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

Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction is an immense work in scope and scholarship. As befits its authors, Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn—two prominent figures in the world of children’s literature criticism—this latest work is a far-reaching feat that grasps the tenuous strings of the inception of both fantasy and children’s literature and weaves them from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries into a tremendous narrative tapestry. Employing a myriad of critical lenses including historical, political, ideological, and cultural schools of thought throughout the ages, Levy and Mendlesohn meticulously detail hundreds of works of fantastical children’s literature, many well known and many less so, to offer a nuanced history of the development of children’s fantasy literature that is occasionally dizzying in its detail but will undoubtedly be the unsurpassed reference for the field for years to come.

In writing scholarship on children’s literature and fantasy, a crucial component is defining both children’s literature and the fantastic in order to provide boundaries for criticism. Here Levy and Mendlesohn have been highly inclusive, adopting the latter’s belief that it is the “mode of fantasy,” rather than the definition, that advances critical consideration (3). Thus Mendlesohn’s four modes of fantasy—portal-quest, intrusion, immersive, and liminal—are all employed throughout the work to locate stories within the trajectory of the genre. Additionally, other well-accepted delineations come into play, including high, indigenous, urban, and pastoral fantasy. Similarly, the historical and modern tales encapsulated in Mendlesohn and Levy’s definition of “children’s literature” are also far-flung, including works that were appropriated by children as well as those written specifically for them (5). These broad definitions, coupled with the authors’ declaration that they “began their bibliographies from scratch” (5), serve as defining characteristics of this book, making it perhaps one of the most ambitious and inclusive writings available on the development of the fantastic for children (5).

The book opens with an examination of how the fantastic evolved to be considered suitable for and published for children. Noting that the earliest children’s stories were often moral animal tales, Levy and Mendlesohn trace the development of such tales through the fairy tales of Perrault’s French court, into the social narratives of the Grimms’ German stories, through the skepticism of early English critics toward the imaginative in children’s works, and finally to the domestic and mostly enclosed fantasy stories of late nineteenth-century Britain. While much of the thematic and social conclusions about the development of children’s fantasy works throughout these time periods are well established, the diligence with which the authors document lesser-known works that support these trajectories is enlightening. No stone, or perhaps no anthropomorphized animal, is left unexamined.

The bulk of Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction runs chronologically, focusing largely on the development of the fantastic and of children’s publishing in England and America from the Victorian period through modern times. As they examine each era in turn, Levy and Mendlesohn lovingly trace not only the defining works and authors of that period, but also the socioeconomic, historical, and cultural trappings that colored the perceptions of both the writers of children’s fantasy and their young readers. Well-versed critics and enthusiasts new to the world of fantasy and children’s fiction alike will find copious detail and insights concerning the movement of the fantastic and children’s literature from their bounded, often trivial, and moralistic roots in Victorian England and the budding United States to the boundless, high-stakes, and frequently dark and bitter flowering that forms much of the fantasy available to children and teens today. Throughout this journey all the usual suspects appear, including such household names in fantasy and children’s writing as George MacDonald, A. A. Milne, Edith Nesbit, J. R. R. Tolkien, Roald Dahl, C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Cooper, Jane Yolen, J...