Children’s Fantasy Series

…is well under way. The focus of the project has changed quite considerably. Also, things have been rearranged.

I could be more vague, but I won’t be.

Yay! My bibliography is done, all 78 items of it (and I used the three-volume set of the Chrestomanci Chronicles). Full bibliography is after the break. (It’s in MLA, in case you were wondering.)

(more…)

Have I mentioned that Professor Minear gives the best paper critiques I have ever had the luxury of getting? Well, now I have. In two rather short paragraphs she’s pointed out what I need to focus on and suggested several new ways to look at my topic. Six pages is definitely not enough.

Back to work!

For as long as it took to research and write (and do the preliminary edits) I’m somewhat sad that all that work boiled down to six double spaced pages. I sent it off to the fabulous Professor Minear, and I’m waiting to hear back from her before sitting down for the first round of revision.

Alright, here’s where it gets interesting. You’ve already seen the correspondence between family size and number of protagonists, but there are a couple other things that have slowly emerged. One of them is that the decade-long oscillations seen here:

Seem to match up particularly well with Tobin’s Q Ratio for the same period. (Still working on graphing this, sorry.) Coincidence? Perhaps. But since Tobin’s Q Ratio can taken as a measure of confidence and trust–it can be loosely defined as how much investors are willing to pay for stock divided by how much it’s worth*–it also makes a great deal of sense.

And as for the gap? I think that can be quite easily explained. During the Great Depression, children’s fantasy literature would have been seen as a needless waste of money. Immediately afterward, of course, was WWII, where any effort put towards something as unessential as fantasy books would have been seen as unpatriotic and, perhaps more damningly, deeply impracticable. And the final break between the end of WWII and the 1950 debut of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Well, the children of the baby boom would not have been able to read right out of the womb. Once they could, however, publishers started seeing profit to be made and began to busily make it.

It’s not waterproof yet by any means, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

*Don’t make faces at me or I’ll sic Garrison Keillor on you.

Now that I’ve finished my reading for this project, the blog format is less useful to me. I don’t intend to leave you hanging out to dry though; you’ll get regular updates. Right now I’m about a third of the way through the first draft of my paper, having completed the chronological overview of the works I’m looking at. Still trying to figure out where to put my criterion for the works I’m considering, though…right now I’m sprinkling it throughout the overview and that strikes me as messy.

I’m also trying to schedule a presentation at the Williamsburg Regional Library–in addition to the Summer research fair the Charles Center puts on, of course. I may post a copy of the finished paper once I hear back from whatever journal I end up submitting to. Hopefully, I’ll just be able to post a link.

Back to work!

P.L. Travers, I do not have to read your series! You are Australian, not English or American. Muahaha. Only wish I’d found that out before I was half-way though the series…ah, well.

At the last minute, I have decided to include the Mary Poppins series, as it fills an important gap in my study. I suppose I should have looked at the dates a little earlier on, but I hadn’t realized how important they would be; I rather assumed that other factors were at the base of the shift, and time was coincidental. Now I see the inverse is true. Yes, it has resulted in more work for me, but my topic is a much stronger one than I at first realized, so I’m not at all unhappy about it. Now the only series I feel guilty about leaving out is Greene Knowe…I even have about half of them at home…we’ll see whether they end up being included or not.

Here’s the edited version. Enjoy!