Review: Maria Sachiko Cecire, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (2019)
Maria Sachiko Cecire. Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Maria Sachiko Cecire’s Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (2019) is an expertly crafted study. This is a book about children’s literature in the twentieth-century, how it came to be shaped, and why medieval elements are so prevalent. Throughout her book, Cecire answers the question often asked by both fantasy scholars and fans: why does fantasy literature so habitually take place in medievalist worlds? From Disney’s castle to Harry Potter’s popularity, medieval elements are everywhere in literature and animation of the fantastic.
Though she focuses on the literature, this specific question of the medieval can be broadened to include fantasy in all kinds of media, often influenced by fantasy literature like the anime Howl’s Moving Castle. In answering this question, implicitly and explicitly, Cecire has done a magnificent job of thoroughly and painstakingly piecing together the answer. In Cecire’s own words: “This book unpacks the ways in which medievalist children’s fantasy has come to have profound national, cultural, and personal impact as it flourished beneath the radar of sustained critical attention over the past century” (2019, 6). While the focus is ostensibly on children’s fantasy, Cecire’s work can be applied to the study of films and adaptations, video games, even mobile apps, and scholars of genre and more will find much to ponder here.
In addition to the basic question of the influence of medieval elements, Cecire examines institutional power, fantasy’s abilities to charm its audience and make the world a better place, as well as fantasy’s inherent (and often problematic) whiteness and struggles with decolonization. Cecire does all this through seven chapters, inclusive of a very thorough introduction, and a brief conclusion. She also includes extensive notes and an index. Cecire brings in a range of scholarship from well outside the fantasy and children’s literature genres, which makes for a very applicable and broad piece of criticism. For example, she draws Adam Smith, most famous for his treatise on economics, into a discussion of English culture and its capital, a culture that includes particular traditions of literature.
Cecire examines fantasy’s cultural power, through formal institutions like the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and into smaller, more personal moments like holiday rituals. Her first two chapters closely examine Tolkien, Lewis and their struggles with modernism, both within their books and in their university departments. She shows how their fascination with medieval literature changed Oxford’s curriculum nearly to the present day and she discusses those children’s fantasy authors who were directly influenced by Tolkien and Lewis (whether they liked it or not, such as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, and others). Even though Cecire moves through territory familiar to most fantasy scholars (Tolkien and Lewis), she does so in fresh and thought-provoking ways. She explores, for example, how Tolkien and Lewis both equated the feminine with irrationality, and other supposedly negative aspects of modernity. Though her take on these grand old men of the genre might anger their more ardent fans, it is refreshing to see everything, and everyone, put under a critical lens.
Chapter three discusses why childhood is so often linked to the past and enchantment in opposition to the “adult” modern and rational. Chapter four tackles issues of race, particularly how “the way that English-language discourses of fantasy encodes historically situated ideas of white normativity and non-white difference as timeless truth” (2019, 174). In the last three chapters Cecire deals with “different angles on popular desire for wonder, enchantment, and tales of triumph in an age of rationalism, disenchantment, and postcolonialism” (33). She does so by analysing children’s fantasy by what she calls the “Oxford school authors,” those who studied Tolkien and Lewis’s English curriculum and other Anglo-American inheritors of this legacy.
Fig. 1 - Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004).
Cecire also has interesting readings of other familiar texts. Her take on Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004) (Fig. 1) moves out from other work on Diana Wynne Jones, for example, providing new insight to a popular story when she argues, among other things, that “[Jones’s] creative reworking of early sources allows the novel to suggest that concepts like women’s desire for self-determination are as ‘timeless’ as the hierarchal structures typical in other medievalist fantasy” (2019, 227). Bringing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into her discussion on Howl’s Moving Castle more clearly links this twentieth-century text with its medievalist influences. Cecire works through how Jones evades the often-strict structures of fantasy and fairy tale to allow her protagonist, Sophie, to find love and meaning in her life, but on her own terms. These new takes can help scholars of animation to see the film in a different light and expand their analysis of the film.
Each chapter in this book is well put together and thoroughly argued. It is stimulating to be able to solely focus on the ideas being expressed, rather than how they are written. Cecire is precise with her language, and the book could be assigned to post-graduates on how to write solid, thoughtful prose in a way that assists meaning, rather than obscures it. For instance, each time Cecire claims that she will “demonstrate” or “argue” something, she then does just that. Cecire uses a variety of critical theories and lenses to discuss the example texts, moving comfortably from feminism to critical race theory and more. Cecire strikes a delicate balance, taking care while challenging old beliefs but also moving into sometimes boggy territory like issues of representation of race with confidence.
My quibbles are few. I would have preferred references to be given in a works-cited list rather than only in notes because the former provides a more convenient overview of the critical context of the work. However, the thoroughness of Cecire’s scholarship cannot be in question. Though it needs careful and slow reading, the text will likely interest a broad range of readers, both those in the more immediately relevant areas of children’s, fantasy, and children’s fantasy, but also those more generally interested in the genre, the recreation of the medieval, or simply in well-crafted scholarship. Re-Enchanted will interest both the scholar and the devoted fan of fantasy, because Cecire persuasively answers questions about medievalism in children’s fantasy and far more.
**Article published: May 28, 2021**
Biography
Audrey Isabel Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at Sul Ross State University, Rio Grande College. Her first book, Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building (2017) can be found here and she is currently working on her second book on Anne McCaffrey. She can be found on the web and contacted via https://auitaylor.wordpress.com/