Re-Viewing Margaret Mahy: Landscapes of Language and Imagination

The paper focuses on a range of Mahy’s young adult writing including her “triptych”: The Haunting (1982), The Changeover (1985), The Tricksters (1986), and her recent epic fantasy, The Magician of Hoad (2009) (published in the UK as Heriot [2009]). The theoretical framework uses aspects of geocriticism and spatiality to support the paper’s analytical focus on Mahy’s distinctive generic contribution to New Zealand young adult literature. In particular it explores Mahy’s use of “real-and-imagined” landscapes brought together here in Soja’s idea of “Thirdspace,” and Upstone’s “Post-space,” and argues that Mahy’s fictional spaces are deterritorialized in order to reteterritorialize and revision new forms of “reality.”