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Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children's Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century
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, and Game of Thrones to those who avoid fantasy because of the racist, sexist, and escapist tendencies they have found there. Drawing on the history and power of children’s fantasy literature, Re-Enchanted argues that magic, medievalism, and childhood hold the paradoxical ability to re-enchant modern life.
Focusing on works by authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, and Nnedi Okorafor, Re-Enchanted uncovers a new genealogy for medievalist fantasy—one that reveals the genre to be as important to the history of English studies and literary modernism as it is to shaping beliefs across geographies and generations. Maria Sachiko Cecire follows children’s fantasy as it transforms over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including the rise of diverse counternarratives and fantasy’s move into “high-brow” literary fiction. Grounded in a combination of archival scholarship and literary and cultural analysis, Re-Enchanted argues that medievalist fantasy has become a psychologized landscape for contemporary explorations of what it means to grow up, live well, and belong. The influential “Oxford School” of children’s fantasy connects to key issues throughout this book, from the legacies of empire and racial exclusion in children’s literature to what Christmas magic tells us about the roles of childhood and enchantment in Anglo-American culture.
Re-Enchanted engages with critical debates around what constitutes high and low culture during moments of crisis in the humanities, political and affective uses of childhood and the mythological past, the anxieties of modernity, and the social impact of racially charged origin stories.
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, and Game of Thrones to those who avoid fantasy because of the racist, sexist, and escapist tendencies they have found there. Drawing on the history and power of children’s fantasy literature, Re-Enchanted argues that magic, medievalism, and childhood hold the paradoxical ability to re-enchant modern life.
Focusing on works by authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, and Nnedi Okorafor, Re-Enchanted uncovers a new genealogy for medievalist fantasy—one that reveals the genre to be as important to the history of English studies and literary modernism as it is to shaping beliefs across geographies and generations. Maria Sachiko Cecire follows children’s fantasy as it transforms over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including the rise of diverse counternarratives and fantasy’s move into “high-brow” literary fiction. Grounded in a combination of archival scholarship and literary and cultural analysis, Re-Enchanted argues that medievalist fantasy has become a psychologized landscape for contemporary explorations of what it means to grow up, live well, and belong. The influential “Oxford School” of children’s fantasy connects to key issues throughout this book, from the legacies of empire and racial exclusion in children’s literature to what Christmas magic tells us about the roles of childhood and enchantment in Anglo-American culture.
Re-Enchanted engages with critical debates around what constitutes high and low culture during moments of crisis in the humanities, political and affective uses of childhood and the mythological past, the anxieties of modernity, and the social impact of racially charged origin stories.
328 pages, Paperback
First published December 17, 2020
6 people are currently reading
250 people want to read
About the author
Maria Sachiko Cecire
3 books3 followersProfessor Cecire is the founding director of the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College, which focuses on how technologies mediate the human experience. She is the author of Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and coeditor of Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789-Present (Routledge, 2015). She is a National Project Scholar for the American Library Association’s Great Stories Club for underserved youth (since 2014); other public-facing humanities work includes podcasting, documentary films, and short fiction. Recipient, Rhodes Scholarship (2006).
BA, University of Chicago; MSt, DPhil, Oxford University.
BA, University of Chicago; MSt, DPhil, Oxford University.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 19, 2020
Described on the back cover blurb as a new genealogy for medievalist fantasy Maria Sachiko Cecire's study is important for recalibrating -- in literature, in other media, in philosophical outlooks -- the assumptions of many of us admirers of this genre. Focusing on five areas, namely childhood reading, the Oxford University English syllabus, the fabricated enchantment of Christmas, so-called 'empires of the mind', and developments in the 21st century, Cecire takes apart the foundations of 20th-century fantasy, examines them, finds what's wanting but then also points out what remains of real worth.
She starts with her own childhood realisation that, as an American of Japanese-Italian descent she "would never grow up to be a blonde-haired, blue-eyed fairy-tale princess"; she later learnt that her experience of "racialized self-alienation [was] far from unique." Re-Enchanted thus became a project searching for the origins of Anglo-American fantasy and, as she puts it, "its special relationship to ideas about childhood, modernity, and the raced, gendered self."
