's misunderstanding of folklore and traditional fairy tales.