From Alice to Harry Potter: Children's Fantasy in England (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England Leona Fisher (bio) From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England. By Colin Manlove . Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions Corporation, 2003. www.cybereditions.com It is perhaps not an exaggeration to call Colin Manlove the "Ur-critic" of British fantasy, his books dating back to the 1970s, his opinions universally quoted, if also contested (see, for example, Hunt and Lenz). Quirky and provocative as he can be, Manlove produces books that serve as highly useful "anatomies" of the fantasy genre, defined loosely as "a fiction involving the supernatural or impossible" (10). His latest, From Alice to Harry Potter: Children's Fantasy in England, proves as usable and frustrating as the previous ones, alternating between astute distillations and idiosyncratic misreadings or cultural generalizations. The text is predictably astonishing in its range, beginning with fantasy's origins in Edgar Taylor's English translations of the Grimms (1823–1826) and concluding with a chapter on William Mayne, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling. Arranged chronologically (Victorian Children's Fantasy, 1900–1950, 1950–1970, The 1970s, The 1980s, The 1990s), the book relies heavily on pithy plot summaries punctuated by assertive judgments—of a book, an author, a critic, or a whole era. A rambunctious and extremely opinionated romp through almost 200 years of the English fantasy landscape, Manlove's book serves as both an annotated bibliography and a series of controversial "prompts" for discussion and debate. Thus, for example, in the two paragraphs on Lucy Boston's 1950s Green Knowe series, Manlove suddenly moves from loose summary to the following curious anachronism: In its hospitality it recalls—perhaps even subsumes—the seventeenth-century celebrations of country houses by Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick or Andrew Marvell, and the more recent one by Allison Uttwell. But the larger reference is to the house that is Britain, now becoming more open to immigrants and multiculturalism. (89) In 1954? Who knew that Green Knowe was meant to recall Penshurst or Appleton House, let along symbolize Britain as a whole? He does qualify this odd analogy, declaring that "the books are not quite as open-spirited as this would suggest," since "the children who come to the house should merge themselves with it rather than it with them" (89); and ends oddly with, "The Chinese boy Ping sinks his oriental [End Page 212] peculiarities [sic] into those of the building" (The River at Green Knowe) (89). Is this a critique or an affirmation of assimilation? Finally, he likens the books to Lewis's Narnia series. In less than a page, the authors and the era are summed up, with no close textual close reading involved. Manlove's readers are simply expected to take his word for it—then move abruptly on to William Mayne, who represents the best of "1950s humanism" (91). Most of the transitions are as arbitrary as these, awkwardly held together by strict chronology, a heavily thesis-driven sense of each decade's Zeitgeist, and not much else in the way of structure. Broad themes illustrate Manlove's preoccupations and vast learning as they recur almost randomly throughout each chapter: religion, self-discovery, the past, magic, secondary worlds, family relations, and so on. The fantasy texts may be presented chronologically, but the analytical and synthetic generalizations operate through stream-of-consciousness, a great deal of self-assurance, and almost no textual references. The historical generalizations are no less assured. For example, in the 1930s, "class separation and race prejudice in harsh form existed side by side with a growing fearful admiration of the proletariat, seen as realised in the shape of Communist Russia, and faintly attractive to a bourgeoisie no longer certain of itself or its values" (68)—hence T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone! And: Few fantasies of the 1980s—or indeed the 1900s—attempt any more to negotiate with the past, or to revive old values. Instead, there is a mood of radical experimentation, an eager embracing of the multi-textual worlds that had become the postmodernist idiom of the day. As for old values, we find these exchanged for new ones such as feminism and ecology...