Abstract
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2009) charts the story of Nobody Owens, a boy who is adopted by supernatural entities in the local graveyard after his family is murdered. This article draws on the notion of the “construed reader,” and combines two cognitive stylistic frameworks to analyse the opening section of the novel. In doing so, the article explores the representation and significance of the family home in relation to what follows in the narrative. The analysis largely draws on Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007), but also integrates some aspects of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), which allows for a more nuanced discussion of textual features. The article pays particular attention to the way Gaiman frames his narrative and positions his reader to view the fictional events from a distinctive vantage point and subsequently demonstrates that a stylistic analysis of children’s literature can lay bare how such writing is designed with a young readership in mind.
Highlights
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2009) charts the story of Nobody Owens, a boy who is adopted by supernatural entities in the local graveyard after his family is murdered
The article pays particular attention to the way Gaiman frames his narrative and positions his reader to view the fictional events from a distinctive vantage point and subsequently demonstrates that a stylistic analysis of children’s literature can lay bare how such writing is designed with a young readership in mind
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2009) tells the story of Nobody Owens, a young boy who escapes from his family home after his parents and sister are killed, and who is adopted by ghosts in the local graveyard
Summary
The first scenes of The Graveyard Book take place in the family home, the exact location is not revealed until the end of the novel. 1) argues that maturation ‘‘saturates children’s stories and colours narratives of every kind.’’ Growth may refer to the characters within the fictional world with their concerns and experiences, and to young readers who are developing their own knowledge of the world more generally For the latter, particular texts can generate moments of intense selfdiscovery and meta-reflection (see Spufford, 2002; Tatar, 2009). There, textual analysis is framed within a broader view of language and cognition, for example drawing on schema theory (Schank and Abelson, 1977), deictic shifting and the encoding of point of view (Zubin and Hewitt, 1995), and Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008) This type of research is inherently interdisciplinary, it retains both a strong linguistic focus and conforms to the underpinning principles of stylistic scholarship. Hollindale argues that a children’s literature text represents a site of interaction between an adult author and a child reader, and between potentially different conceptions of childness. Since I largely draw on Text World Theory for my analysis, the following section outlines its basic parameters
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