Introduction

The introduction lays out the scope and methodology of the book as a whole, while offering discussions of three additional cases that represent examples of texts that are relevant to the project but that represent lines of examination not pursued later in the book. The book deals with Anglo-American children’s and young adult fiction from the early twentieth century through the present that reuses and redeploys elements of the classical world. Having noticed in this relatively constrained body of literature the prevalence of place in structuring metaphors, these works are then grouped into five chapters according to the major topological metaphors that they rely on, as primarily palimpsest, map, or fractal texts. The major methodology on display throughout is a cognitive poetics approach. The sample exception texts, designed to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of our groupings and methodological approach, are Marilyn Singer’s Echo Echo: Reverso Poems about Greek Myths, David Elliott’s Bull, and Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Mark of the Horse Lord, which offer contrasting spatial metaphors of a type that are here briefly acknowledged: original/mirror, inside/outside, and straight lines/spirals.