Empire and Race in Enid Blyton’s Fiction
Deconstructing Whiteness and Modern Editing Practices
Empire and Race in Enid Blyton’s Fiction
Deconstructing Whiteness and Modern Editing Practices
Description
Looking into the implications of the changes made to Enid Blyton's children's stories to omit problematic passages surrounding race and imperialism, this book examines her fiction in its original and revised forms to assess the evolution of her work against evolving political, imperial, and cultural developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. With detailed explorations of Blyton's highly successful magazine Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories, the Adventure and The Secret Seven series among her other popular works, Siobhan Morrissey contextualises Blyton's fiction within multiple literary and historical contexts, including 20th-century magazines, the Second World War, imperial adventure fiction, the decline of the British Empire and contemporary conceptions of race and whiteness in children's literature. Calling upon critical race theory, white and postcolonial studies, the book models how these ideas can be applied to literature studies and analyses the imperial, racial hierarchies of Blyton's texts and how these can be remedied. Then, taking a broader survey of how contemporary children's publishers are amending authors' works from Roald Dahl to P. L. Travers to Hugh Lofting and to what effect, the book makes a case for an intervention in current editing practices and a reappraisal of how work should be censored and rebranded.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One – Race, Empire, and Colonialism in Blyton's Sunny Stories Magazine
Chapter Two: Supporting Empire: The Imperial and Colonial Ideologies of the Adventure and Secret Series
Chapter Three - Modifying Blyton: Twenty-First Century Revisions
Chapter Four – The Wider Issue: Modification of Classic and Popular Children's Books and Authors
Conclusion
References
Index
Product details
| Published | 28 May 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 9781350465145 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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