Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction by Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn (review)

In Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn trace the development of fantasy literature for children from its roots in sixteenth-century fable and folklore to its manifestations in the present day teen market. Wide-ranging in its text selection as well as its critical approaches, the book is the first to put the study of children's literature and the study of the fantastic in extended dialogue. In doing so, Levy and Mendlesohn have created a foundational text for the intersection of these fields.

The scope of this undertaking is impressive: the authors focus on literature written in English, primarily from Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and they include well-known as well as lesser known writers. Their critical frameworks—aside from extant scholarship on children's and fantasy literature—include historical, literary, and national contexts, material print culture, and changing conceptions of childhood and audience. Far from competing, these frameworks inform each other and bring into relief the complex interplay of forces that have shaped the production of children's fantasy literature, especially in the West.

For instance, chapter 3, "The American Search for an American Childhood," reads to the rise of fantasy in the United States against the backdrop of early American distrust of the fantastic, the influence of folk and tall tales, the significance of Hans Christian Andersen, the role of public libraries, the advent of The Horn Book Magazine, and the popularity of pulp fiction—this last an oft neglected context for scholarly study of children's fantasy literature, and so much appreciated here. By engaging these frames, Levy and Mendlesohn complicate more commonly understood ancestries of children's literature by placing L. Frank Baum and E. B. White, foundational figures in American children's fantasy literature lauded by librarians, next to pulp writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, whose work, though intended for adult audiences, became popular among adolescent readers (to the chagrin of many of those same contemporary librarians) and influenced writers such as Andre Norton and Ray Bradbury. They also note significant differences between British and American children's fantasy literature, especially regarding child protagonists' relationships with parents, and emphasize the impact of J. R. R. Tolkien on American readers' conception of fantasy.

Here, as in other chapters, the text knits writers together across time and geography to establish and disrupt legacies in the history of fantasy literature. Chapters 5–7 ("The Changing Landscape of Post-war Fantasy," "Folklore, Fantasy and Indigenous Fantasy," and "Middle Earth, Medievalism and Mythopoeic Fantasy," respectively) exhibit the enormity of this undertaking, as the first of them opens with this statement: "In the years between 1950 and 1990, the landscape of children's fantasy in the UK and the Commonwealth changed in both literal and metaphorical ways … [and was] so prolific, and so important to the development of children's fantasy, that we have chosen to split [the period] into three [chapters]" (101). The discussion within these sections ranges vastly. The authors examine how children's fantasy of this period developed tropes now used in fantasy for adults, trace the expansion of fantasy "fodder" from classical myth to archaeological and historical inspirations from many cultures, note the trend of pushing the landscape of the fantastic from the bounded to the unbounded, and argue convincingly for a movement from the child as visitor to the fantastic to the child as participator in the mythopoeic impulse. These, of course, are just several of the many strands Levy and Mendlesohn weave.

The final chapters of the book demonstrate the ways that children's fantasy of the last few decades has both inherited these complex histories and forged ahead to create new ones. Drawing a contrast to mid-twentieth century rejections of "lipstick and nylons" fantasy (a nod to C. S. Lewis's treatment of Susan in the final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia), Levy and Mendlesohn provide a nuanced critique of...