I can't emphasise how important this study is in helping not just academics but also a wider public to understand how white European medievalist fantasies adopted an imperialist and colonialist stance, one which has held sway for too long -- but one which may yet have the capacity to evolve and change to suit 21st-century sensibilities, particularly where race and gender and culture are concerned. Tempting though it may be to quote extensively from the text (Cecire makes her points both succinctly and in depth, paradoxical though that may seem) I shall try to resist the urge -- while simultaneously hoping my paraphrasing doesn't misrepresent her argument.
She begins in Oxford in the interwar years when Tolkien and C S Lewis were writing the English syllabus with an emphasis on Anglo-Saxon and medieval texts as suitable grounding for literature students; in this she makes clear that they were trying to resist modernist movements instigating literary and social changes. What she calls the Oxford School of Children's Fantasy Literature included not just Lewis and Tolkien but also a later generation of English students who would go on to be formative in fantasy's development -- Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones, Philip Pullman and, to a lesser extent, Roger Lancelyn Green, another Inkling. The Oxford dons' influence would also extend to those not in the English department, such as Alan Garner, Richard Adams and Penelope Lively.
What this syllabus did was to invest medieval English literature (Beowulf, Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and so on) with an importance that fed into fantasy -- initially fantasy for children such as Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The fact that both Tolkien and Lewis wrote influential books for younger readers meant they reinforced the conviction that "modern children's culture is premised on the child's supposed capacity to bring enchantment into everyday life and the primeval into the present, often as part of the same process" (18) and, as the opening show of the 2012 London Olympics emphasised, reading this genre provided "formative building blocks in the constitution of the self," providing a foundation for adult identity.
Cecire acknowledges fantasy as a "literature of desire" (30), identifying "power in triviality and consequence in seeming inconsequence" (35). Moreover it "does not have to contain an intended moral" (as, say, Victorian children's literature often did) "but its status as knowingly not-real seems to invite interpretive reading to make sense of the gaps between the impossible and the possible" (44).
Having established its origins and its power to enchant, the author outlines the kind of golden age that followed in which authors from the antimodernist Oxford School and their imitators emphasised British -- and more particularly, English -- culture, history and traditions as foundational for fantasy, tropes which would have huge influence beyond the island's shores. In her third chapter Cecire follows on from her observation that children feature as "trans-historical travelers" (64) by pointing out their centrality in the invented tradition that is the modern feast of Christmas, a holiday period which has become a mishmash of Dickensian make-believe where everybody becomes child-like, in which an idealised and enthroned childhood is privileged above all. The modern Christmas is accorded an "affective authenticity" (162) which she describes as
But all through these three chapters a growing unease becomes increasingly evident: the context is the loosening of what the author identifies as the hegemony of Anglo-American geographical empires and their replacement by what Churchill termed "empires of the mind" (175) based on language and influence, all the time "affirming racial and gender hierarchies": as medievalist English-language fantasy rushed in to buttress Anglo-American empires of the mind concepts like a multi-racial Europe of the Middle Ages created cognitive dissonance in the minds of those wedded to "the new model of Anglo-American imperial domination in the twilight of empire", a model which she suggests "laid the groundwork for heroic visions of 'geek' masculinity in the information age."
The heart of Cecire's critique is a measured and justifiable polemic about how spaces in fiction and culture modelled around childhood are fixated on what she identifies as the image, frozen in time, of the innocent, white Romantic child within a colonialist bildungsroman, an image as misleading as the imaginary, often otherworldly, Middle Ages dominating much the genre. In a postcolonialist world, she intimates, these alternative worlds and times ("outside of real-world time") allow Anglo-American writers and readers to envision a pretend "trajectory of national growth" (205); often this involves defeating an evil empire, a scenario that unfortunately echoes the neoconservative, 'neomedievalist' International Relations (IR) theory that rose to prominence after 9/11, encapsulated by the ill-judged crusading meme from George W Bush's so-called War on Terror.
From fantasy's foundational white magic Cecire studies the self-help movement that developed in the late 20th century and which often featured the Inner Child (the "therapeutic child") sought out in the quest for self-improvement. This search, she suggests, may have arisen from fraying social bonds because of challenges from identity categories (race, ethnicity, worker status, for example) to established communal institutions. While self-help could morph into selfishness and, ultimately, neoliberalism, the Inner Child archetype found its concomitant in children's fantasy, a genre that could foster allegorical spaces for personal quests and self-realisation.
