History is a Map 2

Abstract

This chapter examines a set of texts—Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (2005–9), Vaughan Edwards and Barry Creyton’s The Dogs of Pompeii (2011), Paul Shipton’s Gryllus the Pig duology (2004–6), Gary Northfield’s Julius Zebra series (2015–18), and Robin Price’s Spartapuss series (2004–15)—that undermine the reader’s presumption of distance from the classical world through an emphasis upon grotesquerie and play. While the protagonists of the first two sets of texts examined are children, the other books deploy animals or humans in animal bodies to emphasize that the classics are accessible to the child reader and that consuming narratives about the past is both serious business and play. In these narratives, the past is itself an object to be consumed as popular culture is consumed; the protagonist of these narratives is likewise obliged to offer himself as an object of consumption through acts of heroic (or mock-heroic) self-sacrifice. Rather than proposing the past as a hard-to-access site of superior culture, these narratives propose it as a place of triumphant popular culture familiar to child readers from their own experience.