National Fantasies

On the whole, Italian children’s literature has been studied less frequently than its British and American counterparts. Lindsay Myers’s recent reading of children’s fantasy in Italy considers a wide spectrum of texts, in some cases little-known ones, and suggests interesting correlations and tensions between these texts and various moments in Italian history, from the Unification to the present day. It is organized in a systematic manner, and the author presents her arguments with clarity and accessibility.

The subset of children’s literature that Myers considers—the fantasy—is, in the words of Maria Nikolajeva (quoted by Myers), “a narrative combining the presence of the primary and the secondary world, that is, our own real world and some other magical or fantastic imagined world” (Nikolajeva 54; qtd. in Myers 9). It may include myths, legends, folk and fairy tales, horror stories, romance, and other narrative forms. It typically features a child protagonist with whom its readers can identify easily and ends often on a happy note. As Myers notes, fantastic genres in which the laws of verisimilitude are suspended in general afford greater freedom both for engaging with controversial social and political questions and for treating sensitive domestic problems related to young readers’ own lives. Writers have frequently turned to this genre in times of historical crisis and transition, and the period that Myers treats (1870 to 2010) has been one of the most turbulent in Italian history. In particular, Myers argues that children’s literature played a central role in the nation-building process in Italy as it informed and formed future citizens.

Myers adopts a “typological contextual approach,” distinguishing it from noncontextual approaches such as Vladimir Propp’s formalist “morphology” as well as from “monographic contextual approaches” that engage cultural and ideological considerations of a single text or author. She defines her critical mode as one that “involves identifying groups of texts which share common structures and examining the extent to which these texts reacted and responded to the socio-political climate in which they were created” (15), noting that although this approach has been adopted in criticism of the English-language fantasy, it is new to the Italian tradition.

Myers identifies nine fantasy sub-genres, organized chronologically and according to the “type of protagonists, the kind of secondary world(s), the plot structure and the nature of magic” (16). These are the Memoir Fantasy (1870–1896), which “focuses on the life stories of animals or inanimate objects” (16); the “Monello” Fantasy (1897–1908), with its rascally protagonists; the Microcosmic Fantasy (1908–15); the Quest Fantasy (1915–18); the Surreal Fantasy (1919–29); the Superhero Fantasy (1930–39); the Community Fantasy (1945–50), which “describes the lives of communities of anthropomorphized animals and plants” (17); the Pinocchiesque Fantasy (1950–80); and the Compensatory Fantasy (1980–2010), which “uses magic to offset suffering and unhappiness in the primary world” (17). Each of these chapters is organized in nearly identical fashion, proceeding from a general historical overview of the period to a discussion of the structural features of the fantasy in question and of its cultural, social, and political contexts, and ending with a consideration of the “structure and purpose” of the fantasy type. The central section of each chapter consists of a sampling of three or four texts, each of which is used to illustrate one or more aspects of the various socio-political contexts; Myers typically considers the influence of other texts and traditions as well. The analyses of the relationships between the texts and their contexts also yield many interesting insights, some of which I summarize below.

The Memoir Fantasy that was popular in the first decades of Italy’s history as a unified nation was a sort of didactic Bildungsroman that featured animals or objects acting as vehicles for the nineteenth-century bourgeois values of politeness, obedience, diligence, and humility. Yet it also investigated complex and highly topical issues such as class division, child abuse and prostitution, and...