RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Children's and Young Adult Literature
Fairy Tales and Retellings
Victorian Fiction and the Family
Women and Literature
The Novel
Women's Studies
CURRENT PROJECT:
Proposed Project Title: Enabling Fictions: Narrative Theology and the Promise
of Children's Fantasy
The project
starts from the awareness that children's literature in the West has its origin
in didacticism, and most often in a specifically Christian didacticism. Bible tales for children and primer
sentences ("In Adam's fall/We sinned all") are among the earliest
literary efforts aimed specifically, and exclusively, at children. In the conventional histories of
children's literature, the 19th-century "Golden Age" of
children's fantasy marks the genre's coming of age, in which the last vestiges
of didacticism disappear in favor of "play without end," a
celebration of childhood innocence and imagination.
This standard
history, however, ignores the ways in which even fantasy can indeed teach. While critical opinion divides on Lewis
Carroll's parodic use of didacticism in the Alice books (do they undercut
didacticism completely, or simply substitute a new lesson for an old?), it is
impossible to ignore his friend George MacDonald's overtly Christian worldview
in the Princess
books and his shorter fantasies for children, as well as in the book-length
fantasy, At the Back of the North Wind.
MacDonald's work stands as a pre-text for many of the 20th-century
novels I'll examine in this study: neither allegorical nor orthodox, his work
opens a space for theodical questioning, proceeding--parable-like--to
interrogate through story the orthodox teachings of the church, and to explore
the ways in which stories shape our deepest spiritual understandings. While MacDonald is not a central subject
of this study, his work is important in establishing an alternative tradition
of children's literature.
The project
focuses on children's fantasy series written in English since World War II,
beginning with C. S. Lewis's allegorical Chronicles of Narnia and ending with Terry
Pratchett's Discworld fantasies for children. Arising in a half-century span during which church
membership in mainstream denominations has contracted and yet spiritual
questioning and active engagement in non-mainstream denominations has,
especially in this country, exploded, these fantasies join in the larger
cultural debates about the role of religion in both public and private life,
the place of women and children in a historically patriarchal religion, the
nature of divinity in a world threatened by ultimate evil, and the loss of a
unifying narrative for spiritual development.
I expect to
analyze works by three groups of writers: those more overtly allegorical and
Christian, such as Lewis and Madeline L'Engle, those who work through myth to
remake theology, such as Susan Cooper and Ursula LeGuin, and those whose work
resists allegory and challenges Christian teachings, such as Philip Pullman and
Terry Pratchett. While different
writers' approaches may differ, the form of children's fantasy, with its use of
alternate worlds, supernatural and magical occurrences, and heroic quest,
allows all of them to rework Christian motifs and stories and, in the richest
and most thought-provoking of the texts, to reconsider the importance of story
in the religious life. Finally, I
hope to argue--following narrative theologians like John Dominic Crossan and
Stanley Hauerwas, and feminist theologians like Carol Christ and, perhaps, Rosemary
Ruether--that theological issues are best approached through narrative, and
that narrative itself becomes the ground of a communal reinterpretation of
orthodoxy. This has its dangers,
from the perspective of the faithful, of course--as witness the controversies
over the Harry Potter and, to a lesser extent (though it is more heretical)
Pullman's His Dark Materials series.
Fantasies raise the kinds of "what if" questions on which
dogmas often founder--what if humans are not the only rational beings? What if the creation story played out
differently on different planets?
What if John Calvin became a pope, science a branch of theology, and the
Church a state hierarchy? As
Crossan, especially, notes, the parables of Jesus themselves constitute a challenge
to religious orthodoxy, not only in their own time but even today, when they
have hardened in many cases into the status of myth. Crossan argues for recapturing the parable as parable--that is,
exploring its open-endedness and challenges to orthodoxy rather than its
"meaning" in a world which has already known its interpretation. Re-reading children's fantasy as
parable, then, explores the ways in which didacticism opens out into a critical
engagement with questions of the deepest spiritual import.
I hope the work
will be of interest not only to scholars of children's literature, where there
is already a long and fruitful tradition of scholarship on fantasy, but also to
scholars of religion and the arts, as well as a general readership interested
in the ways in which children's literature shapes the imaginations, including
the religious imaginations, of its readers.
Contact me if you'd like to see more...