More recently developments in the genre have exhibited what has been labelled postirony, allowing fantasy to convey enchantment without succumbing to naïveté (Cecire cites the several manifestations of Game of Thrones as a ready example). Even though postironic and postmodern fantasy warns against letting children's fiction "unduly shape readers' identities and life expectations" she notes it has the capacity to "convey important affective experiences like enchantment, pleasure, and joy" (256). From a genre that rose against a background of white exceptionalism, post-imperialism and neocolonialism, laden with raced and gendered assumptions, fantasy has embraced diversity, postmodernism and postirony to allow a broad range of readers to feel at home in fictional cultures that are neither (as Lee Konstintinou is quoted, 248-9) "uncritically earnest [nor] naively nostalgic".
This reader went from recognising the historical context from which modern fantasy arose to feeling guilty about enjoying books which implicitly subscribed to its insular, misogynistic and racially prejudiced roots, and then on to acknowledging the core worth that fictional enchantment represents. Re-Enchanted is, I'd maintain, essential reading for personal and group discourse about not only the genre's rise but also its future in a world that seems more fragmented despite being more linked up than can have been imagined a century ago. I'll leave the final words to the author herself, words which seem to me to encapsulate the continued draw and consolation of epic or High Fantasy in its varied manifestations for many of its fans:
She starts with her own childhood realisation that, as an American of Japanese-Italian descent she "would never grow up to be a blonde-haired, blue-eyed fairy-tale princess"; she later learnt that her experience of "racialized self-alienation [was] far from unique." Re-Enchanted thus became a project searching for the origins of Anglo-American fantasy and, as she puts it, "its special relationship to ideas about childhood, modernity, and the raced, gendered self."
I can't emphasise how important this study is in helping not just academics but also a wider public to understand how white European medievalist fantasies adopted an imperialist and colonialist stance, one which has held sway for too long -- but one which may yet have the capacity to evolve and change to suit 21st-century sensibilities, particularly where race and gender and culture are concerned. Tempting though it may be to quote extensively from the text (Cecire makes her points both succinctly and in depth, paradoxical though that may seem) I shall try to resist the urge -- while simultaneously hoping my paraphrasing doesn't misrepresent her argument.
She begins in Oxford in the interwar years when Tolkien and C S Lewis were writing the English syllabus with an emphasis on Anglo-Saxon and medieval texts as suitable grounding for literature students; in this she makes clear that they were trying to resist modernist movements instigating literary and social changes. What she calls the Oxford School of Children's Fantasy Literature included not just Lewis and Tolkien but also a later generation of English students who would go on to be formative in fantasy's development -- Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones, Philip Pullman and, to a lesser extent, Roger Lancelyn Green, another Inkling. The Oxford dons' influence would also extend to those not in the English department, such as Alan Garner, Richard Adams and Penelope Lively.
What this syllabus did was to invest medieval English literature (Beowulf, Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and so on) with an importance that fed into fantasy -- initially fantasy for children such as Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The fact that both Tolkien and Lewis wrote influential books for younger readers meant they reinforced the conviction that "modern children's culture is premised on the child's supposed capacity to bring enchantment into everyday life and the primeval into the present, often as part of the same process" (18) and, as the opening show of the 2012 London Olympics emphasised, reading this genre provided "formative building blocks in the constitution of the self," providing a foundation for adult identity.
Cecire acknowledges fantasy as a "literature of desire" (30), identifying "power in triviality and consequence in seeming inconsequence" (35). Moreover it "does not have to contain an intended moral" (as, say, Victorian children's literature often did) "but its status as knowingly not-real seems to invite interpretive reading to make sense of the gaps between the impossible and the possible" (44).
