Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children's Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century by Maria Sachiko Cecire (review)

Maria Sachiko Cecire's Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children's Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century provides a detailed and broadly contextualized argument concerning the origins and influences of children's fantasy literature, stemming from J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and their resulting here-named "Oxford School of children's fantasy literature." I use "influence" multivalently; Cecire explores both the literature and beliefs that spawned Lewis's and Tolkien's interests as well as the formative effects of their work on those who write in their wake. Thus, while the locus of the study is the Oxford School of children's fantasy literature, the book details not only its characteristics and aims but also its formative and rightfully contested legacy in Anglo-American literature and popular culture. Indeed, the work of the four authors who make up the school in addition to originators Tolkien and Lewis—Kevin Crossley-Holland, Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philip Pullman—do not get too much more "stage time" in the text than the work of non-Oxford fantasists such as J. K. Rowling, Junot Díaz, Nnedi Okorafor, and Lev Grossman.

The first half of the book provides several historical contexts necessary to understanding the early rise of medievalist children's fantasy from its Oxfordian roots. Chapters 1 and 2 are particularly linked by Cecire's focus on Lewis's and Tolkien's work. The first takes up their philosophies of literary meaning, which insist on an antimodernist embrace of childhood reading, magic and magical creatures (in particular the dragon), and Christian religious beliefs. Cecire describes the notion of a transcendent "heroic past" (63) enabled by the conflation of the medieval with enchantment and the openness to wonder believed to mark childhood, as well as the promotion of allegory as the literary form most likely to convey spiritual insight—which Lewis and Tolkien believed necessary to arm against the deadening effects of industrial, fragmented, trend-consumed modernity. Throughout the book, Cecire attends to how this vision and its aims change in tenor—whether Lewis and Tolkien would have approved or not—from the religious to the secular with each generation of new fantasy writers; she also attends to how the Englishness of medievalist fantasy is one of its most persistent characteristics. Indeed, Englishness is baked into children's fantasy literature's origin story: such literature was the tool through which Tolkien, especially, set about attempting to create a distinctly English mythology set on "idealized visions of magical early Englishness whose powerful draw was unhindered by the fact that it probably never existed" (57).

Chapter 2 takes a closer look at that project, demonstrating the successful efforts of Lewis and Tolkien to center medieval studies in the Oxford curriculum in order to assert the significance of English identity, especially in contrast to Cambridge's embrace of modernism. Cecire lays out how each school engaged arguments about masculinity and literary merit to leverage their opposing positions, with special attention to the way "Oxford English under Tolkien and Lewis was an ideological project: nationalistic, traditionalist, masculinist, even colonialist in its rhetoric, and resistant to the effete ambiguities and disenchanted realism of modernity" (101). She also weaves into her arguments Gauri Viswanathan's insights regarding English studies in India as a colonialist (though not uncontested) project.

Neither of these first chapters, however, remains in the details of the first half of the twentieth century to make the whole of its argument; each also engages with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century evidence of the legacy of Lewis's and Tolkien's perspectives. For example, references to the medieval interests of the Harry Potter series and its fandom community appear several times throughout these and other sections. And while the third chapter begins the book's proper launch into further investigation of the contours and contests of this legacy, it dwells first in cultural contexts that converge...