Beyond the looking-glass

Children’s fantasy literature has never been just one thing. Animal fables, folk and fairy tales were not originally intended for a child audience, while the relatively recent phenomenon that is entertaining (rather than principally didactic) children’s literature has many origins that are not fantastic at all. Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn draw a line — well, many lines — from these assorted beginnings to today’s world, in which fantasy specifically aimed at young readers is a large and noisy part of the publishing market, but still very far from a single coherent one.

Much of the category’s mutation over the centuries can be explained contextually: political pressures, economic changes, advances in gender politics and shifts in attitudes towards religion all play a role. These include loss of an empire, the aftermath of a brutal war, the anxieties of a nation seeking to define itself (think of L. Frank Baum’s America, or T.H. White’s Britain) and crucially, unsurprisingly, how we think of children, and what we expect from them. Levy and Mendlesohn give a convincing explanation for a distinctively post-second-world-war literature where children are unprotected, where they have agency and responsibility, where they face true and terrible evil. As time goes on, the stakes continue to rise. Compare Nesbit’s world to Narnia — do our young protagonists have a small, limited quest to complete, or do we expect them to save the world?

Meanwhile children’s literature in general has stretched through adolescence, over roughly the same period that saw the requirement for young people to remain in full-time education extended. As the role of the teenager in society changed, young adult books took form as a significant category, with fantasy playing an increasingly dominant and sophisticated role within it.

The forces driving the genre’s development are often external ones, then.