Having established its origins and its power to enchant, the author outlines the kind of golden age that followed in which authors from the antimodernist Oxford School and their imitators emphasised British -- and more particularly, English -- culture, history and traditions as foundational for fantasy, tropes which would have huge influence beyond the island's shores. In her third chapter Cecire follows on from her observation that children feature as "trans-historical travelers" (64) by pointing out their centrality in the invented tradition that is the modern feast of Christmas, a holiday period which has become a mishmash of Dickensian make-believe where everybody becomes child-like, in which an idealised and enthroned childhood is privileged above all. The modern Christmas is accorded an "affective authenticity" (162) which she describes as
"the sensation of something being emotionally true, even if it is not empirically true. These are the truths that Lewis and Tolkien argued are the most important in life, beyond facts and beyond time."
But all through these three chapters a growing unease becomes increasingly evident: the context is the loosening of what the author identifies as the hegemony of Anglo-American geographical empires and their replacement by what Churchill termed "empires of the mind" (175) based on language and influence, all the time "affirming racial and gender hierarchies": as medievalist English-language fantasy rushed in to buttress Anglo-American empires of the mind concepts like a multi-racial Europe of the Middle Ages created cognitive dissonance in the minds of those wedded to "the new model of Anglo-American imperial domination in the twilight of empire", a model which she suggests "laid the groundwork for heroic visions of 'geek' masculinity in the information age."
The heart of Cecire's critique is a measured and justifiable polemic about how spaces in fiction and culture modelled around childhood are fixated on what she identifies as the image, frozen in time, of the innocent, white Romantic child within a colonialist bildungsroman, an image as misleading as the imaginary, often otherworldly, Middle Ages dominating much the genre. In a postcolonialist world, she intimates, these alternative worlds and times ("outside of real-world time") allow Anglo-American writers and readers to envision a pretend "trajectory of national growth" (205); often this involves defeating an evil empire, a scenario that unfortunately echoes the neoconservative, 'neomedievalist' International Relations (IR) theory that rose to prominence after 9/11, encapsulated by the ill-judged crusading meme from George W Bush's so-called War on Terror.
From fantasy's foundational white magic Cecire studies the self-help movement that developed in the late 20th century and which often featured the Inner Child (the "therapeutic child") sought out in the quest for self-improvement. This search, she suggests, may have arisen from fraying social bonds because of challenges from identity categories (race, ethnicity, worker status, for example) to established communal institutions. While self-help could morph into selfishness and, ultimately, neoliberalism, the Inner Child archetype found its concomitant in children's fantasy, a genre that could foster allegorical spaces for personal quests and self-realisation.
More recently developments in the genre have exhibited what has been labelled postirony, allowing fantasy to convey enchantment without succumbing to naïveté (Cecire cites the several manifestations of Game of Thrones as a ready example). Even though postironic and postmodern fantasy warns against letting children's fiction "unduly shape readers' identities and life expectations" she notes it has the capacity to "convey important affective experiences like enchantment, pleasure, and joy" (256). From a genre that rose against a background of white exceptionalism, post-imperialism and neocolonialism, laden with raced and gendered assumptions, fantasy has embraced diversity, postmodernism and postirony to allow a broad range of readers to feel at home in fictional cultures that are neither (as Lee Konstintinou is quoted, 248-9) "uncritically earnest [nor] naively nostalgic".
This reader went from recognising the historical context from which modern fantasy arose to feeling guilty about enjoying books which implicitly subscribed to its insular, misogynistic and racially prejudiced roots, and then on to acknowledging the core worth that fictional enchantment represents. Re-Enchanted is, I'd maintain, essential reading for personal and group discourse about not only the genre's rise but also its future in a world that seems more fragmented despite being more linked up than can have been imagined a century ago. I'll leave the final words to the author herself, words which seem to me to encapsulate the continued draw and consolation of epic or High Fantasy in its varied manifestations for many of its fans:
"This is the work that fantasy can do: providing in seemingly timeless terms an allegorical narrative that reflects the striving of everyday people [...] defeating not only external dangers but also the internal, psychological ones that haunt a society." (169)
April 29, 2021
Absolutely brilliant. The title is misleading as the impact and scope of the book is essential to understanding the development of English literature as a field of studies alongside the development of canon and English and American national identities. Highly recommend for anyone studying or wanting to learn more about English Literature or about Anglo-American identity in general, and is not limited to children's/fantasy literature.
Edit: It's also a pleasure to read, which is sometimes rare in literary criticism. Deeply engaging, and the author's voice shines through.
