This seminar will focus on Anglophone fantastic children’s literature and explore influential modern classics of the twentieth century, which contributed to shape the genre and its ongoing popularity. The starting point will be Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1971) as a key text of the ‘first golden age’ of British children’s literature. Moreover, we will look at the American counterpart L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), whose film adaptation The Wizard of Oz (1939) has become an icon of American popular culture. This seminar will also explore the animal story on the basis of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) as well as the school story as exemplified by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007).

The focus on spaces in fantastic children’s literature will aid in exploring significant features of the genre with regard to the landscapes and geography inherent to the narratives and examine key terms of the genre according to different traditions, such as ‘high fantasy’ vs. ‘low fantasy’, ‘secondary worlds’, ‘magical realism’, and ‘portal-quest fantasy’. Please note that this is a reading intensive seminar. Students will be required to read 4-5 novels throughout the semester and should be prepared to participate actively in seminar discussions. Since students will be asked to read the Alice books by the third session of the seminar, it is highly recommended to plan ahead (The reading workload for these two novels is 250 pages in the recommended Penguin Classics edition).