Chapter 7: Modern Fantasy
 Fantasy for today’s child
 Children need contemporary stories that are relevant and speak to the problems of daily living
 Good fantasy might be critical to children understanding of themselves and the struggles they will face as human beings
 It revels new insights into the world of reality
 Fantasy helps the child develop imagination
 Lloyd Alexander argues that fantasy is of the utmost value for children
 “Fantasy touches our deepest feelings and in so doing, it speaks to the best and most hopeful parts of our selves. It can help us learn the most fundamental skill of all- how to be human.”
 Modern fairy tales
 Folklore or fairy tales has no identifiable author but was passed on by retellings by one generation to the next
 Hans Christian Anderson is the first author of modern fairy tales
 Ex: “the wild swans”
 Oscar Wilde, another early author of the modern literary fairy tales
 Modern Fantasy
 Fantasy, like poetry, means more than it says
 Evaluating modern fantasy: well written fantasy, like other fiction, has a well constructed plot, convincing characterization, a worth-while theme, and appropriate style
 Additional considerations must guide the evaluation such as variety techniques and the way the author makes the fantasy believable
 Animal fantasy
 Tales of talking animals, toys, and dolls. One of the most beloved animal fantasies of our time is E.B White’s “Charlotte’s Web”
 The world of toys and dolls
 Authors have endowed animals with human characteristics
 A.A. Milne in his story “Pooh” he made his story quite so much like people putting all the stuffed toys of Moline’s son Christopher Robin in each chapter
 Eccentric Characters and preposterous situations
 Many fantasies are based on eccentric characters or preposterous situations
 Often characters and situations occur in otherwise normal settings, allowing the reader to believe more readily. “Cars or people might fly; eggs might hatch into dinosaurs or dragons…etc.”
 Extraordinary worlds
 Often start in the world of reality, they move quickly into a world where everyday becomes extraordinary, yet still believable. (ex. “Alice’s adventures in wonderland”)
 Magical power

 The children in books of fantasy often possess a magical object, know a magical saying or have magical powers themselves (ex.”Half Magic” by Edward Eager)
 Suspense and the supernatural (pg. 309)
 Such as ghost stories or mystery tales. They interest in the occult and the supernatural, always an adult preoccupation, also captures the imagination of children
 Time- shift fantasy
 Author of books for children have written many fantasies that are based on characters that appear to shift easily form their particular moment in the present to a long-lost point in someone’s past. One of the finest time fantasies ever written is mysterious and exciting “Tom’s Midnight Garden”
 Imagination reams
 These types of stories have been set in an imaginary society where kings and queens rule feudal societies that resemble the Middle Ages. They are often lighter in tone than high fantasy, these stories might none the less feature some of its attributes such as a human character’s search for identity, a quest or the struggle against evil and good introductions to the more complex and serious work of high fantasy
 High fantasy
 Popular stories of magic, ghosts, time travel, and go on to become fans of a more serious and demanding type of high story
 Science fiction
 One of the values of science fiction is its ability to develop children’s imagination and intuitions as well as exercise their speculative and improvisational abilities. Science fiction assumes a vastly different society.
 Through the door
 Includes spaceships, robots, futuristic settings, or scientific terminology but does not fully fill “science fiction” by definition
 Visitors to earth
 Students today are willing to suspend disbelief and are usually prepared to consider the dilemmas that interact between visitors and human present. To do television and motion pictures that have eased out acceptance of the possibility of visitors from another part of the universe
 Outer space
 Have been popular since Jules Verne wrote “From the Earth to the Moon”
 Views of the future
 These books ask readers to consider how present actions might affect Earth’s ecological, political, and social future.