Edit: It's also a pleasure to read, which is sometimes rare in literary criticism. Deeply engaging, and the author's voice shines through.
June 1, 2020
Beautifully written literary history meets unflinching and loving critique in Re-Enchanted. A twin historical account of how medievalist fantasy for children became such a major strand of children's literature in the 20th century and of why that literature looks the way it does, answering the question of why medievalist and why this specific kind of Britain-centric medievalism, the book moves effortlessly between faculty meeting notes, critical writings, and the children's novels in question to think seriously about the fantastical and its cultural role. I find Cecire's account of the role Tolkien and Lewis played in building this phenomenon not only through their own fiction but through their curricular and research decisions in the nascent English department at Oxford University extremely compelling and probably my favorite part of the book. In many ways Oxford's cultural power has decreased since Tolkien was teaching (though perhaps in others it has not) and so while it is unclear that a similar curricular force at a single institution could reshape culture in quite the way circumstances allowed Tolkien and Lewis's Oxford to do, I've never seen a more convincing example of just how deeply the fingers of education reach into culture in unexpected ways. None of the fantasists Cecire analyses were taught to write fiction by Tolkien, but Cecire's claim that his English curriculum echoes through their fiction and subsequently from the whole genre of children's fantasy is beautifully argued and works really well.
At the same time, though Cecire introduces herself at the beginning of the book as someone personally shaped by this work, she pulls no punches with regards to the whiteness of medievalist children's fantasy nor the nationalist and potentially white-supremacist underpinnings of early and mid twentieth century arugments for a turn to the fantastical, the medieval, and to childhood, pointing directly to Tolkien and Lewis's own writings as evidence. She traces the echoes and attacks on this throughout other medievalist childen's fantasy, ending up at the present and the current shift in the genre of fantasy towards more inclusive visions of both the past and the future. An incisive look into how cultural forms develop and entrench themselves, how even beloved ones are deeply flawed, and how we might be able to change them for the better. Highly recommended.
At the same time, though Cecire introduces herself at the beginning of the book as someone personally shaped by this work, she pulls no punches with regards to the whiteness of medievalist children's fantasy nor the nationalist and potentially white-supremacist underpinnings of early and mid twentieth century arugments for a turn to the fantastical, the medieval, and to childhood, pointing directly to Tolkien and Lewis's own writings as evidence. She traces the echoes and attacks on this throughout other medievalist childen's fantasy, ending up at the present and the current shift in the genre of fantasy towards more inclusive visions of both the past and the future. An incisive look into how cultural forms develop and entrench themselves, how even beloved ones are deeply flawed, and how we might be able to change them for the better. Highly recommended.
March 1, 2023
I used to think of myself as a huge fantasy fan, but nowadays, I have accepted that I probably read more mysteries than I do fantasy. That said, I still enjoy a good fantasy and Maria Sachiko Cecire’s book interested me, given its subtitle: The rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century.
Re-Enchanted deals with the origin and development of medieval fantasies for children (or “high fantasy” or “epic fantasy”, to use other terms). This narrows it to a subset of writers; E Nesbit’s fantasy is ignored and we start with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien. In five chapters, Cecire explores:
1. J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s Antimodernism
2. The role of Oxford’s English faculty in the rise of children’s medievalist fantasies, looking at six writers in particular: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Philip Pullman
3. The role of romantic notions of childhood in the rise of medievalist fantasies
4. Race and medievalist fantasies
5. How fantasy in the early twenty-first century uses medievalisms to explore the “broken promises of Anglo-American childhood for adult audiences”
The first chapter, which talked about how Tolkien and Lewis’s love of the medieval era shaped the English syllabus at Oxford was interesting. One point that Cecire brings up is the significance that these authors placed on the fictionality of medieval legends, as when Tolkien called the dragon in Beowulf “a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold. Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who yet have been caught by the fascination of the worm.” As Cecire put it, “[f]or Tolkien, old stories contain profound truths that hold relevance across time and practical ramifications that persist into modernity.”
