Though the label is more recent, Young Adult fantasy dates at least to CS Lewis’s Narnia books (1949–56), and prospered throughout the subsequent decades — but in the later 1990s it began a phenomenal expansion, driven initially by Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000) and Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom trilogy (1995–2003), and then by the astonishing popularity of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007).
What happened included the very aggressive marketing and merchandising of the Harry Potter films (2001–11) by Warner Bros, and of The Golden Compass (2007) by New Line — but they initially purchased the rights because the books were already runaway bestsellers, and it is in the books themselves that answers must be sought. What is it about these particular works that proved so important to so many children and teenagers, as well as to adults?
To begin with, it is notable that all three authors deal, however fantastically, with deeply serious issues that include material traditionally excluded from ‘acceptable children’s literature’. Pullman, already an experienced YA author, is also a considerable Christian controversialist, and besides responding to Milton’s Paradise Lost, His Dark Materials offers a severe critique of contemporary religious dogmatism and institutions. Nix, a less experienced but not debut author, treats and imagines death in intense detail, deconstructing the life–death binary in part as a response to the protracted death over three years of his grandfather. And racism is central to Rowling’s series, above all with muggles and mudbloods, but also in lesser matters from the treatment of house elves to ‘black Hermione’ in The Cursed Child. As happened with Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy (1969–73), the works of Nix, Pullman, and Rowling have been received as much as wisdom literature, tackling hard subjects with imaginative grace, as entertainment. And one other medium, unavailable to Le Guin, was critical to their explosive print success — the Internet, primarily as a networking tool allowing fans to link up, and to find critical discussion unavailable elsewhere, but also as the home of fanfiction, a particularly significant element in the Potterverse.
This course takes a hard look at all three writers, and the real historical and literary contexts in which their works of fantasy have come to matter so much to so many people.