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A review by avrilhj
Inventing Wonderland by Jackie Wullschläger
3.0
I suspect some of the errors of the first edition have been corrected in this later one, and it does end with a new chapter that looks at later twentieth-century children's fantasy written by British authors, although there is a still a reference in the body of the book to the Winnie-the-Pooh stories by A. A. Milne being the last of the British children's fantasy books which I, as a reader of Lewis and Tolkien, found bizarre.
Wullschlager's connection between the Victorian and Edwardian worship of the child, the psycho-sexual development of the authors, and the books themselves, is interesting, and she doesn't make the mistake of reading paedophilia back into Carrol and Barrie's relationships with children. (Ruskin, on the other hand, seems much less innocent to me.) During the Freudian years of the twentieth century, when everything was about sex, there would have been no escape from such a reading; post-Freud we can acknowledge the possibility of asexuality, which seems to have been what Carrol and Barrie were.
The trouble is that having made the link between history, psycho-sexual development and writing fantasy for children, Wullschlager can't explain why fantasy has remained such a dominant mode in British fiction and the last chapter is confused. What makes sense for the five men (four and a half because Milne doesn't quite fit?) doesn't seem to make sense for later authors. Other books need to be written to explain this, and some of them have been written, looking at the impact of WW1 on writers like Lewis and Tolkien, for instance.
But, all up, I enjoyed this and it gave me new information about Lear, at least, if not much about the other authors.
Wullschlager's connection between the Victorian and Edwardian worship of the child, the psycho-sexual development of the authors, and the books themselves, is interesting, and she doesn't make the mistake of reading paedophilia back into Carrol and Barrie's relationships with children. (Ruskin, on the other hand, seems much less innocent to me.) During the Freudian years of the twentieth century, when everything was about sex, there would have been no escape from such a reading; post-Freud we can acknowledge the possibility of asexuality, which seems to have been what Carrol and Barrie were.
The trouble is that having made the link between history, psycho-sexual development and writing fantasy for children, Wullschlager can't explain why fantasy has remained such a dominant mode in British fiction and the last chapter is confused. What makes sense for the five men (four and a half because Milne doesn't quite fit?) doesn't seem to make sense for later authors. Other books need to be written to explain this, and some of them have been written, looking at the impact of WW1 on writers like Lewis and Tolkien, for instance.
But, all up, I enjoyed this and it gave me new information about Lear, at least, if not much about the other authors.