Alan Garner’s Red Shift: The Anger of the Scholarship Boy

Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Critical Approaches to Children's Literature book series (CRACL)

Abstract

Chapter 6 examines Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1973), in which a scholarship boy suffers from cultural and emotional loss in response to his blind loyalty to the dominant culture. Takiuchi explores how Garner’s traumatic scholarship boy experience formed his aesthetics as a novelist and how this attitude featured in Red Shift. Although Garner admired the rural working-class culture, and is sceptical towards the dominant culture, he was aware of the importance of being a scholarship boy in standing between two class cultures. At one level, Red Shift, which is highly sophisticated and includes both intellectual content and working-class characters, reflects this view. Garner, however, depicts the difficulty of achieving this ideal in the form of the tragedy of the scholarship boy Tom.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Works Cited

  1. Barstow, Stan. A Kind of Loving. London: Hutchinson, 1960.Google Scholar
  2. Butler, Charles. “Alan Garner’s Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of ‘Tam Lin’.” Children’s Literature Review. Vol. 130. Detroit: Gale, 2008. 41–52. Rpt. of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 26.2 (2001): 74–83.Google Scholar
  3. Chambers, Aidan. Personal interview. 25 Apr. 2012.Google Scholar
  4. Cooper, David. “Introduction.” Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. London: Routledge, 2001. vii–ix.Google Scholar
  5. Davis, Robert A. “Seeing Everything at Once: Myth, Freedom, and Determinism in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and Red Shift.” Towards or Back to Human Values? Spiritual and Moral Dimensions of Contemporary Fantasy. Ed. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marek Oziewicz. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006. 227–242.Google Scholar
  6. Dixon, Bob. Catching Them Young 2: Political Ideas in Children’s Fiction. London: Pluto, 1977.Google Scholar
  7. Eliot, T.S. Murder in the Cathedral. London: Faber, 1968.Google Scholar
  8. Foss, Peter J. “The Undefined Boundary: Converging Worlds in the Early Novels of Alan Garner.” Children’s Literature Review. Vol. 130. 2008. Rpt. of New Welsh Review 2.4 (1990): 30–35.Google Scholar
  9. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar
  10. Garner, Alan. “Achilles in Altjira.” The Voice that Thunders. London: Harvill, 1997. 39–64.Google Scholar
  11. ———. “Alan Garner Part 1: Some Influence and Inspirations.” Swing 51 7 (1983): 16–21, 28.Google Scholar
  12. ———. “Alan Garner Part 2: The Lad of the Gad, The Guizer, Red Shift, and Others.” Swing 51 8 (1984): 20–29.Google Scholar
  13. Garner, Alan. “An Interview with Alan Garner.” The Signal Approach to Children’s Books. Ed. Nancy Chambers. London: Scarecrow, 1980. 276–328.Google Scholar
  14. ———. “An Interview with Alan Garner.” Labrys 7 (1981): 80–87.Google Scholar
  15. ———. Boneland. London: Fourth Estate, 2012.Google Scholar
  16. Garner, Alan. “Inner Time.” The Voice that Thunders. London: Harvill, 1997. 106–125.Google Scholar
  17. Garner, Alan. “Interview with Alan Garner.” Taliesin’s Successors. Raymond H. Thompson. The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester, 12 Apr. 1989. Web. <http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/garner.htm>.
  18. ———. Red Shift. 1973. London: HarperCollins, 2002.Google Scholar
  19. ———. “The Fine Anger.” Responses to Children’s Literature: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature.1978. 9–12 Sep. 1980. 1–12.Google Scholar
  20. ———. The Moon of Gomrath. 1963. London: HarperCollins, 2010. Kindle.Google Scholar
  21. ———. The Stone Book Quartet. 1976–1978. London: Flamingo, 1999.Google Scholar
  22. ———. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. 1960. London: HarperCollins, 2013. Kindle.Google Scholar
  23. Jackson, Brian and Dennis Marsden. Education and the Working Class: Some General Themes Raised by a Study of 88 Working-class Children in a Northern Industrial City. 1962. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.Google Scholar
  24. Long, Paul. Only in the Common People: The Aesthetics of Class in Post-War Britain. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar, 2008.Google Scholar
  25. McCallum, Robyn. Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction. New York: Garland, 1999.Google Scholar
  26. Michael, Benton. Detective imagination. Children’s Literature in Education 5.1 (1974): 5–12.Google Scholar
  27. Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic. New York: Garland, 1996.Google Scholar
  28. ———. “The Insignificance of Time: Red Shift.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 14.3 (1989): 128–131.Google Scholar
  29. ———. The Magic Code: The Use of Magical Patterns in Fantasy for Children. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988.Google Scholar
  30. Philip, Neil. A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner. London: Collins, 1981.Google Scholar
  31. Reay, Barry. Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.Google Scholar
  32. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan: or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1993.Google Scholar
  33. Shakespeare, William. The King Lear. Ed. R.A. Foakes. London: Cengage, 1997.Google Scholar
  34. Smuts, R. Malcolm. Culture and Power in England, 1585–1685. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.Google Scholar
  35. Williams, Raymond. Border Country. London: Chatto, 1960.Google Scholar
  36. ———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Funabashi-shiJapan

Personalised recommendations