Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (review)

This volume addresses the purposes and diversity of maps in children's literature and how the analysis of maps as a specific kind of illustration is intimately connected with picture theory, picture book research, and cognitive studies. The thirteen essays draw on different theoretical frameworks including geography and developmental psychology, maps and geographic literacy, ecocriticism, historiography, materialist cartographies, social anthropology, island studies, genre studies, and nonsense geography. Hence the editors engage the reader with an interdisciplinary methodology representing a wide spectrum of diverse genres with a selection of children's works from Germany, Italy, England, Norway, Denmark, the United States, and Russia.

Part 1, "About Mapping: Learning to Orientate Oneself," examines how maps and mapping in children's literature contribute to children's abilities to orient themselves in various spaces and how they learn from maps. Lynn Liben discusses the use of maps during reading and their impact on the cognitive and emotional consequences of the independent or shared reading experience. Nikola von Merveldt looks at the importance of maps in late eighteenth-century Germany. Considering the pedagogy of cartophobia initiated by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she studies the philanthropic movement in Joachim Heinrich Campes's geographical writings. Travel literature was regarded as the only appropriate kind of literature for philanthropic children to grow on. Janet Grafton uses ecocriticism and critical nostalgia to show how personal geography and physical geography inform each other in L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill (1937) and Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood Betsy (1916). In both narratives, the setting is not merely a backdrop, but rather a place for the female protagonists to engage with the land and to build their skills, thus attesting to each author's intrinsic sense of cartography. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer's cognitive methodology centers on the use of "metaphorical maps" (the Gall map tradition) in Sara Fanelli's My Map Book (1995) and Peter Sís's The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (2007). Most important to both authors is the function of these maps of places that are shaped like humans or animals, and the type of picture books that implement them.

Part 2, "Literary Shaping of Real Cityscapes," deals with the idea of how maps contribute to the portrayal of real cityscapes in picture books and children's novels. Corina Löwe analyzes Andreas Steinhöfel's Rico, Oskar und die Tierferschatten (The Spaghetti Detectives, 2008), in which young readers may follow the protagonist's route in an urban space. Anna Katrina Gutierrez examines the intertextual links with music, poetry, and literature established by a map of New York City in two young adult novels co-authored by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006) and Dash and Lili's Book of Dares (2010). Anna Juan Cantavella elaborates on Jacques Mullender's "degree zero of cartography" (129) in the act of walking as "map-building" of Prague and New York (139) in two picture books by Czech-born American children's author Sís: The Three Golden Keys (1994) and Madlenka (2000). Marnie Campagnaro concludes this section with a close reading of Bruno Munari's innovative picture book Nella Nebbia de Milano (The Circus in the Mist, 1968). She provides an overview of Munari's creativity and emphasizes the relationship linking a landscape to the child's sensory receptiveness that is created by Munari's use of pierced and perforated paper to suggest the fog.

Part 3, "Fictional Seascapes and Landscapes," sheds light on maps that depict fantasy seascapes and landscapes and stresses two seminal aspects of children's literature: the impact of genre and the significance of underlying ideological issues on the understanding of maps and related spaces. Olga Holownia traces common features of nonsense geography in representations of seascapes and soundscapes in Walter Moers's The 13½ Lives of...