Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties by Laurence Talairach (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews cult to map onto characters of African descent” and because vampire stories are often about taboo sexual desires), this chapter highlights the significant differences between how the Black, American Bonnie Bennet and her White, Irish book counterpart, Bonnie McCullough are treated (113). By tracing TV Bonnie’s dark fantastic cycle, Thomas demonstrates how “the imperatives of commercial teen television and fan responses limit the liberating possibilities of characters of color” (127). The final sections of the chapter discuss the following: how social media activism raises awareness against injustice; the increased number of Black girls and women advocating for better representation in mainstream speculative fiction; and fan fiction as a way to rewrite the stories of marginalized characters. The final chapter in this monograph, “Hermione Is Black,” is most compelling as it moves from literary criticism to audiences’ responses to the lack of representation—or even misrepresentation—in popular literature. Recounting her experiences as an avid reader of the Harry Potter novels and as a writer of Harry Potter fan fiction, Thomas discusses the contemporary audiences’ use of social media to construct meanings from texts independent of or contrary to authorial intent. She goes on to offer the practice of “restorying”—which describes how young readers “reimagine the very stories themselves” as they “imagine themselves into stories”—time and place, identity, and across modes as some ways of decolonizing the imagination (159, emphasis original). To say that The Dark Fantastic does important work in the fields of critical race theory, young adult literature, and media studies would be an understatement; its impact is both dynamic and far-reaching. One reason this book is such as an important resource for decentering whiteness in academic settings and beyond is because it uses critical counterstorytelling to bring historically marginalized voices to the forefront. Another reason is that Thomas’s incorporation of autoethnography and reader responses increases the text’s accessibility (and teachability) so that readers—regardless of their backgrounds—might learn new ways of seeing.