Fantasy in 20th Century Children's Literature

Most critics agree that children’s literature is a diverse paradoxical area of study combining different literary genres. Like the concept of childhood, children’s literature is a social and cultural concept that evolves over time. Since the fourteenth century, children’s literature has gone through different literary periods each defined by its own divisions and genres. Many children’s novels, such as J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, and C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe were published in the twentieth century and became classics. These books were marked with an increased diversity of literary genres such as mystery and fantasy literature. Fantasy literature has been a dominant literary genre in twentieth century children’s literature, particularly in Barrie’s and Lewis’s novels. In general, as a genre, fantasy literature integrates imaginative elements that shift away from reality into a secondary world. Fantasy literature in the twentieth century, namely in Barrie’s Peter and Wendy and Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wadrobe serves to help children develop vast imagination, and through imagination it allows children to understand and resolve real-world social issues. Doubtless, most people would be able to name some of the features of fantasy literature. Richard Mathews in his book Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination describes fantasy as a distinct literary genre that may be best thought of as a “fiction that elicits wonder through elements of the supernatural or impossible” (Matthews 2). Fantasy literature assumes the existence of supernatural elements within the framework of a certain text. These supernatural elements can exist in many locations throughout the text: they may be buried in, or leak into the apparent real world setting, the case of the boy character Peter Pan and his fairy Tinker Bell in Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. Supernatural elements may also appear in a secondary world where characters are drawn into a world with such