Department of English

Topic: “Children's Fantasy Literature"

This course will study Anglo-American children's literature through the frame of the fantastic, stretching from fairy stories to the contemporary flourishing of fantasy fiction for children. Our goal will be to understand the historical development of the genre and its relationship to the broader production of fantasy as a transmedial genre. At the same time, we will be attentive to the way that childhood emerges from and changes within the course of the novels we read and the historical periods they reflect. While our selections will all be novels, students will have the opportunity to research and present material related to children's picture books, graphic novels, television, film, and YouTube programming, and other aspects of children's material culture.

Readings may include some of the following novels: J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terebithia, Natalie Babbit's Tuck Everlasting, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Stephen King's The Wind Through the Keyhole, Lemony Snicket's The Bad Beginnings, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, and Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch. We will also read short works of criticism and theory.

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