In the first edition of When Dreams Came True I remarked that the scholarship on fairy tales, as well as the genre itself, had flourished during the past twenty years, and in the time that has passed since the initial publication of this book, the situation has not changed.
More and more studies about the significance of the fairy tale have appeared, and more and more innovative experiments with the genre in the fields of painting, film, advertisement, literature, the internet, theater, opera, toys, and clothing have been produced almost daily—and not just in the West.
It is almost as if there were a fierce drive to keep the utopian spirit of the fairy tales alive, even when this spirit may be commodified in our age of consumerism.
Though the fairy tale is frequently emptied of its substantial utopian longings through commodification, it still denotes a loss or a lack.
The postmodern giants, ogres, and witches that haunt us may twist meanings and deplete the quality of our lives by destroying our hope and maiming our lives, but they will never be able to eliminate the essence of dreams for a better life.
In revising and expanding When Dreams Came True, I have corrected some minor factual and stylistic errors that appeared in the first edition.
The major changes involve the addition of four new essays, which, I believe, will make my book more comprehensive and more substantial.
Chapter 5, “The “Merry” Dance of the Nutcracker: Discovering the World through Fairy Tales,” deals with the brilliant writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, a German romantic, whose presence is much more with us than we realize.
Chapter 6 contains two new essays, “The Hans Christian Andersen We Never Knew” and “Critical Reflections about Hans Christian Andersen, the Failed Revolutionary,” which replace “Hans Christian Andersen and the Discourse of the Dominated.”
I have eliminated this latter essay because I have republished it in my book, Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller, which appeared in 2005.
