ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the depiction and representation(s) of gender restrictions in fantasy literature for children. It expresses that representative of the narrative scope for re-imagining the gendered experience of childhood that the fantasy genre offers. The chapter discusses some texts as a representative sample of the wider canon of international children's literature. It focuses on a potential for empowerment exists across and within the fantasy genre, both in national bodies of fiction for children and across a range of time periods, from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century. The chapter also expresses that the fantasy genre offers child readers and child figures the freedom to move beyond and transcend the gender restrictions imposed on them as male and female children, through the act of creative narration. Children's literature simultaneously carries and exposes ideologies about the hierarchical arrangements of society.
