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- Title
Regeneration Through Pleasure: Walter Farley's American Fantasy.
- Authors
Emrys, A. B.
- Abstract
This article examines the Black Stallion series of books by Walter Farley. Farley's 21 books about the Black Stallion and other horses explore the zone between subversion of normalcy and acceptance of order. Farley amalgamated fantastic and information material to an unusual degree. He found it unnecessary to reject either the machinery of civilization or the energy of the garden, creating instead a melting pot perspective that partakes of both escapism and realism. Born in 1920, Farley made Black Stallion novels and related books his life's works. He began writing horse stories as a teenager, polished the draft of the first novel, The Black Stallion, in the late 1930s, and completed the 21st book, The Young Black Stallion, shortly before his death in 1989. From the first book, mediation is built into the Farley formula, which weaves ingredients of boys' action adventure, Westerns, and supernatural tales with realistic animal stories and self-help literature. As the Black Stallion series progresses, the necessary co-existence of orderly values and disorderly impulses is developed further. Farley illustrates a dynamic tension between discipline and freedom and implies that both elements, rather than choice, are the ideal.
- Subjects
FARLEY, Walter, 1915-1989; BLACK (Fictional character : Farley); HORSES in literature; LITERATURE &; society; LITERATURE
- Publication
Journal of Popular Culture, 1993, Vol 26, Issue 4, p187
- ISSN
1540-5931
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1111/j.0022-3840.1993.2604_187.x