The History of Fantasy in Children's Literature
The History of Fantasy in Children's Literature The job of the fantastic in literature is to suspend our disbelief and to make possible things that are not strictly possible in the real world. Everything from the miracles in Bible stories to the magic of a girl pricking her finger on a spinning wheel and falling into an endless slumber to entire hidden worlds of magical people and creatures that exist just outside our normal human perceptions. Fantasy requires the reader to give up something of the real world in order to interact with a make believe one. “The fantastic is an area of literature that is heavily dependent on the dialectic between author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual construction of belief” (Mendlesohn, Rhetoric , xiii). The degree to which this sense of wonder is conveyed depends on the story; it takes much less effort on the part of the reader to believe that there is a witch’s house in the woods
