I'm supposed to be finished with my reading for my PhD Thesis (called a Dissertation on the US side of the pond), but how can I be when amazing books like this come out? I was so excited by Maria Sachiko Cecire's
Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century, I immediately got in touch with her publisher and her to talk about the book. (Turns out Maria and I have
tons of friends in common!) So, I'm thrilled to have her here today to talk about her fascinating debut monograph....
To push past the musty folds of coats in an old wardrobe, and walk into a whole other land fresh in new-fallen snow; to tap the dingy bricks of a London courtyard wall and see them wriggle aside to reveal a bustling, vivid universe of wizardry; to receive a priceless and seemingly inscrutable instrument and find that in your hands it yields up the secret truths of the universe and opens doors to adventure beyond your dreams…
Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century
Many lovers of children’s literature – and most lovers of fantasy – will recognize these moments as scenes from C. S. Lewis’s
Chronicles of Narnia, J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter books, and Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials trilogy. Over and over again, children’s fantasy offers moments of magic when child characters discover that they can bridge an invisible gap between mundane reality and otherworlds of enchantment. Such stories are now so widespread that fantasy has become, as author Neil Gaiman writes in his blurb for Re-Enchanted, “like wallpaper, part of our world”. But how did it get to be this way? And why is so much iconic fantasy set in pseudo-medieval, roughly British worlds?
Hunting down the origins of modern children’s fantasy naturally brought me to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who both taught at the University of Oxford in the years that they were writing their Middle-Earth and Narnia stories. But I also discovered that several other major children’s fantasy authors also studied English at Oxford as undergrads: Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, Philip Pullman, and Kevin Crossley-Holland. I had to know more. What was the relationship between all of these authors, whose children’s fantasy has so shaped popular culture in the Anglo-American world and beyond? What role did their shared education play?
I spent four years at Oxford as a graduate student, sifting through the archives, walking the city’s winding streets, and getting to know the English department first-hand. I turned this research into a book in the years after I moved back to the US. In Re-Enchanted I show how Tolkien and Lewis led the charge in a two-pronged attack—both within and outside the academy—on the disenchantment, relativism, ambiguity, and progressivism that they saw in modernity; and how they used their positions as Oxford faculty to build a curriculum that would teach new generations of writers to re-enchant the world through literature, medievalism, and the fantastic.
Echoes of their faerie-touched English curriculum recur throughout what I call the “Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature”: there are resonances of the Old English poem
Beowulf in Tolkien’s
The Hobbit (including a cup-thief waking the dragon in both!); the supernatural Christmas adventures of the fourteenth-century
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight turn up in new forms in Cooper’s
The Dark Is Rising; Chaucer’s transformation of a desirable young woman into an outspoken old one in his
Wife of Bath’s Tale’s reappears in a fairy-tale setting in Jones’s in
Howl’s Moving Castle; and much more. Even Oxford School authors who push back against their forerunners, like Pullman in
His Dark Materials, draw on the Oxford English syllabus: in that case, through a reading of Satan in Milton’s early modern epic
Paradise Lost that C. S. Lewis would have definitely not liked. Meanwhile, all of these authors followed Tolkien and Lewis’s lead in writing their tales for children, in one of the few modern literary realms, many of them felt, where magic, heroism, adventure, and belief in the unseen were still valued.
My book explores the lasting effects of Tolkien and Lewis’s project of re-enchantment by discussing not only Oxford School novels but also other works inspired by (and that respond to) the subsequent rise of fantasy, like the
Harry Potter series,
A Song of Ice and Fire and its TV adaptation, Lev Grossman’s
The Magicians trilogy, and Junot Díaz’s
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. These effects are often complicated and vexed: the legacies of colonialism, racism, sexism, and other social hierarchies have long clung to children’s fantasy, making some readers avoid the genre altogether. As a mixed child who felt excluded from beloved realms of magic growing up, I know how painful the seemingly innocent associations between privilege and enchantment can be. But Re-Enchanted also addresses the work being done to diversify the genre, with texts that insist that wonder belongs to
everyone and that no culture has a monopoly on magic. These books continue the project of re-enchantment through fantasy literature in their own way, drawing on a range of cultural traditions to build new bridges to magical otherworlds for children from all backgrounds.
Re-Enchanted links:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/re-enchanted
https://www.amazon.com/Re-Enchanted-Childrens-Fantasy-Literature-Twentieth/dp/151790658X
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781517906580
For instance, I'm celebrating the new illustrated (by me) edition of A BIRD ON WATER STREET! My debut novel won me "Georgia Author of the Year!"
