Oceanic Spaces in American Girl Historical and Contemporary Literary Discourse

Abstract

The American Girl series is a constantly evolving book series for children featuring the lives of girls living in different historical periods of the US, starting from the colonial era up to nowadays. The aim of this paper is to study the verbal and nonverbal portrayal of the oceanic spaces of the past in the books about the historical characters and their rediscovery in the books about the contemporary characters. An attempt is made to analyse the different roles of oceanic images in stories of migration and mobility of the American Girls, their families, friends, acquaintances both in the past and in the present. The images of the oceans in the books about the historical characters and in those about the contemporary characters are analysed separately and the results are compared and contrasted. It is assumed that the oceans which are depicted both verbally and nonverbally in the American Girl series have become not only territorial borders for some of the characters but also metaphoric ones.