Abstract

Examining the history of Ireland and India’s ‘othering’ in similar patterns of imperial discourses and their subsequent evolution into zones of hybridity and plurality against the backdrop of a rising tide of nationalism in nineteenth/twentieth century India and Ireland, I examine how these socio-political developments might have informed constructions of the ‘child’ and conceptualizations of ‘childhood’ in Irish and Bangla juvenile print literature, folk and fairy tales, and apparition narratives. I compare the educational policies and school curriculum of colonial Ireland and Bengal, reviewing conditions that led to the proliferation of juvenile print literature and recreational reading practices, indicating a shift towards child-centrism and publication of fantastic narratives in the indigenous press as opposed to contemporary publication trends in Great Britain. Then I survey British and other European folk literature to determine the functionality and significance of their fantastic paraphernalia from the standpoint of narration and meaning-making and how that differs from the narrative/thematic modalities prevalent in Irish and Bangla folklore. Comparing Irish and Bangla oral traditions and mythospheres, I analyse how certain folk narratives are re-imagined by Anglophone authors of juvenile fiction in Irish and Bangla literary traditions through the contemporization of the folk-type and re-purposing of the ‘fantastic’ in literature. This line of inquiry is followed by the study of appropriated fairy tales which I propose, belie Anglican narratives by modifying several structural and thematic elements in them, as a mode of re-writing the ‘Western meta-ethic.’ Extending the exploration to authors of modern children’s fantasy, particularly in their use of the ghost narrative and the horror-humour conjunction, a legacy of both Bangla and Irish satirical literature, I examine their subversive potential within a broader postcolonial discourse. Finally, I draw these strands of argument together to propose the development of what I call, the ‘postcolonial fantastic,’ an authorial method of exploring the wild and pluralistic possibilities of the juvenile consciousness to account for their own counter-hegemonic and nationalistic visions.