MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In much of children’s literature, the elements of fantasy are written with broad strokes and typically introduce secret other worlds in which great peril lurks and priceless rewards are at stake. Such stories portray epic battles between good and evil, belief and disbelief. Children are required to grow up and take up the mantle of responsibility, accept a quest and in effect become a hero aka adult figure. However, this trope is circumvented in Edward Eager’s seven novels — Half Magic (1954), Knight’s Castle (1956), Magic By the Lake (1957), The Time Garden (1958), Magic Or Not? (1959), The Well-Wishers (1960) and Seven-Day Magic (1962). Eager, clearly influenced by Edith Nesbit, writes novels about ordinary children who are very much enthralled by the act of reading and story telling and who happen to have magical adventures. The protagonists in an Eager novel are typically a group (no individual heroic effort required) of children who are either related or close friends and who share a love of reading and magic. His characters overtly mourn the dearth of exciting but believable magic books and possibilities. An underlying thematic thread running throughout Eager’s books is the idea of children perceiving a threat to their world because parents are temporarily unable to fulfill their duty toward the children. These perceived threats usually take the nature of a parent’s illness, extended working trip or the act of remarriage. On these pages, no epic battles are fought and the children are often revealed to be selfish and both child like and childish but are still worthy of magical encounters. This presentation explores how Eager uses low fantasy to create believable worlds in which children are briefly given the power to blur imagination and reality, time travel and cross the boundaries between “real” and “fictional.”