One of the surprise best-sellers of 1994 was James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, which retold a number of traditional fairy tales in satirical form, using the language of the fashionable ‘politically correct’ world of American universities. The Norwegian tale of ‘The Billy-Goats Gruff ’ thus reappears as ‘The Three Codependent Goats Gruff’, and in it the billy-goats, instead of deceiving and inally defeating the troll, insist in turn on their own culpability and eventually fall into the ravine with the troll, all still ighting desperately for the right to feel ‘guiltier than thou’. In Garner's version of H. C. Andersen's ‘The Emperor's New Clothes’, the new suit is said to be visible only to ‘enlightened people with healthy lifestyles’, who ‘don't smoke, drink, laugh at sexist jokes, watch too much television, listen to country music, or barbecue’; and when the little boy calls out ‘The emperor is naked!’ a quick-witted bystander replies, ‘No, he isn't! The emperor is merely endorsing a clothing-optional lifestyle!’, so that folly is never exposed at all. Similar treatments are given to a dozen familiar fairy tales, with Grandma cutting off the woodcutter-person's head in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, for being sexist and speciesist, ‘The Three Little Pigs’ becoming porcinistas to destroy wolvish colonialism, Snow White and her stepmother chasing away the dwarves and the prince to set up a women's spa and conference-centre, and so on.

The joke was received with considerable hauteur by academic fairy-tale scholars, Jack Zipes for instance classing it among ‘opportunistic books … that mock politics and the fairy tale itself’ (Zipes 1994: 26). Zipes's criticisms are more annoyed than accurate. Garner's book was a commercial success, but that alone does not prove it particularly ‘opportunistic’. It contains no criticism of politics in general, and its mockery is not of the fairy tale but of what academic commentary might do to it, indeed already had done to it: Zipes's complaint about people using the fairy tale opportunistically had, by 1994, more than a hint of trying to stuff the djinn back into the bottle. What Garner's collections and the critical response to them really show is that, by the 1990s, the traditional fairy tale had become a contested site, viewed by many as an actual or potential means of social comment, social control, or social change.