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Where do children travel when they read a story? In this collection, scholars and authors explore the imaginative geography of a wide range of places, from those of Indigenous myth to the fantasy worlds of Middle-earth, Earthsea, or Pacificus, from the semi-fantastic Wild Wood to real-world places like Canada’s North, Chicago’s World Fair, or the modern urban garden.
What happens to young protagonists who explore new worlds, whether fantastic or realistic? What happens when Old World and New World myths collide? How do Indigenous myth and sense of place figure in books for the young? How do environmental or post-colonial concerns, history, memory, or even the unconscious affect an author's creation of place? How are steampunk and science fiction mythically re-enchanting for children?
Imaginative geography means imaged earth writing: it creates what readers see when they enter the world of fiction. Exploring diverse genres for children, including picture books, fantasy, steampunk, and realistic novels as well as plays from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland from the early nineteenth century to the present, Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography provides new geographical perspectives on children’s literature.
Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography
Table of Contents
Introduction – Aïda Hudson
PART I: Geographical Imaginaries: The Old World and the New
1. Pullman and Imperialism: Navigating the Geographic Imagination in The Golden Compass – Cory Sampson
2. Nineteenth-Century British Children’s Literature and the North – Colleen M. Franklin
3. Envisioning Ireland: Landscape and Longing in Children’s Literature – Margot Hillel
4. From Vanity to World’s Fair: the Landscape of John Bunyan’s Allegory in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress – Shannon Murray
5. Old World, New World, Other World: Overcoming Prosaic Landscape with The Golden Pine Cone – Linda Knowles
6. Healing Relationships with the Natural Environment by Reclaiming Indigenous Space in Aaron Paquette’s Lightfinder – Petra Fachinger
INTERLUDE
7. History, Hills, and Lowlands: In Conversation with Janet Lunn – Aïda Hudson
PART II: Gardens and Green Places
8. How Does Your Garden Grow? The Eco-Imaginative Space of the Garden in Contemporary Children’s Picture Books – Melissa Li Sheung Ying
9. Into the (Not So) Wild: Nature Without and Within in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows – Alan West
INTERLUDE
10. Earth, Sea and Sky Writing in Becca at Sea – Deirdre F. Baker
PART III: Fantasy Worlds and Re-enchantment
11. The Imaginary North in Eileen Kernaghan's The Snow Queen – Joanne Findon
12. Camping Out on the Quest: the Landscape of Boredom in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Sarah Fiona Winters
13. Sky Sailing: Steampunk’s Re-enchantment of Flight – Christine Bolus-Reichert
14. Mythic Re-Enchantment: The Imaginative Geography of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet – Monika Hilder
PART IV: Space and Gender
15. Female Places in Earthsea – Peter Hynes
16. Dancing and Hinting at Worlds in Theatre for Young Audiences – Heather Fitzsimmons Frey
POSTLUDE
17. Following the Path of the Unconscious in the Owen Skye Books, and Others – Alan Cumyn
Works Cited
Contributors
Index