Abstract
In children’s literature, representations of home give way to multifarious ideological, social, economic, and cultural inferences. Both home and its outside display dualistic nature in children’s literature, containing positive and negative connotations at the same. Family house as a sanctuary connotes safety and protection, yet it simultaneously comes to be a space where children’s freedom is limited. Similarly, the outside of house signifies unknown hence dangerous territories, but it concurrently offers independence and an opportunity for exploration and experiencing for children. Taking into consideration such multi-layered associations and dual nature of both spaces, this study inquiries into the possibility of reconceptualizing and restructuring home in children’s literature. In this vein, this paper reads Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000) as a radical text in terms of its unique and experimental representations of home. It suggests that Pullman deconstructs genre-based conservative, de facto, and traditional representations of home in the canon of children’s literature and argues that the meanings of such concepts as home and homelessness can be extremely fluid and subjective.
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