Spatialisation of Text Worlds: Contrastive Interpretations in P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins

Abstract

Abstract Fictional situations recounted by a narrator instantaneously trigger a mental representation of a text world (Gavins 2007) which aims to explicate how meaning is achieved by readers based on salient theories of stylistics. This study examines how text world creation is established while reading Mary Poppins (Travers 2014). Crucial excerpts are explored to explain how readers perceive events that constitute the narrative. As the author recounts all events through an omniscient perspective, a discourse world is established through schematic data of all participants in the discourse based on common ground information. Deictic shift (Segal 1995) is employed to demonstrate how a mental representation is spatially situated and to achieve rich presentations of the fictional world. The present study concludes that text-world approaches to Mary Poppins could explain interpretive controversies between the novel and the film, since participants, schema and ontological distance trigger spatialisation of the fictional worlds.