Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson Heather Cyr (bio) Aïda Hudson, ed. Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography. Wilfred Laurier UP, 2018. Edited by Aida Hudson, Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography is a beautifully designed book that collects together a wide range of essays on geographies in literature for young people, adding to the larger conversations, perspectives, and challenges within this fertile area of criticism. The four main sections of the text—"Geographical Imaginaries," "Gardens and Green Spaces," "Fantasy Worlds and Re-Enchantment," and "Space and Gender"—give [End Page 345] an idea of how varied readings that proceed from the interrelated foci of space/place and landscape can be and what rich ground children's literature is for the spatial turn. Many edited collections that examine place and space within children's literature focus on a specific location, geographical topos, or specific theoretical framework as a guiding point: for example, Padraic Whyte and Keith O'Sullivan's Children's Literature and New York City (2014), Mary Shine Thompson and Celia Keenan's Treasure Islands: Studies in Children's Literature (2006), and Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd's Wild Things: Children's Literature and Ecocriticism (2004). Indeed, there have been several entries in the last few years digging quite deeply into the function of mapping in children's literature, such as the special issue of Children's Literature in Education edited by Anthony Pavlik and Hazel Sheeky Bird (2017) not to mention Stefan Ekman's important work on maps and settings in fantasy literature (2013). However, this collection, perhaps to its detriment, takes a different tack, focusing instead on a broadly imagined conception. Hudson's introduction starts with a breakdown of the word "geography" as "imaged earth writing" (1) and then draws upon Edward Said's definition in Orientalism (1978) of "imaginative geographies" as a dualistic concept of familiar-unfamiliar or "our land-barbarian land" (54). Starting with the "universal practice" that "Every individual whether young or old has been exposed to familiar and unfamiliar places . . . whether in life or literature" (4), Hudson shows how widely Said's conception of "imaginative geography" applies. She demonstrates a short "worlding" of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, folds in concepts from environmentalism (specifically environmentalist Gerald Buell's "place attachment," in which she sees Said's influence), turns backward to Tolkien's definitions of myth and the grounding of fantastic Middle Earth in Tolkien's very real experiences of war, and moves toward contemporary Indigenous Literature, giving examples of novels that "may reflect the anger of peoples who have been dispossessed and displaced, but they also often evoke rootedness in the land and an affirmation of Indigenous culture" (12). The introduction casts a deliberately wide net that goes on to define the collection's many varied imagined geographies; however, the collection may have benefitted from both a tighter focus and more interaction with recent children's literature scholarship about place and space. As Hudson's introduction acknowledges, the collection is mostly focused on the Northern Hemisphere: it includes essays on Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling's Britain, Irish writers both at home and within the Irish diaspora, Kenneth Grahame's Edenic England, and Ursula K. Le Guin's fantastic Earthsea. As Hudson is co-editor of Windows and Words: A Look at Canadian Children's Literature in English (2003), it is no surprise that much of [End Page 346] the collection focuses on Canadian children's literature and other works that examine the North. In the first section, an intriguing entry is Cory Sampson's essay "Pullman and Imperialism: Navigating the Geographic Imagination in The Golden Compass," which interrogates the imperial foundations of Lyra's steampunk world, arguing that the genre relies on imperialist tropes to generate wonder. This is placed side-by-side with Colleen M. Franklin's "Nineteenth-Century British Children's Literature and the North," which examines the "sublime quest" of British explorers in the Canadian north that "became a trope for self-conquest" (Hudson 15) that continues through to Pullman's work. An enriching aspect of the collection is the move from these British-centered conceptions...