Microsoft Word final-current Developments at the Intersection of British Children-online-version doc

Muddle Earth
are familiar with Tolkien’s work in the first place. Their parents are more likely 
to meet the requirements.
Ironic fantasy of a more serious kind can be found in Beddor’s The Looking-Glass 
Wars
. Carroll’s children’s classic is turned upside down and interlarded with violence and 

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cruelty. This does not leave much space for humour, as the heads actually do come off in this 
version.
Terry Pratchett and his Discworld novels
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play in a league of their own. Invented 
from scratch, clearly structured and drawn up, Pratchett’s secondary world even possesses its 
own map. Moreover, the author does not omit any characteristic feature of fantasy; nothing 
goes unheeded or uncommented. Despite the apparent ease of Pratchett’s narrative, the reader 
often cannot help feeling that he is constantly overlooking allusions and overtones of 
subliminal comments or intertextual references. The author’s humour is very individual; it 
covers and savours the entire bandwidth of the spectrum of fantasy.
In a Time fantasy, the protagonist(s) take up contact with a time level different from 
their own. More often than not this is the past, whereas the future is usually reserved for 
science fiction. Time can either be suspended, extended, sped up, shifted or travelled 
through.
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By means of certain devices of entrance, be it a dream, an artefact or a location, the 
characters either cross into another time, or a character from another time makes an 
appearance in theirs. From the divergence between these two levels and the resulting 
difficulties the characters gain insight into the past as well as into their own time. Knowledge 
of the past and friendships across time strengthen the protagonists and help them understand 
their present reality. The time fantasy per se is Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. Other 
works, such as Nesbit’s The House of Arden, L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Farmer’s 
Charlotte Sometime
, or Nimmo’s The Time-Twister all offer creative approaches towards the 
same phenomenon.
In a Toy fantasy children’s favourite playthings come alive, become sentient and have 
the power of speech. This either happens in the seclusion of a nursery, in broad daylight or in 
a little world of its own. Winnie-the-Pooh and Paddington, two teddy bears, are the main 
representatives of this subgenre of fantasy. Where Paddington remains the sole toy in the 
focus of attention, Winnie-the-Pooh is part of an entire menagerie of stuffed animals. 
Christopher Robin is their only human attachment figure to see them in action. To his father, 
they remain lifeless toys.
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In our corpus, these are The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith. The Amazing Maurice and His 
Educated Rodents 
come under animal fantasy, since the main protagonists are animals.
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Compare Clute; Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, p. 948. 
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The same constellation is found in Watterson’s comics Calvin and Hobbes, where the toy tiger Hobbes is only 
ever alive in front of six-year-old Calvin.

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Modern fantasy is teeming with hybrid forms, i.e. mixtures of several genres. Back in 
the Golden Age of children’s literature categorising fantasy novels for children was a 
comparatively easy venture. Topical fantasy novels for children make use of various 
subgenres, narrative forms and techniques, and combine them to new arrangements. What 
they tend not to do is restrict themselves to just one form or subgenre of fantasy. Borders blur 
or dissolve completely, thus allowing for wide-ranging fantasies. Instead of making this a 
deplorable fact, border traffic enriches the spectrum and offers new possibilities by combining 
elements from several varieties.
Applied to the present corpus this means that novels such as His Dark Materials or 
Harry Potter
cannot exclusively be classed as high fantasy. As they also feature elements of 
Dark/ Gothic fantasy, detective novel, philosophy, bildungsroman, adventure story, school 
story etc., they are a hybrid form and have to be treated a such. Further hybrid forms on the 
basis of high/ low fantasy included into our corpus are for instance The Faerie Wars 
Chronicles, The Valley of Secrets, The Edge Chronicles, The Secret of Platform 13, The 
Children of the Lamp, The Children of the Red King, Skellig, Clay, Stravaganza, Hellbent and 
Molly Moon.