Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson (review)

Aïda Hudson situates her edited collection at the intersection of three concentric ideas surrounding place: Edward Said's imaginative geographies, Lawrence Buell's place attachment, and the idea of mythical spaces. The volume's seventeen essays are divided into four sections with two interludes and a postlude. Some of the authors in the collection engage with Said's imaginative geographies, while others use postcolonial and ecocritical theories in conjunction with Buell's place-attachment theory. Still others explore particular spaces, or topoi, and their relationship to power structures and binaries (14).

Part 1 contains six essays divided into two sections. The first three are grounded in the Old World, while essays four through six "reflect viewpoints that are 'landed' in the New World" (15). In chapter 1, "Pullman and Imperialism: Navigating the Geographic Imagination in The Golden Compass," scholar Cory Sampson traces imperialist themes in His Dark Materials by positing that Lyra's universe is reminiscent of Victorian Britain. While Sampson doesn't necessarily argue that The Golden Compass is "'unconcealedly'" imperialist, his work investigates the series' imperialist themes of geographical exploration, child adventurers, and the ethnic "othering" of non-Europeans (43). In "Nineteenth-Century British Children's Literature and the North," Colleen M. Franklin does similar work in mapping imperialist themes and tropes. Margot Hillel also traces imperialism in "Envisioning Ireland: Landscape and Longing in Children's Literature," focusing on nineteenth-century Ireland and the unique migration of Irish citizens away from "our land" to the New World.

Hillel's piece transitions the section nicely to essays focused on North America. In "From Vanity to World's Fair: The Landscape of John Bunyan's Allegory in Frances Hodgson Burnett's Two Little Pilgrims' Progress," Shannon Murray maps a third imaginary landscape that orphan protagonists Meg and Robin create when they find a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and leave their farm home to set out for Chicago's World Exposition. Their imagined geography is a rejection of both the rural life that they have left as well as the industrial city that they travel to. Both Linda Knowles and Petra Fachinger conclude part 1 with essays that illustrate a restorative connection back to indigenous spaces—in particular, the harsh Canadian wilderness—which they argue creates fertile ground for imaginative geographies in fiction written for children.

In the first interlude, Hudson offers her audience a change of genre in the interview "History, Hills, and Lowlands: In Conversation with Janet Lunn." Lunn, a prolific writer of Canadian historical fiction for young adults, talks about the connection between Canadian geography and mythology in several of her novels. The interview functions well as a transitional piece from themes of imperialism and migration to a series of essays in part 2 on particular topoi, or "places like gardens, a riverbank, and a rural countryside," and their particular connection to a child's geographical imagination (17).

In chapter 8, "How Does Your Garden Grow? The Eco-Imaginative Space of the Garden in Contemporary Children's Picture Books," Melissa Li Sheung Ying focuses on the importance of the garden as an educational space for children, arguing that it invites them into a greater environmental consciousness and, hopefully, activism. Ying's analysis of the interplay of text and image is particularly effective, calling attention to the parallel of text with visual elements such as color transitions and the use of panels.

While Ying's essay focuses on both image and text, Alan West's "Into the (Not So) Wild: Nature Without and Within in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows" focuses primarily on the textual representations of Grahame's idyllic landscape. West discusses the lack of "wild" in the work, in which the main characters wear clothing and are civilized—except for the othered stouts and weasels, whose wildness threatens Toad Hall in the climax of the story. West's analysis fits appropriately within the conversation of the Saidian dualism of "ours/theirs" or...