Looking into the implications of the changes made to Enid Blytons childrens stories to omit problematic passages surrounding race and imperialism, this book examines her fiction in its original and revised forms to assess the evolution of her work against evolving political, imperial, and cultural developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. With detailed explorations of Blytons highly successful magazine Enid Blytons Sunny Stories, the Adventure and The Secret Seven series among her other popular works, Siobhan Morrissey contextualises Blytons fiction within multiple literary and historical contexts, including 20th-century magazines, the Second World War, imperial adventure fiction, the decline of the British Empire and contemporary conceptions of race and whiteness in childrens literature. Calling upon critical race theory, white and postcolonial studies, the book models how these ideas can be applied to literature studies and analyses the imperial, racial hierarchies of Blytons texts and how these can be remedied. Then, taking a broader survey of how contemporary childrens publishers are amending authors works from Roald Dahl to P. L. Travers to Hugh Lofting and to what effect, the book makes a case for an intervention in current editing practices and a reappraisal of how work should be censored and rebranded.
