Pagan Themes in Modern Children's Fiction

Recent children's fiction has a formative and interrogative relationship with fashionable but controversial aspects of modern Paganism. Children's fiction responds with innovative and exciting reformulations to difficulties with the Pagan appropriation of the Green Man, shamanism and prehistoric monuments. Peter Bramwell proposes that the Pagan in children's literature adds distinctive accents to critical and theoretical approaches, including: Bakhtinian concepts and critical linguistics, ecocriticism, gender-conscious criticism, and ideas about childhood and children's spirituality. Issues around ecology and power are prominent as contemporary children's fiction reflects and questions the figuration of the Green Man as apocalyptic environmentalist icon; attempts to restore shamanism to appropriate cultural contexts and revisions northern traditions; and plays off Pagan, heritage, New Age and earth mysteries constructions of prehistoric monuments. A wide range of texts is scrutinised, including ones by acclaimed and popular authors such as Susan Cooper, Catherine Fisher, Anthony Horowitz, Geraldine McCaughrean, Michelle Paver, Susan Price and Philip Pullman.