ABSTRACT
Children's literature of the fantastic suggests either high drama—battles between the powers of lightness and darkness—or stuffed animals capering about a nursery world after hours. Generally the chief human actors in these fantasies are children imbued with the key attribute of being parent free; parents, after all, would get in the way by providing cautions which would inhibit the child characters from stepping through wardrobes or time travelling, or worse, chuckling indulgently when children mention that their stuffed animals talk. Introducing fantasy into children's real worlds, making the unbelievable believable while the central characters are surrounded by everyday settings and activities, takes a skilled author. An intact family unit almost defeats the concept of fantasy, but it commonly points out the fundamental conflict between fantastic and rational views of the world, or between (stereotypically) the child's view and the adult's.
