Children's Fantasy

Children's fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy literature written for young readers, though the term can also describe fantasy read by children regardless of its intended audience. Its roots lie in folk tales such as Aesop's Fables that were not originally written for children, since before the Victorian era fairy tales were widely regarded as immoral or unsuited to a child's mind; a dedicated market for children's fantasy emerged in nineteenth-century Britain with works such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Edith Nesbit's Five Children series, and in America with L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with Nesbit commonly credited as the creator of the modern form. Scholars place the genre's golden age in the mid-twentieth century, shaped by J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, followed by the mythopoeic fantasy of the 1970s from writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, before J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter produced a commercial boom in the late 1990s alongside a parallel trend toward darker, more realistic fantasy exemplified by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.