Landscape in Children's Literature

by Jane Suzanne Carroll

This book provides a new critical methodology for the study of landscapes in children's literature. Treating landscape as the integration of unchanging and irreducible physical elements, or topoi, Carroll identifies and analyses four kinds of space ― sacred spaces, green spaces, roadways, and lapsed spaces ― that are the component elements of the physical environments of canonical British children’s fantasy. Using Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence as the test-case for this methodology, the book traces the development of the physical features and symbolic functions of landscape topoi from their earliest inception in medieval vernacular texts through to contemporary children's literature. The identification and analysis of landscape topoi synthesizes recent theories about interstitial space together with earlier morphological and topoanalytical studies, enabling the study of fictional landscapes in terms of their physical characteristics as well as in terms of their relationship with contemporary texts and historical precedents. Ultimately, by providing topoanalytical studies of other children’s texts, Carroll proposes topoanalysis as a rich critical method for the study and understanding of children’s literature and indicates how the findings of this approach may be expanded upon. In offering both transferable methodologies and detailed case-studies, this book outlines a new approach to literary landscapes as geographical places within socio-historical contexts.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

258 pages, Hardcover

First published June 19, 2012

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brilliant work of children's literature scholarship, which I believe began as Carroll's PhD dissertation, examines the question of landscape in children's literature, using a topoanalytical approach to identify four elements of landscape (or 'topoi') central to British children's fantasy. Her chapters are devoted to the "Sanctuary Topos," which encompasses enclosed spaces, both sacred and domestic; the "Green Topos,' which includes gardens, farms, the pleasance, and the wilderness; the "Roadway Topos," which is so central to the journey tale, and which encompasses the street, the road, wandering and exile, and old and magic roads; and to the "Lapsed Topos," which includes caves, graves and ruins. Having examined these topoi as they appear in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence , in which space and place are so very central, Carroll devotes her fifth and final chapter to applying some of the ideas she has developed to other works of fantasy.

As someone who is a great admirer of Susan Cooper, and who also has a deep interest in questions of place in children's literature, Carroll's work was almost guaranteed to appeal to me. I found Landscape in Children's Literature both informative and thought-provoking, and thought the author's defense of topoanalysis, which she believes will allow for a critical reading of literature that unlocks the significance of landscape both as setting for and influence on narrative, to be convincing. Her analysis was so convincing, that I ended up using her final chapter on the lapsed topos, as the jumping off point for my own analysis of the island spaces in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Eilís Dillon's The Island of Horses , arguing that the two both functioned as graves, or dead spaces. Carroll's work is well worth the time of any scholar with an interest in children's literature, or in landscape studies.

[Nick Swarbrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here’s a first academic response: http://nicktomjoe.brookesblogs.net/20...