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  • "High Fantasy" in America:A Study of Lloyd Alexander, Ursula LeGuin, and Susan Cooper
  • Lois R. Kuznets (bio)

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century in Great Britain, Lewis Carroll was writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) and George MacDonald was writing At the Back of the North Wind (1871); meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Louisa May Alcott was writing Little Women (1868-69) and Mark Twain was writing his Tom Sawyer books (1876). The informal but pervasive reputation of the British for producing great fantasies for children and adults seems to have been formed during this era and it has been preserved almost intact for one hundred years, while what has been reserved for Americans is the tradition of the realistic novel for children -not always considered an honor, at least among children's literature circles in the United States.1

This informally held view of the differences between British and American children's literature has been, up until recently, fostered rather than dissipated by British and American critics of fantasy for children and adults. In spite of quite different contemporary developments in fantasy theory on the Continent, stemming from the works of structuralist Todorov and his followers, the British and Americans have generally continued to measure achievement in the fantasy line by the yardstick of C. S. Lewis's and J. R. R. Tolkien's critical theories and literary practices.2

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and his essay, "On Fairy-Stories" (delivered as a lecture in 1938 and published in 1947), have exerted a prime influence, establishing contemporary standards for what is known in Great Britain and the United States as "high fantasy" (although Tolkien did not call it that). So-called high fantasy puts a premium on the presence of the "marvelous," i.e., evidence of supernatural powers available and at work in the natural world. High fantasy also generally depends on the writer's "subcreation" -to use Tolkien's word for it -of a substantial and original fantasy world. This world has to be both sustained enough (often through two or three volumes) and clearly and significantly delineated enough (often by incorporating elements of classic mythologies), to serve as a fitting background for a story in which the forces of good and evil clash and [End Page 19] in which evil is, at least temporarily, defeated. The protagonist of the story may be, and usually is, ordinary in ways with which most modern readers can identify, but he must perform heroic acts in the course of the story, which usually has a romance-quest structure. By its end, he must achieve the status of a hero among his comrades, who somehow need him to complete their number even though they are, in contrast to the hero, usually extraordinary in ways with which the audience cannot identify.3 According to Tolkien's theories, such a fantasy must never convey within its text any sense that the fantasy world is unreal or that the hero's experience is untrue. This fantasy world cannot, for instance, be purely psychic in origin, as a dream would be. (This means, of course, that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland does not qualify -an exclusion that has caused much controversy even among those who generally accept Tolkien's theories.) Any explanation for the marvelous other than supernatural would automatically deprive the work of its high fantasy status.

Measured by such criteria, American writers of high fantasy for children are latecomers in the field. Only with the publication of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1962, could American fantasy for children be seen as in the running. And for some purists, L'Engle's work, which attempts to reconcile the numinous with the scientific in many ways, does not make the grade either since it smacks somewhat of science fiction -a genre with which Tolkien refused to be associated, although C. S. Lewis found it a useful vehicle for some of his adult fantasy. At any rate, the works with which I will deal, coming hard on the heels of L'Engle's first fantasy, are...

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