Decoding Magic’s Cultural Roots

In this keenly argued, well-intentioned but not always satisfying book, Maria Sachiko Cecire offers a socio-historical study of the origins and politics of twentieth-century children’s fantasy literature in English. She devotes five chapters to the beginnings and proliferation of the genre in the Anglo-American world with a sharp eye toward fantasy’s cultural ramifications. The book primarily focuses on six writers whom Cecire identifies as the “Oxford School of Children’s Fantasy Writers”: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, Kevin Crossley-Holland, and Philip Pullman. Cecire’s contention is that the group was heavily influenced by its scholarship at the University of Oxford and promoted a common understanding of the fantastical: one which had widespread influence in America as well. Cecire simultaneously demonstrates how the genre became an inextricable part of the Anglo-American psyche and identity. Her critical narrative moves with a sincere eye toward the historical, and she apportions an extensive space to biographical and political contexts of literary productions, and her study asserts a strong deterministic quality about fantasy’s overarching agenda(s).

The first two chapters should be read together along with the introduction, as they shed light on how critical thoughts and creative imaginations of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis opened the fertile ground of fantasy novel writing, creating a form of replicable “tradition.” These three chapters comprise nearly half of the book and concentrate on exposing the medievalist tendencies of early twentieth-century fantasies, their anti-modernist stances, and their formal canonization within academia. Building on Seth Lerer’s argument that the child is a metaphor for what later historical periods consider “medieval,” Cecire establishes a link between the study of the Middle Ages and the study of infancy. She observes that the magic “considered natural to Romantic childhood” (44) derives from the magic of the past, which is why forms of children’s literature such as allegory, moral fable, and romance are “distinctively premodern” (44). Deftly plowing through rich archival material around Tolkien’s and Lewis’s lives, Cecire shows how magic, medievalism, and childhood were considered “trivial” and “irrelevant” categories in the adult-based and future-oriented premise of modernity. She reads Tolkien, Lewis, and their successors carving out their roles as writers against this cultural backdrop. Notwithstanding the death of enchantment as announced by Max Weber, or the irrationality of magic declared by Freud, these fantasists consciously rediscover the value of old texts like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. These texts not only present heroic plots to emulate in contemporary times but also allegorical and metaphysical truths to live by. Cecire argues that such rediscovery reaches its finest apotheosis once it is reconfigured in the mould of the fantastical.

The transformation of the medieval into the fantastical was especially aided and approved by the formal setting of an ancient institution, the University of Oxford, where Tolkien and Lewis worked as educators and curriculum-makers. The Oxford syllabus was committed to an intensive study of old tales that marshalled a quintessentially “English” identity. Such literary identity, Cecire contends, had parallels in numerous other adventurous and imperial stories of Victorian novels along with Middle English texts, and also in the global colonial rise of English studies. The latter equated English literary education with a Christian, white, and morally superior learning, a feature that entered fantasy writing of the era as well. As Cecire remarks: “Fantasy’s roots in academia and especially in English studies bind the genre to an authoritative source of cultural capital” (125). Interestingly, while Oxford visibly promoted a study of Anglo-Saxon literature and its derivatives, the rival English university Cambridge shaped its English curriculum according to the changing times. Thus, instead of Old English writings, it was the contemporary literature of modernism that influenced Cambridge’s literary pedagogy. Cecire holds this difference to be of paramount significance since it strongly impacted...