Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years ed. by Jennifer Harrison (review)

Abstract

Children’s Literature Association Quarterly Lord of the Rings (Mills 119). Still, Ball demonstrates and justifies Lewis’s Orientalism even as he objects to the “full armoury” of Said’s theory (131, 230). East of the Wardrobe opens an area that benefits from more discussion: C. S. Lewis’s ideological and aesthetic construction of Narnia beyond “mere Christianity.” Ball’s work shares a family resemblance with Laura Miller’s Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (2008) in that it describes how an adult may revisit childhood favorites with an awareness of how the books have spurred subsequent tastes and interests (books and Anglophilia, in Miller’s case; archaeology and the East, in Ball’s). Like Miller, Ball delights in recognizing the origins of his vocation and interests while using adult frameworks to reassess his old favorites. Ball’s introduction of central Asian texts and art could inspire new areas for research. Despite these promising aspects, the book is not so much literary criticism as it is a product of nostalgia, a work that links this world and imagined ones without necessarily distinguishing between them. East of the Wardrobe misses an opportunity to engage seriously with Lewis’s legacy in a way that could, as scholars are now doing with the Crusades, name and acknowledge the subterranean contributions of Arab, Persian, and other Near Eastern thinkers and artists to Narnia and to us.