Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals by Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals by Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey Elizabeth Hale (bio) Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals. By Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey. Oxford University Press, 2019. The past few years have seen a surge of scholarship on how children’s literature draws on the Classical world. Most recent scholarly work in this field has been driven by classicists, more interested (naturally) in how the classical world appears in children’s literature: the narrative patterns, ideas, texts, historical and mythical figures that children’s literature transmits to new generations of readers, and how particular cultural emphases shape their depiction, and use, of classical material. See for instance Lisa Maurice, ed., The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature: Heroes and Eagles (2015); Katarzyna Marciniak, ed., Our Mythical Childhood: The Classics and Literature for Children and Young Adults (2016); Owen Hodkinson & [End Page 219] Helen Lovatt, eds., Classical Reception and Children’s Literature: Greece, Rome and Childhood Transformation (2018); Sheila Murnaghan & Deborah Roberts, Childhood and the Classics: Britain and America, 1850–1965 (2018); Katarzyna Marciniak, ed., Chasing Mythical Beasts : The Reception of Ancient Monsters in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture (2020). Morey and Nelson, on the other hand, are scholars of children’s literature, interested in the uses to which children’s texts put classical material, and the effect of historical engagement on children’s literature. To that end, they take an approach drawing from recent scholarship on cognition (currently influential in some areas of children’s literature scholarship), in order to show how authors shape representations of the past, and shape children’s (i.e., child protagonists’) ideas about their place in time and their view of the world. This work involves bringing together a range of ideas about literary cognition, and Topologies of the Classical World covers considerable ground in doing so, providing close readings of a wealth of British and American children’s novels (and some poetry) from the twentieth century on. Three main structuring metaphors shape the book: History is a Palimpsest, History is a Map, and History is Fractal, and these metaphors are explained in the introduction, which orients the argument within cognitive theory. The metaphors are convincing, though the discussion is quite dense, and a set of “sample exceptions” intended to test and challenge them might have been better placed towards the end of the book. In History is a Palimpsest, the “past and present exist in a many layered series of deposits” (6). Protagonists can find their way forwards and backwards through time, learning about the past as they go. Chapter 2, “The Layers of Ancient Rome in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Its Successors” features stories about individual protagonists who travel in time to the past, solving mysteries or problems as they go. Focus texts include Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (1973) and Silver on the Tree (1977), and Joan Aiken’s The Shadow Guests (1980). Chapter 3, “Time Zones, Scars, and Family in (Mostly) Realistic Works,” explores how the ideas of trauma and the family connect through the layers of the past. Modern protagonists, who engage with the traumas of the past also uncover and resolve traumas of the present. Focus texts include Edith Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle (1907), 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). History is a Map 1 and 2 (chapters 4 and 5) focus on texts that use maps and other orienting devices to help young readers (and protagonists) understand the past: here, often in quest narratives, they learn about the shape and color of the ancient world. Chapter 4, “Navigating the Underworld,” considers stories in which [End Page 220] protagonists visit the underworld (a dominant quest narrative in mythology and in fantasy literature), tracing the paths of figures such as Demeter and Persephone, or Orpheus and Eurydice. The discussion covers Nesbit...