The book does not mention this, but I thought it would have been interesting to also bring Chesterton into the discussion. We know that Chesterton’s book ‘The Everlasting Man’ was greatly influential on Lewis, and given that Chesterton and Tolkien were Catholic, I cannot help but wonder if he had any influence on their views. Chesterton’s chapter “The Ethics of Elfland” comes immediately to mind as espousing very similar sentiments, but throughout his books Orthodoxy and Heretics, I get the feeling that Chesterton treats old practices, including pagan rituals, as pointing towards a deeper truth, the way Tolkien sees them. It would have been interesting if Cecire had any research that looked at this possible connection.
Chapter 2 looked at how the Oxford English program, as set up by Tokien and Lewis (Cecire does not mention any syllabi changes so I assume it’s the same for the time period she examines) and how that influenced a few influential fantasy writers. As someone who doesn’t really follow authors, I’m not sure if the six writers mentioned are the sum total of all Oxford English-educated fantasy writers or if there are more and these were deemed representative. Still, it’s interesting to see that despite the field’s colonialist origins, these writers did try to push the boundaries in their own ways.
One thing in this chapter that confuses me was during the discourse about English’s appeal to marginalised groups such as women, the working class, and people of colour and how that works with the way Tolkien and Lewis saw the study of English. As Cecire put it, “literary canons are ultimately about demarcating and imparting what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital: social assets that can help people navigate and advance through hierarchies of power” and hence its appeal to marginalised groups. However, Chapter 1 gave me the impression that Tolkien and Lewis’s antimodernist views weren’t extremely dominant, as exemplified by the fact that Cambridge’s English syllabus focused on modern works. So what is this literary canon and was it even clearly defined if the medieval period wasn’t “in fashion”? My question is off-tangent but I did wonder that if a canon was being debated, then how does it help to go to one or the other’s school of thought? What would be the appeal of this and would these marginalised classes be conscious of why they chose Oxford instead of Cambridge and vice-versa?
Another passage that baffled me was in Chapter 5, when Cecire used the tumblr MedievalPOC as an extended example of how people of colour were erased from the Medieval Ages. Cecrire writes that "MedievalPOC's greatest sin in the eyes of its attackers seems to be the very fact of its existence, as part of a larger phenomenon that challenges whiteness and gender inequities of medievalist fantasy and other popular genres." This example almost completely ignores that there are legitimate reasons to critique MedievalPOC, including her cited Queen of Sheba image which, as this reddit post on r/badhistory argues, doesn't mean that just because an artist painted black people, it is proof that the subject was based on a real person the artist knew, especially since the Queen of Sheba was believed to be from South Arabia and people would have wanted to draw what they thought she would have looked like. To write about MedievalPOC uncritically and without mentioning how some of their "evidence" is contested and how some critiques are about the lack of context given, rather than the blog's existence, did make me wonder if I could fully trust all the other examples given.
Now that I’ve sort of skipped over to Chapter 5, I wanted to add that her chapter on race and fantasy reminded me of this BBC article on Enid Blyton’s popularity in India, which I will just recommend in my review and then leave it aside. As someone who never had “The Moment” where I felt like fantasy didn’t love me back despite being Chinese, I can’t fully understand the exclusionary feeling. However, while reading the chapter on race, I couldn’t help but think that it was perfectly normal for people who studied English medieval works and having a certain idea of how the medieval world looked like would write a mostly-white world. And as Cecire points out, later authors do try to be inclusive in their ways, though looking at how she talked about how JK Rowling got pushback for not being racially diverse in her books and then for not writing about a race that she didn’t belong to well enough, I can also see why authors will shy away from attempting to be more inclusive for fear of getting it wrong.
I have blogged about diversity before, and I obviously love diverse stories. But I don’t think I can get angry at Tolkien and Lewis for writing what they knew and influencing other writers (whether it’s through their syllabus or because their works were so popular). Were they the product of their time? Absolutely. But acting like there’s something wrong that their works continue to enchant despite the lack of racial diversity is rather strange to me – surely their works enchant because the story enchanted us? Perhaps it’s because I just heard about the new “updating” of Roald Dahl’s works, but there was something about the argument about the fantasy “doesn’t love you back” argument that tired me. The only way I can see fantasy “not loving me back” is if I intentionally choose to read only fantasy that features people that does not look like me and I somehow cannot see a part of me reflected in the character (like a hobbit or an elf, which aren’t technically even human?). It may just be me, but I always identified more with the character traits of the characters than how they looked like. If I wanted to read about people that looked like me, I would read Legend of the Condor Heroes but then again, I’m unable to identify as a martial artist due to my lack of skill.
