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Empire and Race in Enid Blyton’s Fiction

Deconstructing Whiteness and Modern Editing Practices

Empire and Race in Enid Blyton’s Fiction cover

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Empire and Race in Enid Blyton's Fiction: Deconstructing Whiteness and Modern Editing Practices
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

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 28 May 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 224
ISBN 9781350465145
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Siobhan Morrissey

Siobhán Morrissey completed her Phd in 2022. She c…

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