ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the gradual increase in the compounding of high and low forms of humor in junior fi ction within the genre of ‘low fantasy’, which I defi ne as fi ction rooted in real world settings with fantasy elements, often including ideas of wish fulfi lment. The genre of ‘fantasy’ is obviously huge and a full examination of humor in fantasy is beyond the scope of this work, so I focus upon two relevant sub-genres of low fantasy for my current purposes. One is fi ction which features anthropomorphized animals, which has a relatively long history. Gifford (1987) states that ‘funny animals’ evolved early on, outside the mainstream of fi ction, inside women’s magazines such as Home Chat (1898), which featured ‘Jungle Jinks’ and its school for anthropomorphic animals. The other sub-genre I consider is child detective/secret agent fi ction, which is much more recent. Although Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives was published in Germany in 1929, most examples that are specifi cally marketed as humorous tend to emanate from the late 1970s onwards.
