History is Fractal

This chapter explores dystopian works—Diana Wynne Jones’s The Game (2007), Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1971), John Christopher’s Fireball series (1981–6), N. M. Browne’s Warriors series (2000–9), Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10), Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes and its two sequels (2015–18), and Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series (1996–2017)—whose dominant spatial metaphor is that of the fractal. The fractal structure offers a jaundiced view of progress marred by conflicts large and small whose protagonists are caught within uncontrollable repetition. It is argued that memory is central to this exploration of conflict and that memory is intertwined with guilt and empathy. While these works also foreground the agency of the young protagonist, efforts at communication are as likely to be damaging as healing, and emotion is often revealed to be a matter of performance rather than authenticity.

History is a Map 1

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.

History is a Palimpsest 2

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.

History is a Palimpsest 1

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.

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.

7 Conclusion

As we conclude this examination of texts that use particular topologies of the past in their redeployment of the classical world, one of the more pressing questions might be why the combination of the classical world and this short list of spatial metaphors constitutes such an attractive matrix for the working out of concerns about citizenship, agency, suffering, and the place of the individual within the family. While the power and perdurability of classical mythology is clearly part of the allure of neoclassical settings and characters, it does not by itself completely explain the utility of these frameworks to our various authors’ projects. After all, a number of the authors with whom our work has engaged—including Rick Riordan, Tony Abbott, Alan Garner, Caroline Dale Snedeker, and N. M. Browne, among others—have shown similar interest in other kinds of mythological or historical settings, in some cases emphasizing the position of the classical as merely one segment of a vast interconnected web of myth/history. Nor is it possible to say that that the privileged place of the remnants of the classical world within the canon of the West by itself explains the reliance of authors over the past century upon its familiarity or prestige....

History is a Map 2

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.