The paper is focused on stylistic features of English fantasy texts. The research materials include four fantasy novels written by British and American authors of the late 20th century: Jordan's "The Eye of the World," Martin's "A Game of Thrones," Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," and "Harry…

The future of childhood is often described in terms of utopian thinking. Here, the turn is towards dystopia as a fertile source of wild imaginings about the future. The dystopian literary fictions featured here act as a message and are projections of an uneasy future requiring a reader to see the present differently. Such projections make reading…

Gholam Hussein Sa'edi is one of the greatest Iranian writers of short stories in the present era. Sa'edi's stories are based on the existence of fanciful and dreamlike settings in which he attempts to establish the endings of the stories to be the direct result of the characters' psychological reaction against their dreams. The linguistic and…

Russell Hoban died in December 2011. In this article, Victoria de Rijke celebrates this mysterious writer's huge contribution to children's literature over 52 years; a career which began and ended with two mythological books: "The Mouse & His Child" (1967) and "Soonchild" (2012). Published in "CLE" over…

This article will focus on sociolinguistic aspects in Terry Pratchett's "The Wee Free Men." In particular we will deal with the interplay of standard and non-standard British English by which the writer highlights cultural stereotypes as well as narrative ones; creating a children's tale with a distinctively adult-like character set.…

The practice of make-believe has traditionally been viewed as valuable by psychologists and philosophers more or less exclusively as a mechanism for social initiation, a tool for everyday problem solving, or a method for children to learn about adult responsibilities. This instrumentalist approach has influenced the development of a wide variety…

This article presents an interview with Terry Pratchett, one of the world's most beloved storytellers. And with sales of more than 65 million books in 37 languages, he's indisputably one of the most successful. The English novelist's many honors include a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, more than a half dozen honorary doctorates, and the 2008…

Like many a modern play theorist, both Mark Twain and Walt Disney were enchanted by the way children act out stories, in particular pirate tales. For both Twain and Disney, this fascination grew out of their small-town, midwestern boyhoods, where avid reading and fantasy play helped stave off boredom and fill emotional gaps for both of them. Even…

Writers of Caribbean ancestry who live outside of the region are usually described as having dual allegiance (Caribbean/American for example). This is eminently justifiable, since there is usually a recognizable Caribbean flavour to the writing. This paper focuses on one feature of Caribbean culture incorporated in three texts: "Praisesong…

The authors use Noam Chomsky's theories about generative grammar to discuss the notion of linguistic creativity they believe lies at the core of storytelling as Salman Rushdie pictures it in his novel, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." The production of meaning through the use of narrative helps explain the rules of the literary game,…

In this article, the author talks about the philosophical adventures of the characters in L. Frank Baum's Lands of Oz and Ev stories and discusses how such stories can stimulate reflections on philosophically interesting questions. Frank Baum is considered as the first American writer of philosophical fantasy for children for writing "The…

Before children learn to read, they act like readers when they play with materials and objects like readers. In play, children beam their projective imagination upon inert material things and animate them with fantasy, infusing objects with meaning. The question of "the real" haunts the psychology of play and through play, the theory of fantasy:…

Vivian Gussin Paley is a teacher, writer, lecturer, and advocate for the importance of play for young children. Author of a dozen books about children learning through play, she has received numerous honors and awards including an Erickson Institute Award for Service to Children, a MacArthur Foundation Fellows award, and a John Dewey Society's…

This article features Lloyd Alexander, an author who has produced some of the most elegant and powerful prose in the history of modern children's literature. Lloyd began writing seriously in high school, and though he wrote and submitted many poems and short stories, his only success was being named a finalist in the "Writer's Digest" Short Story…

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to…