A Necessary Fantasy?: The Heroic Figure in Children's Popular Culture (review)

A Necessary Fantasy?: The Heroic Figure in Children's Popular Culture has interesting essays about a variety of novels and other media, but the title and subtitle are a bit misleading. Not all of the articles are about fantasy; many of the essays discuss books best categorized as Romantic Realism, rather than fantasy. Readers will understand the focus of the book better if they take time to read its introduction, in which Jones and Watkins state that the focus of the book lies not with the fantastic, but with the heroic. They write: "The contributors of this book address, from a variety of critical perspectives, the central issues of what constitutes heroism and the nature of the heroic figure in American, Australian, and British Popular Culture" (1 [emphasis added]).

My second surprise was the wide definition employed in the concept of what constitutes "popular culture." While I was not surprised to see articles concerning film, television, comic books, or action toys—clear symbols of what, to me, constitutes popular culture—I was surprised to find an essay which discusses pony stories from as early as 1800 (Memoirs of Dick), and one on girls' books from the earliest part of the 1900s. Readers will find interesting essays on the heroic in literature and popular culture and its influence on the formation of society.

A handful of essays do focus on the fantastic. Nina Mikkelsen's foray into the world of trickster characters ("Strange Pilgrimages: Cinderella Was a Trickster—and Other Unorthodoxies of American and African-American Heroic Folk Figures") reveals some of the difficulties in trying to tie the heroic to the fantastic. Showing that oral tradition stories often fall outside of traditional literary definitions, yet "there is no such thing as a prototypical trickster; the trickster 'text' is a non-text—or it is a very open one that changes constantly as it crosses geographical, historical, and cultural (class, gender, and ethnic) lines" (24-25), Mikkelsen discusses a world of American trickster tales that readers may not know.

C. M. Stephens's article, "Spider-Man: An Enduring Legend" and David Lusted's "Children and Popular Culture: The Case of Turtle Power," exemplify what I expected in the book. Stephens offers a look at a Spider-Man whose "archetypal insecurity encourages empathy and identification" (263) from readers of all ages who suffer similar insecurities. Lusted's interest in Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles is in the British reaction and recreation of the Turtles as British popular-culture icons. His essay covers not just the origin of the Turtles and their transformation for British audiences, but also the nature of heroism and childhood in England.

In "Producing the National Imaginary: Doctor Who, Text and Genre," John Tulloch is less concerned with the heroic and more concerned with the nature and cause of the mythic and the effect of the mythic on "a particular moment of contestation and reconfiguration of the British 'imagined community'" of 1974 (368). In a very dense article, Tulloch examines the nature of myth as it is perceived by a variety of audiences.

Chris Routh does not come to any conclusions in "Peter Pan: Flawed or Fledgling Hero." He brings together the history of the creation of Peter Pan, a quantity of criticism, and a varied look at the heroic, partially to explain the enduring popularity of Pan.

Dudley Jones looks at similar ideas when he examines the legend of Robin Hood and its impact on readers since about 1912, in "Reconstructing Robin Hood: Ideology, Popular Film, and Television." Jones's essay traces the variety of retellings to show how popular culture is able to emphasize new aspects of stories.

Beyond the essays on fantasy, several examine male and female heroes as both cultural markers and role models in British popular stories. Essays...