Empire and Race in Enid Blyton’s Fiction : Deconstructing Whiteness and Modern Editing Practices

Using critical race theory to explore the racial, colonial and imperial ideologies underpinning Enid Blyton's fiction, this book assesses the edits publishers have made to her work and digs into the effects of censorship and rebranding of children's fiction across the wider publishing industry.

Looking into the implications of the changes made to Enid Blyton’s children’s stories to omit problematic passages surrounding race and imperialism, this book examines her fiction in its original and revised forms to assess the evolution of her work against evolving political, imperial, and cultural developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. With detailed explorations of Blyton’s highly successful magazine Enid Blyton’s Sunny Stories, the Adventure and The Secret Seven series among her other popular works, Siobhan Morrissey contextualises Blyton’s fiction within multiple literary and historical contexts, including 20th-century magazines, the Second World War, imperial adventure fiction, the decline of the British Empire and contemporary conceptions of race and whiteness in children’s literature. Calling upon critical race theory, white and postcolonial studies, the book models how these ideas can be applied to literature studies and analyses the imperial, racial hierarchies of Blyton’s texts and how these can be remedied. Then, taking a broader survey of how contemporary children’s publishers are amending authors’ works from Roald Dahl to P. L. Travers to Hugh Lofting and to what effect, the book makes a case for an intervention in current editing practices and a reappraisal of how work should be censored and rebranded.