Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn

CHILDREN'S FANTASY LITERATURE

An introduction

274pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, 16.99 [pounds sterling] (US $27.99).

978 1 107 61029 3

Frances Hardinge's Costa Book Award victory for The Lie Tree earlier this year was as significant as it was unexpected. The first children's book to win since Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass fifteen years earlier, it reflects a trend; children's and Young Adult (YA) fiction now regularly tops bestseller lists, and juvenile fantasy regularly supplies Hollywood with sources for adaptations. Serious academic attention to fantasy literature is long overdue, and this new study from Cambridge University Press offers a magisterial foundation.

Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn's ambition is to trace the history of children's fantasy in English as it shifts from something deemed "potentially dangerous to young readers", to "something that presents an ideal for young people to aspire to, and then to something that can help children find their own lives and gain agency in the world they live in". They identify several recurring themes to unify a wide array of material: free will and destinarianism; domesticity, containment and escapism; moral, religious and civic allegories. The first chapter, covering folklore traditions and European pioneers such as the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, is, at sixteen pages, too short to provide sufficient grounding in...