Anyway, I have dithered long enough so it’s time for me to end my review. Re-Enchanted was an interesting book that uncovered the origins of medievalist fantasy children’s literature and gave me a lot of food for thought. I do wish it was less academic in style because I think it would be worth it for fantasy fans to read and think about the issues raised here, but it might be a bit inaccessible for a non-determined non-academic.
This review was first posted at Eustea Reads and links to everything I mentioned in my review are at the original blogpost
Re-Enchanted deals with the origin and development of medieval fantasies for children (or “high fantasy” or “epic fantasy”, to use other terms). This narrows it to a subset of writers; E Nesbit’s fantasy is ignored and we start with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien. In five chapters, Cecire explores:
1. J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s Antimodernism
2. The role of Oxford’s English faculty in the rise of children’s medievalist fantasies, looking at six writers in particular: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Philip Pullman
3. The role of romantic notions of childhood in the rise of medievalist fantasies
4. Race and medievalist fantasies
5. How fantasy in the early twenty-first century uses medievalisms to explore the “broken promises of Anglo-American childhood for adult audiences”
The first chapter, which talked about how Tolkien and Lewis’s love of the medieval era shaped the English syllabus at Oxford was interesting. One point that Cecire brings up is the significance that these authors placed on the fictionality of medieval legends, as when Tolkien called the dragon in Beowulf “a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold. Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who yet have been caught by the fascination of the worm.” As Cecire put it, “[f]or Tolkien, old stories contain profound truths that hold relevance across time and practical ramifications that persist into modernity.”
The book does not mention this, but I thought it would have been interesting to also bring Chesterton into the discussion. We know that Chesterton’s book ‘The Everlasting Man’ was greatly influential on Lewis, and given that Chesterton and Tolkien were Catholic, I cannot help but wonder if he had any influence on their views. Chesterton’s chapter “The Ethics of Elfland” comes immediately to mind as espousing very similar sentiments, but throughout his books Orthodoxy and Heretics, I get the feeling that Chesterton treats old practices, including pagan rituals, as pointing towards a deeper truth, the way Tolkien sees them. It would have been interesting if Cecire had any research that looked at this possible connection.
Chapter 2 looked at how the Oxford English program, as set up by Tokien and Lewis (Cecire does not mention any syllabi changes so I assume it’s the same for the time period she examines) and how that influenced a few influential fantasy writers. As someone who doesn’t really follow authors, I’m not sure if the six writers mentioned are the sum total of all Oxford English-educated fantasy writers or if there are more and these were deemed representative. Still, it’s interesting to see that despite the field’s colonialist origins, these writers did try to push the boundaries in their own ways.
One thing in this chapter that confuses me was during the discourse about English’s appeal to marginalised groups such as women, the working class, and people of colour and how that works with the way Tolkien and Lewis saw the study of English. As Cecire put it, “literary canons are ultimately about demarcating and imparting what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital: social assets that can help people navigate and advance through hierarchies of power” and hence its appeal to marginalised groups. However, Chapter 1 gave me the impression that Tolkien and Lewis’s antimodernist views weren’t extremely dominant, as exemplified by the fact that Cambridge’s English syllabus focused on modern works. So what is this literary canon and was it even clearly defined if the medieval period wasn’t “in fashion”? My question is off-tangent but I did wonder that if a canon was being debated, then how does it help to go to one or the other’s school of thought? What would be the appeal of this and would these marginalised classes be conscious of why they chose Oxford instead of Cambridge and vice-versa?
