Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the 20th Century

In this fascinating study, Cecire (Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present), an assistant literature professor at Bard College, traces the current popularity of juvenile fantasy novels back to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Fiercely resistant to literary modernism, those authors wanted to “re-enchant” the contemporary world and teach readers, especially children, how to “read the world for enchantment” through their books set in, respectively, Middle-Earth and Narnia, both imagined worlds evoking England’s medieval past. Cecire recounts in some detail Tolkien and Lewis’s joint effort to revise Oxford’s English curriculum in the 1920s to reemphasize the study of Old English, especially through such classic texts as Beowulf. She sees Tolkien’s quest for an intrinsically “English” national literature in medieval works as an explicitly conservative, xenophobic reaction to the “internationalism” of modernist authors and to the “Americanization” he feared would transform Britain. The “Oxford School” of fantasy literature that Lewis and Tolkien created, Cecire shows, has since influenced—albeit without transmitting the authors’ reactionary politics—such English fantasy series as Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy—which begins at an alternate-universe Oxford college—and J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster Harry Potter franchise. This meticulously researched study, while occasionally repetitive, is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand literary fantasy’s influence on today’s culture. (Dec.)