And They Lived Happily Never After: On the Anti-utopian Function of Postmodern Polish Fairy Tales by Bohdan Butenko, Hanna Krall, and Sławomir Shuty

My goal is to show how the experience of the communist regime that affected Poland in the twentieth century—that is, the political, social, and mental situation of Poles before the fall of communism in 1989—is reflected in the works discussed. I focus on these fairy-tale texts' motifs of sociopolitical oppression and on the metafictional dimension of oppression. By using the descriptor "anti-utopian function of the fairy tale," I refer to Jack Zipes's idea of the fairy tale as a utopian genre and argue these postmodern Polish fairy tales question this utopian dimension.