“Introduction: A Special Issue for a More Than Special Writer”
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\n
It must have been about 1982. A children\u2019s librarian who shared my taste for fantasy asked if I had read a book she recently added to the local collection. The author was Diana Wynne Jones. I remembered reading a couple of Jones\u2019s earlier fantasies and noting her as someone to watch, but then I had gotten caught up in graduate studies and trying to start a sputtering career, and had forgotten to do the watching.<\/p>\n
The book the librarian handed me was called Dogsbody<\/em> (1975), and it was like nothing I had ever read: funny, touching, political, poetic, wildly inventive. The point of view character was impossible\u2014not just a dog, but a dog who had once been a star\u2014but Jones carried it off brilliantly. I immediately tracked down every book I had missed (not easy in those days before online searches) and have never missed a Jones title since. I\u2019ve read them all more than once, passed most of them along to others, written about their intricate structures and narrative daring, and turned a few favorites into places I can retreat to in difficult times. The range of her work is astonishing; its charm is inimitable. And her parody guidebook, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland<\/em>, is both a devastatingly accurate critique of formulaic fantasy and a sympathetic poetics of the genre as a whole.<\/p>\n I could not make it to the 2009 conference devoted to Diana Wynne Jones and her work, but I\u2019m delighted that some of those who were there were willing to turn the event into a more lasting symposium in the form of this special issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts<\/em>. My great thanks to the contributors, to the conference organizers Farah Mendlesohn, Charlie Butler, and Chris Bell, and especially to the guest editors Charlie Butler, Hallie O\u2019Donovan, and Maureen Kincaid Speller.<\/p>\n “Introduction” On 3 July 2009, some eighty people from fourteen different countries converged on the University of the West of England in Bristol, for a weekend conference devoted to the work of Diana Wynne Jones. Since Bristol has been Jones\u2019s home since the mid-1970s, the choice of venue was an appropriate one, although ill-health prevented her from attending. The current issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts<\/em> comprises edited and expanded versions of ten of the thirty-two papers delivered over that weekend, beginning with Nicholas Tucker\u2019s keynote address, in which he assesses Jones\u2019s life and achievement in the context of a friendship spanning some seventy years, from a time when he and Jones were young children in the Lake District during the Second World War.<\/p>\n Children\u2019s literature studies may have come of age in the last generation, but it is still rare for an entire conference to be devoted to a single children\u2019s author, especially one who has not been associated with a wider cultural \u201cphenomenon\u201d such as that surrounding the Harry Potter or Twilight series. The work of Diana Wynne Jones has never occupied that kind of position. She has received considerable academic attention over the past decade, most notably in the essay collection An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom<\/em> (2002), Farah Mendlesohn\u2019s monograph Diana Wynne Jones: Children\u2019s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition<\/em> (2005), and my own study Four British Fantasists<\/em> (2006); but for much of her long career as a children\u2019s writer, Jones has been seen as an underappreciated writer. Since her first children\u2019s book (Wilkins\u2019 Tooth\/Witch\u2019s Business<\/em>) appeared in 1973, she has been published steadily, now having over forty novels to her name, but until recently her books were inclined to slip in and out of print. Many of those who developed a taste for her work as children became long-term admirers and have continued their appreciation and advocacy into adulthood, but they have never been numerous enough to make her a household name. She has won important honors within the fantasy world, but not the Carnegie Medal or Whitbread Award, the major UK prizes for children\u2019s books. For many years, in fact, Jones was an author whose work was discussed most consistently and intensively by fans and within fandom rather than in academia\u2014for example in Deborah Kaplan\u2019s Chrestomanci Castle mailing list (1999\u2013present) and through innumerable one-to-one conversations and recommendations.<\/p>\n Given that background, one of the most gratifying features of the conference was the fruitful interaction that took place between academia and fandom. This distinction was not embodied in a simple division of attendees, nor did the conference divide, as might have happened had it been larger, into academic and fan streams. Rather, there was a general and widely articulated sense that different kinds of expertise were here being brought to bear on each other in a productive and unusual way. Those who gave papers included\u2014as well as academics working in fantasy, science fiction, and children\u2019s literature\u2014 speakers with backgrounds in the hard sciences, computing, the history of technology, publishing, and numerous other fields. This diversity frequently allowed for a cross-fertilization of approaches, a process informed on all sides by a detailed and profound knowledge of the Jones corpus. This juxtaposition of cultures combined with the flattering consensus that, if her books appealed to a minority of readers, it was in part because they were written for \u201csmart\u201d people; and a collective enjoyment at being in a company where it was possible to use such phrases as \u201cHathaway, send a bus!\u201d or to compare UWE\u2019s puzzlingly signposted campus to the hotel in Deep Secret<\/em>, knowing that one would not be required to explain oneself further.