{"title":"History is a Map 2","authors":"C. Nelson, Anne Morey","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846031.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846031.003.0005","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":334791,"journal":{"name":"Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114286654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"History is a Map 1","authors":"C. Nelson, Anne Morey","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846031.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846031.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906), C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (1953), Roger Lancelyn Green’s Mystery at Mycenae (1957), Caroline Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries series (2001–9), K. M. Peyton’s Roman Pony trilogy (2007–9), Katherine Marsh’s The Night Tourist (2007) and The Twilight Prisoner (2009), and Tony Abbott’s Underworlds series (2011–12). All these texts involve journeys that can be plotted upon maps geographical and/or chronological, with the consequence that the major cognitive metaphor is HISTORY IS A MAP. Here family is not the site of trauma but rather a zone for the exercise of agency on the part of the young protagonist who must effectively visit an underworld to retrieve or make a family relationship and to come to terms with death. These books suggest that while the past is associated with death, it is also a haven from death.","PeriodicalId":334791,"journal":{"name":"Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121093791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"History is a Palimpsest 2","authors":"C. Nelson, Anne Morey","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846031.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846031.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores a further set of palimpsestic texts, E. Nesbit’s fantasy The Enchanted Castle (1907) and five historical novels: Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Theras and His Town (1924), The Forgotten Daughter (1933), and The White Isle (1940); Elizabeth George Speare’s The Bronze Bow (1961); and Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth (1954). It is argued that these texts emphasize family as a mechanism for representing both disparate experiences between parents and children and continuity over time, in keeping with the topological resources of the palimpsest figure. Palimpsestic texts are fundamentally about a maturing or an aging that the child has not yet experienced, and that maturation is sometimes represented as a kind of inevitable damage or loss to both place and person. Indeed, a dominant facet of this set of palimpsestic texts is an analogy between damage to the landscape that the characters inhabit and damage to the human body. Methodologically, these works are examined with the aid of critics who consider the representation and cultivation of empathy in fiction.","PeriodicalId":334791,"journal":{"name":"Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129940678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"History is a Palimpsest 1","authors":"C. Nelson, Anne Morey","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846031.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846031.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the first set of texts associated with the entailed metaphor HISTORY AS PALIMPSEST through the key narrative of Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), which makes salient a genealogy of works for both children and adults that imagine England’s history proceeding through a series of invasions and the loss and recovery of memory of invasion. Because several of the treatments address both adults and children, the chapter examines three adult fantasies derived from Puck—Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), Warwick Deeping’s The Man Who Went Back (1940), and C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945)—before moving on to four novels for children/young adults that are connected both to Puck and to its adult interwar/wartime successors: Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (1973) and Silver on the Tree (1977), Joan Aiken’s The Shadow Guests (1980), and Philip Turner’s Sea Peril (1968). Because the metaphor of the palimpsest emphasizes that the individual’s occupation of time and space is temporary, the dominant affect in all instances is nostalgia and melancholy. Nonetheless, invasion is a complex image that suggests that loss of sovereignty is not necessarily bad or injurious to the nation (or the child reader). Rather, the invasion trope offers a view of the experience of the nation that mirrors the complex layers of the individual psyche, and narratives activating the palimpsest metaphor prize and rehearse individual agency on the part of protagonists.","PeriodicalId":334791,"journal":{"name":"Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128354383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}