Beginning with Rudyard Kipling and Edith Nesbit and concluding with best-selling series still ongoing at the time of writing, this volume examines works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century children's literature that incorporate character types, settings, and narratives derived from the Greco-Roman past. Drawing on a cognitive poetics approach to reception studies, it argues that authors typically employ a limited and powerful set of spatial metaphors - palimpsest, map, and fractal - to organize the classical past for preteen and adolescent readers. Palimpsest texts see the past as a collection of strata in which each new era forms a layer superimposed upon a foundation laid earlier; map texts use the metaphor of the mappable journey to represent a protagonist's process of maturing while gaining knowledge of the self and/or the world; fractal texts, in which small parts of the narrative are thematically identical to the whole, present the past in a way that implies that history is infinitely repeatable. While a given text may embrace multiple metaphors in presenting the past, associations between dominant metaphors, genre, and outlook emerge from the case studies examined in each chapter, revealing remarkable thematic continuities in how the past is represented and how agency is attributed to protagonists: each model, it is suggested, uses the classical past to urge and thus perhaps to develop a particular approach to life.
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Product Details
Weight: 480g
Dimensions: 146 x 221mm
Publication Date: 30 Oct 2019
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication City/Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
ISBN13: 9780198846031
About Anne MoreyClaudia Nelson
Claudia Nelson has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American children's literature and family studies. Her book Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America 1850-1929 (Indiana University Press 2003) won the Children's Literature Association award for the best scholarly book in the field of children's studies. A professor of English at Texas A&M University she is a former president of the Children's Literature Association and a former editor of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Anne Morey is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her book Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry 1913-1934 (University of Minnesota Press 2003) deals with Hollywood's critics and co-opters and she has also edited a volume on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight phenomenon Genre Reception and Adaptation in the 'Twilight' Series (Routledge 2012). She is currently at work on a book about the Junior Literary Guild and children's reading from 1929-1955 and is co-writing a book with Shelley Stamp on women in American silent cinema.