earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the unique fantastic space of Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It. In Five Children and It, Nesbit transforms the spatial structure of the traditional fairy tales into the one where the fantastic phenomenon intrudes into the real world. Nesbit’s fantastic phenomenon has three characteristics. The first is that characters’ sense of the extraordinary is in disturbance when they are faced with the fantastic thing, Psammead. The second is the unstable attributes of Psammead’s magic. The third is chaos and restoration. The principle of the everyday life is violated. However, the normal recovers from chaos, as soon as the fantastic disappears. The unique fantastic space in Five Children and It creates humor by using contradiction and predictability. And the fantastic space of Five Children and It subverts the traditional relationship between adulthood and childhood. The distinctive spatial form makes the traditional relationship subverted, so that children are not considered as innocent beings but intellectual beings equal to adults.