Girls Transforming : Invisibility and Age-Shifting in Children's Fantasy Fiction Since the 1970s

This book explores representations of girlhood and young womanhood in recent English language children's fantasy by focusing on two fantastic body transformation types: invisibility and age-shifting. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory, the study discusses the tropes of invisibility and age-shifting as narrative devices representing gendered experiences. The transformations offer various perspectives on a girl's changing body and identity and provide links between real-life and fantastic discourses of gender, power, invisibility and aging.

The main focus is on English-language fantasy published since the 1970s but the motifs of invisibility and age-shifting in earlier tales and children's books is reviewed; this is the first study of children's fantasy literature that considers these tropes at length.

Novels discussed are from both critically acclaimed authors and the less well known. Most of the novels depicting invisible or age-shifting girls are neither thoroughly conventional nor radically subversive but present a range of styles. In terms of gender, children's fantasy novels can be more complex than they are often interpreted to be.

Sanna Lehtonen is a university lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the Department of Languages, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, where she teaches in the area of discourse studies with a particular focus on gender and new media.

Donald E. Palumbo is a professor of English at East Carolina University. He lives in Greenville, North Carolina.

C.W. Sullivan III is Distinguished Professor of arts and sciences at East Carolina University and a full member of the Welsh Academy. He is the author of numerous books and the on-line journal Celtic Cultural Studies.