Another passage that baffled me was in Chapter 5, when Cecire used the tumblr MedievalPOC as an extended example of how people of colour were erased from the Medieval Ages. Cecrire writes that "MedievalPOC's greatest sin in the eyes of its attackers seems to be the very fact of its existence, as part of a larger phenomenon that challenges whiteness and gender inequities of medievalist fantasy and other popular genres." This example almost completely ignores that there are legitimate reasons to critique MedievalPOC, including her cited Queen of Sheba image which, as this reddit post on r/badhistory argues, doesn't mean that just because an artist painted black people, it is proof that the subject was based on a real person the artist knew, especially since the Queen of Sheba was believed to be from South Arabia and people would have wanted to draw what they thought she would have looked like. To write about MedievalPOC uncritically and without mentioning how some of their "evidence" is contested and how some critiques are about the lack of context given, rather than the blog's existence, did make me wonder if I could fully trust all the other examples given.
Now that I’ve sort of skipped over to Chapter 5, I wanted to add that her chapter on race and fantasy reminded me of this BBC article on Enid Blyton’s popularity in India, which I will just recommend in my review and then leave it aside. As someone who never had “The Moment” where I felt like fantasy didn’t love me back despite being Chinese, I can’t fully understand the exclusionary feeling. However, while reading the chapter on race, I couldn’t help but think that it was perfectly normal for people who studied English medieval works and having a certain idea of how the medieval world looked like would write a mostly-white world. And as Cecire points out, later authors do try to be inclusive in their ways, though looking at how she talked about how JK Rowling got pushback for not being racially diverse in her books and then for not writing about a race that she didn’t belong to well enough, I can also see why authors will shy away from attempting to be more inclusive for fear of getting it wrong.
I have blogged about diversity before, and I obviously love diverse stories. But I don’t think I can get angry at Tolkien and Lewis for writing what they knew and influencing other writers (whether it’s through their syllabus or because their works were so popular). Were they the product of their time? Absolutely. But acting like there’s something wrong that their works continue to enchant despite the lack of racial diversity is rather strange to me – surely their works enchant because the story enchanted us? Perhaps it’s because I just heard about the new “updating” of Roald Dahl’s works, but there was something about the argument about the fantasy “doesn’t love you back” argument that tired me. The only way I can see fantasy “not loving me back” is if I intentionally choose to read only fantasy that features people that does not look like me and I somehow cannot see a part of me reflected in the character (like a hobbit or an elf, which aren’t technically even human?). It may just be me, but I always identified more with the character traits of the characters than how they looked like. If I wanted to read about people that looked like me, I would read Legend of the Condor Heroes but then again, I’m unable to identify as a martial artist due to my lack of skill.
Anyway, I have dithered long enough so it’s time for me to end my review. Re-Enchanted was an interesting book that uncovered the origins of medievalist fantasy children’s literature and gave me a lot of food for thought. I do wish it was less academic in style because I think it would be worth it for fantasy fans to read and think about the issues raised here, but it might be a bit inaccessible for a non-determined non-academic.
This review was first posted at Eustea Reads and links to everything I mentioned in my review are at the original blogpost
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July 15, 2022The book’s subtitle, “The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century,” is certainly appropriate for the first few chapters, which consider the careers and influence of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, especially their influence on the “Oxford School” of fantasy writers: Philip Pullman, Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, and Kevin Crossley-Holland. Other books have been written about them, but Maria Cecire is also interested in 21st-century concerns like misrepresentation of people of color and the promotion of patriarchal, Anglocentric values found in Tolkien and Lewis. As a result, she finds “medievalist fantasy” in some unexpected places, with a chapter on Christmas rituals and the idea of the innocent (white) child. Harry Potter is also considered. Continuing into the 21st century, Cecire brings in examples of fantasy written for adults, sometimes perpetuating but more often interrogating the assumptions of Tolkien and Lewis. I found the discussion of Lev Grossman’s Magicians series particularly interesting. So the book offers more than the title suggests. Endnotes provide source information and there’s an index, but no bibliography.
April 5, 2021
The central thesis of this book (and the support for it) are highly valuable. The portion of the book that addresses the parallel development of English curricula at Oxford and Cambridge was fascinating, and it deserves a book-length treatment of its own. The examination of how the work of the Inklings shaped the development of modern fantasy was also very effectively done. At times, the book wanders a little afield from the strong, central ideas (the portion on medieval conceptions of Christmas, for instance) and the title of the book is a little misleading with respect to the book's true importance. However, the book makes a huge contribution to the field of children's/young adult literature.
August 16, 2020
Read for Dissertation, Queen Mary University of London 2020.
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