Fantasy and the Real World in British Children's Literature : The Power of Story

This book examines the children’s fantasies of three extraordinary British writers - J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, and Terry Pratchett - and investigates their use of narrative strategies to engage children in reading and educate them into becoming more mature readers and indeed individuals. The author argues that these writers do not deploy fantasy either as mere escapism or as a mask for didactic moralising, but instead demonstrate the ethical power of fantasy and the imagination itself in real-world interaction. She demonstrates how, in very different ways, they introduce readers to the unpleasantness of the real world and equip them with the strategies with which to survive it.

This study examines the children’s books of three extraordinary British writers—J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, and Terry Pratchett—and investigates their sophisticated use of narrative strategies not only to engage children in reading, but to educate them into becoming mature readers and indeed individuals. The book demonstrates how in quite different ways these writers establish reader expectations by drawing on conventions in existing genres only to subvert those expectations. Their strategies lead young readers to evaluate for themselves both the power of story to shape our understanding of the world and to develop a sense of identity and agency. Rowling, Jones, and Pratchett provide their readers with fantasies that are pleasurable and imaginative, but far from encouraging escape from reality, they convey important lessons about the complexities and challenges of the real world—and how these may be faced and solved. All three writers deploy the tropes and imaginative possibilities of fantasy to disturb, challenge, and enlarge the world of their readers.