Enid Blyton’s Wartime Sunny Stories : Facilitating Fantasies of Child Heroism

This chapter argues that Enid Blyton’s (1897-1968) wartime periodical stories facilitate fantasies of child heroism which were published to reassure wartime readers of the superiority and eventual victory of the British nation. The necessity of defending the nation’s borders is explained in short stories published within her magazine Sunny Stories which draw upon wartime propaganda to present a vision of the enemy as inherently dictatorial, corrupt, and as subhuman. The content of Blyton’s magazine demonstrates an engagement with the Second World War that challenges the perception of the author as a writer of escapist fiction and, furthermore, challenges the perception of wartime juvenile periodicals for young child readers as primarily sources of distraction, humour, and escapism.