Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children's Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century

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From The Hobbit to Harry Potter, how fantasy harnesses the cultural power of magic, medievalism, and childhood to re-enchant the modern world Why are so many people drawn to fantasy set in medieval, British-looking lands This question has immediate significance for millions around the world: from fans of Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter

Reviews

"Re-Enchanted is essential for the study of the fantastic. While other recent critical studies have focused on fantasys origins before 1900 or the genres place in the contemporary literary landscape, Maria Sachiko Cecire focuses the reader on the influence of the Oxford School fantasists, also known as the Inklings, who mapped the world of story through perspectives influenced by their times. Thus, fantasy was left behind while the rest of the world changed. Re-Enchanted reminds us of the ways that English-language fantasy is, was, and can continue to be an instrument of empire. Engaging, thorough, and absolutely necessary."Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, author of The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games

"Full of revelatory scholarship on J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Phillip Pullman, and their heirs, Re-Enchanted makes the case for scholarship itself at the heart of fantasy. No one will read The Lord of the Rings or His Dark Materials again without realizing just how much Oxford itselfits libraries and its landscapescripted their imaginations and how its syllabi inspire, to this day, Harry Potter, The Magicians, and beyond."Seth Lerer, author of Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter

"In the twenty-first century, fantasy has become a way of speaking, in fiction (adults or children's) and outside it. Here Maria Sachiko Cecire interrogates the Oxford roots of something that has become, like wallpaper, part of our world, and helps us to see the landscape of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, of Diana Wynne Jones and Philip Pullman, and understand how that landscape became universal, the ways it buoys us up and the ways that it fails us."Neil Gaiman

"Cecire calls upon readers to acknowledge the dangers of the Oxford Schools project while recognizing the cultural power its members harnessed. She encourages us to embrace and explore new ways of expanding the scope of the tropes of childrens fantasy to become more inclusive in the ways it reaches into the past to find magic in a difficult contemporary world."Medievally Speaking

"Effectively, Cecire proves that in terms of modern childrens fantasy literature, all roads lead to the Oxford School."CHOICE

"Cecire illustrates brilliantly how Tolkien and Lewis took the building blocks of medieval literature and historical linguistics and created alternative worlds."Times Literary Supplement

"An important and endlessly engaging book that will provoke much further thought and discussion."Mythlore

"A compelling case both for training our critical attention on medieval and medievalist literature and for expanding the texts we read, teach, study, and share."The Medieval Review

"Re-Enchanted reveals how magic mystifies ideologies, embedding antimodernist, nationalist, colonialist ideas in childrens fantasy, concealing them in an invisibility cloak of (white) childhood innocence. Its an essential book for anyone who wants to unlearn the hidden assumptions of our own childhood reading and find better stories for the next generation. "ALH Online Review

Author Bio

Maria Sachiko Cecire is associateprofessor of literature and founding director of the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College.