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Holly Viriginia Blackford. The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Myths are at once the "oldest stories" (Gamble and Yates 102) and the stories most frequently renewed and retold. The trend for reworking mythology- from James Joyce's Ulysses to Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad to Eowyn Ivey's just-published version of The Snow Child-is especially prominent in children's literature. Myths are "right and proper fare for children" (Saxby 162) and have often been seen as appropriate vehicles for the social, moral, and cultural values we seek to impart to children. Rather than focusing on straightforward retellings of classical mythology, Holly Virginia Blackford's engaging study, The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature, shows how the Persephone story subtly informs a range of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century narratives. Taking Persephone and her Narcissus as psychological archetypes, and the story of the girl's separation from her mother, her descent into the underworld, and their subsequent reunion or reconciliation as a narrative prototype, Blackford offers detailed readings of nine texts and shows how the Persephone myth has been reworked-consciously and unconsciously-since the Romantic period.
Blackford sees the Persephone myth as an elegant and timeless exploration of female relationships and as "a powerful evocation of child development" (33). The myth, as she suggests in chapter 1, maps the natural cycles of death and renewal onto a story of loss and recovery whereby Persephone is symbolically killed by the underworld only to rise again in the spring. The story of Persephone and Demeter fascinated Victorian artists and writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Walter Pater (33), and became for Carl Jung and other psychologists "an expression of the female psyche" (32). Drawing on a range of texts as diverse and popular as Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Neil Gaiman's Coraline, and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, Blackford demonstrates how this psychological dimension may inform our readings...