<\/p>\n The essays collected in this issue of JFA<\/em> represent something of the conference\u2019s diversity, but also reflect the fact that certain themes surfaced repeatedly, even if they were approached from a variety of critical angles and applied to many different texts. Jones\u2019s use of intertexts and metafiction, for example, is a concern of several of the articles here, from Gabriela Steinke\u2019s essay on the device of the mythosphere in the novella The Game<\/em> (2007), through Kyra Jucovy\u2019s comparative analysis of Jones\u2019s 1984 novel Archer\u2019s Goon<\/em> with its Orwellian urtext, to Ren\u00e9 Fleischbein\u2019s study of the relationship between narrative, metafiction, and identity in Fire and Hemlock<\/em> (1985). Identity, and particularly the concept of identity as performance, is also a central concern in Caroline Webb\u2019s essay on the Chrestomanci novel Conrad\u2019s Fate<\/em> (2005); while Debbie Gascoyne and David Rudd both explore the power of language to create and transform reality, one drawing on J. L. Austin\u2019s ideas about speech acts and performative language and the other on the insights of deconstruction. Power\u2014whether political, magical, or linguistic\u2014was another common theme, one addressed most explicitly here in Martha Hixon\u2019s article on The Merlin Conspiracy<\/em> (2003) and The Pinhoe Egg<\/em> (2006). Hixon\u2019s essay provides not only a discussion of the forms of power at work in those two texts but a challenging analysis of the political positions they imply. Helgard Fischer addresses the educational system in Year of the Griffin<\/em> (2000), using Thomas Kuhn\u2019s theory of paradigm shifts in order to elucidate the process of transition from one system of magical education to another, and the wider changes that necessarily result from such profound revisions in understanding. Deborah Kaplan discusses the ways in which Jones\u2019s books (notably Hexwood<\/em> [1993] and A Sudden Wild Magic<\/em> [1992]) play on expectations about age and growth, considering the implications not only for readers\u2019 own genre assumptions but also for that most enduring and controversial power relationship within children\u2019s literary criticism, the one between adult and child.<\/p>\n I and my fellow editors, Hallie O\u2019Donovan and Maureen Kincaid Speller, would like to pay tribute not only to those whose papers appear here, but to all those whose contributions made that weekend in July 2009. In particular, we would like to thank Farah Mendlesohn, whose idea the conference originally was, and the staff of JFA<\/em> for providing us with the opportunity to present some of the results to a wider audience.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Butler, Charles. Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children\u2019s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper<\/em>. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2006. Print.<\/p>\n Kaplan, Deborah. \u201cDiana Wynne Jones Mailing List.\u201d 1999\u2013present. Chrestomanci Castle: The Diana Wynne Jones Homepage or Travels in the Land of Ingary<\/em>. Web. 28 Aug. 2010.<\/p>\n Mendlesohn, Farah. Diana Wynne Jones: Children\u2019s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition<\/em>. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Children\u2019s Lit. and Culture 36.<\/p>\n Rosenberg, Teya, Martha P. Hixon, Sharon M. Scapple, and Donna R. White, eds. Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom<\/em>. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Print. Studies in Children\u2019s Lit. 1.<\/p>\n “Keynote Address: Diana Wynne Jones” “Power Plays: Paradigms of Power in The Pinhoe Egg<\/em> and The Merlin Conspiracy<\/em>” “The Games People Play” “Disrupted Expectations: Young\/old Protagonists in Diana Wynne Jones\u2019s Novels” “‘Why don\u2019t you be a tiger?’: The Performative, Transformative, and Creative Power of the Word in the Universes of Diana Wynne Jones” “‘False Pretences’ and the ‘Real Show’: Identity, Performance, and the Nature of Fiction in Conrad\u2019s Fate<\/em>” “New Hero: Metafictive Female Heroism in Fire and Hemlock<\/em>” “The Structure of Magical Revolutions” “Building Castles in the Air: (De)Construction in Howl\u2019s Moving Castle<\/em>” “Little Sister Is Watching You: Archer\u2019s Goon<\/em> and 1984<\/em>” Peter Cochran\u2019s The Gothic Byron<\/em> Helen Farley\u2019s A Cultural History of Tarot from Entertainment to Esotericism<\/em> Farah Mendlesohn\u2019s The Intergalactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children\u2019s and Teens\u2019 Science Fiction<\/em> M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas\u2019s The Science Fiction Handbook<\/em> Sophie Beaul\u00e9\u2019s Jean-Louis Trudel<\/em> Suzanne Magnanini\u2019s Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile<\/em> Rachel Falconer\u2019s The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children\u2019s Fiction and Its Adult Readership<\/em> John Wyndham\u2019s Plan for Chaos: The Prequel to<\/em> The Day of the Triffids Susan Schneider\u2019s Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence<\/em> Farah Mendlesohn\u2019s On Joanna Russ<\/em> Editor’s Introduction “Introduction: A Special Issue for a More Than Special Writer” Brian Attebery It must have been about 1982. A children\u2019s librarian who shared my taste for fantasy asked if I had read a book she recently added to the local collection. The author was Diana Wynne Jones. I remembered reading a couple of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":223,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-fullwidth.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-236","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":329,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/236\/revisions\/329"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Guest Editor’s Introduction<\/h3>\n
\nCharlie Butler<\/p>\nArticles<\/h3>\n
\nNicholas Tucker<\/p>\n
\nMartha P. Hixon<\/p>\n
\nGabriela Steinke<\/p>\n
\nDeborah Kaplan<\/p>\n
\nDebbie Gascoyne<\/p>\n
\nCaroline Webb<\/p>\n
\nRen\u00e9 Fleischbein<\/p>\n
\nHelgard Fischer<\/p>\n
\nDavid Rudd<\/p>\n
\nKyra Jucovy<\/p>\nReviews<\/h3>\n
\nRev. by Lisa Andres<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Emily E. Auger<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Jen Gunnels<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Rob Latham<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Amy Ransom<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Tina-Louise Reid<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Faye Ringel<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Roger C. Schlobin<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Janani Subramanian<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Christopher M. Sutch<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"