The Trilogy Paradox: Experiments in Contemporary Children's Book Studies
Creators: Daignault, Amanda
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2024

<p>In this study, I take a multi-method approach to investigate contemporary children&#39;s fantasy trilogies as a publishing phenomenon. Contemporary book studies is a quickly expanding field, but as yet has not engaged fully with children’s literature as a genre, or children’s books as a major market category. To open this much-needed conversation, I bring together theories of genre, particularly those which speak to contemporary “genre fiction” such as science fiction and fantasy; analysis of the networks and processes that animate the children’s book industry; descriptions of seriality and the trilogy form; and statistical data about juvenile fiction as part of the contemporary book market in Canada. Ultimately, I argue that children’s trilogies are a paradox of contemporary publishing: they are both singular and multiple; both prestigious and highly commercial; and both iconic and fragile of form, with their complete three-part structure susceptible to their own success and expansion. In Chapter Two, I reconstruct an origin story for children&#39;s fantasy trilogies from extant histories and surveys of children&#39;s literature and fantasy in order to provide a broadly contextualized account of the genre. However, I conclude by acknowledging that this kind of conventional narrative history is always selective and incomplete, necessitating complementary accounts of the emergence of individual texts and genres. Chapters Three and Four, then, tell different origin stories for individual trilogies. Chapter Three focuses on the critical reception of Philip Pullman&#39;s His Dark Materials, arguing that book reviews of each novel emphasize both the autonomy of each installment and the growing sense of the trilogy as a singular unit, which latter conceptualization was eventually to dominate conversation around the trilogy. Chapter Four considers the intersection of celebrity and authorship via Colin Meloy’s The Wildwood Chronicles, arguing that while Meloy’s success in music boosted publicity for his first novel, this effect faded with subsequent novels, turning him from a “celebrity author” to simply an author. Moving away from origin stories and towards a consideration of how children’s fantasy trilogies may be encountered by everyday consumers, Chapter Five contains an extensive analysis of middle-grade books on sale on a single day in three bookstores in Edmonton, Alberta, finding that fantasy novels are not only a popular but the dominant genre of children’s literature, and that series fiction is the most common form of middle-grade novel, while trilogies form an important but not disproportionate fraction of middle-grade fantasy series. This dissertation demonstrates that applying the methods of book history and book studies to contemporary children’s literature can fruitfully unsettle existing narratives about this genre; equally, it shows that foregrounding children’s books within the larger publishing industry is necessary to correct for past oversight of this category within contemporary book studies.</p>