Fantasy Literature for Children

Catalog description

Fantasy Literature for Children explores a range of fantasy literature including literary fairy tales, toy fantasies, ghosts/horror/suspense, science fiction, reworked fairy tales, low fantasy, and high fantasy. This course will consider different rationalizations for fantasy literature and will examine some of the key stories that illustrate fantasy from different perspectives, such as literary, social, and psychological angles. This course will look at, first, the beginnings of modern fantasy with the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Carlo Collodi's classic, Pinocchio. Then the course reading will include ghosts and other supernatural fantasy stories, and "reworked" fairy tales, a current trend in fantasy literature. Despite of some scholarly debates on science fiction, that is, whether it should be categorized into fantasy or not, this course will consider science fiction as being similar enough to fantasy for it to be included. The course will also include a study of fantasy books currently popular with school-age readers. Fantasy can be divided into two main groups: low fantasy and high fantasy. Several of the stories to be read in the course are perhaps best categorized as low fantasies, not because of what they are, but because they are not high fantasy, which has a mythic quality to it. High fantasy seems to go beyond the particulars of its story to explore the nature of good and of evil. Though high fantasies can be humorous at times, the overall tone is serious. Often characters are on quests and the stakes of success or failure usually involve saving the world from some great evil or preventing the tyranny of some powerful and evil ruler. Reading the different types of fantasy literature and the literary critiques and analyses of those works, this course will be wrestling with the overall importance of those books in the lives of children by pondering imagination and its role in the lives of children.