Abstract:
Between 2003 and 2004, Neil Gaiman wrote a short story called ‘The problem
of Susan’. In it, a young journalist has a dream in which she is Susan Pevensie
and the world of Narnia has become dark and terrifying. In this article, the
author argues that Gaiman’s preoccupation with and intertextual re-envisioning
of Narnia goes beyond ‘The problem of Susan’, and that his children’s book,
Coraline (2002), can be viewed partly as a rewriting of C.S. Lewis’s The lion,
the witch and the wardrobe ([1950] 2001). The author further shows that the two
books have many shared aspects, but that Gaiman transforms these aspects to
make the fantasy world in Coraline an unsteady, threatening and even horrifying
version of the bright and inviting world of Narnia. The author also argues that
Gaiman’s purpose in so doing is to defy and subtly criticise what he views as
Lewis’s attempts to encourage children to remain innocent and childlike.
