ABSTRACT

This chapter juxtaposes three Romantic literary fairy tales: Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Paradise of Children' in A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, Tappan's eponymous The Magician's Show Box, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's The Birthday in Fairy-Land. Testaments to a 'didactic tradition of fantasy literature' imparting its lessons under the 'guise of enchantment', these texts illuminate the animating paradox of imaginative children's fiction. The chapter refuses to position any of the authors as exceptional, instead presenting them as constructing and deconstructing the fantasy genre in equal parts. Sharing in the halting transformation of antebellum children's literature, they posit effervescent fantasies that temporarily break from normative gender constructions even as these same fantasies discipline children's desires. The chapter offers an expanded canon of Romantic children's fiction, hoping to restore balance to the critical discussions often dominated by narratives in which Hawthorne almost single-handedly revolutionizes American children's literature.