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Reviewed by:
  • Roald Dahl ed. by Ann Alston and Catherine Butler
  • Joli Barham McClelland (bio)
Roald Dahl. Edited by Ann Alston and Catherine Butler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

In her introduction to Roald Dahl, Catherine Butler observes that while Dahl’s life has been well scrutinized in academic prose, “probably the most striking thing about academic criticism of his work is that there is so little of it” (2). It is this lack of criticism—of theoretical, thematic, linguistic, and other scholarly exploration—that the writers in this edited collection seek to rectify. The notable and impressively credentialed contributors to Roald Dahl pursue new viewpoints into his stories, discovering along the way not only a strong desire to appeal to children on their own terms, but also a dedication to many traditional family values coupled with a willingness to constantly reinvent the writer himself within Dahl’s fiction.

The first half of Roald Dahl offers a delicious array of criticism on his written works, beginning with Deborah Cogan Thacker’s playing with the notion of “fairy tales” and “anti-fairy tales” in Dahl’s writings. Thacker examines both Dahl’s reliance on traditional fairy tale themes and his eschewing of the more didactic nature of civilized fairy tales in favor of a return to the “carnivalesque tendencies” of folktales. Highlighting Dahl’s use of narrative techniques and his emphasis on storytelling interaction between child and adult—or between reader and writer—within his tales, Thacker illustrates Dahl’s insistence on the power of storytelling and the ability of the teller to change both lives and fortunes.

The humor often found in Dahl’s “carnivalesque tendencies,” as emphasized by Thacker, is more fully explored by Jackie E. Stallcup in her essay “Discomfort and Delight: The Role of Humour in Roald Dahl’s Works for Children.” The notion that disgust and delight are located along the same spectrum, along with Stallcup’s discussion of Dahl’s humor as stemming from artfully placed examples of incongruity, the taboo, and derision, make for enjoyable insights into Dahl’s ability to walk the very fine line between the amusing and the outlandish in his works.

Dahl’s use of language throughout his stories has also been cited as both amusing and outlandish, and it is this aspect of the writer which David Rudd tackles. Arguing that Dahl employs language to disorder the status quo, most notably through scatological and violent terms, Rudd examines the writer’s lexical, phonological, typographical, semantic, and narrative inventions as direct attempts to undermine accepted power hierarchies (adult versus child, human versus animal, etc.) and uncover new methods of empowerment and ways of viewing normality.

Formal education, or Dahl’s hatred of it, is an often explored topic in his oeuvre. Pat Pinsent, investigating Dahl’s “problem of school,” deftly [End Page 368] teases out the “love–hate” relationship with education as expressed in his stories, rather than identifying one of simple abhorrence. Like Pin-sent, Ann Alston finds that Dahl’s feelings toward the traditional family structure, as with his feelings toward education, are ambiguous at best. As Alston argues, Dahl rejects parental figures who fail to embrace the individuality of children and their ability to help the adults grow and learn in return. Like teachers, mother figures who fail to express love, devotion, and self-sacrifice for their children uniformly meet untimely—if highly amusing—ends in Dahl’s works.

Building on Alston’s investigation of family romance, and mother figures in particular, Beverley Pennell turns a critical eye to the feminist themes in Dahl’s children’s tales. In the same vein as numerous other critics within Roald Dahl, Pennell cites the fairy tale genre, and the misogynous traditions typically found within it, to flood Dahl’s seemingly antifeminist portrayal of women with a different light. Arguing that Dahl’s female protagonists increasingly support the feminist agenda through their agency and intelligence, Pennell crafts an intricate and convincing narrative in favor of female power in his works.

The second half of Roald Dahl moves outside the texts themselves to embrace popular and cultural questions surrounding his overall work as an author and his impact on the realm...

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