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

Attentions to place and space have long been part of criticism on children's and young adult literature, contributing important insights to our perceptions of writing for young people. Foundational analyses foreground location: for instance, in the highly influential textbook The Pleasures of Children's Literature (1991, 1995, 2002), Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer's definition of the "home-away-home" thematic structure suggests that children's literature relies fundamentally on geography as an organizing principle. More recent works have taken up and expanded on this insight, constituting a slow but steady growth in engagements with childhood, place, and space. The interdisciplinary Landscapes of Childhood Series, which includes Kenneth Kidd and Sidney Dobrin's edited collection Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism (2004), organizes its essays around the argument that children's sense of place is paramount to the way they move and act in the world. Clare Bradford's groundbreaking Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children's Literature (2007) considers the roles of nationality, space-time, and borders in both settler colonial texts and indigenous narratives, a reading that shows in part how imperialist cartographies forcibly remapped native spatialities. Editors Terri Doughty and Dawn Thompson's Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children's Literature (2011) examines what it means for child characters to occupy particular environments, with the acknowledgement that different identity categories participate in constructing varying levels of agency. And, finally, in the last few years, two more essay collections have taken up the centrality of geographic meaning to children's literature: Space and Place in Children's Literature, 1789 to the Present (2015) and Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature (2017), both approaches that assert inextricable connections between power, identity, mobility, and location. Clearly, the spatial turn is beginning to amass velocity in children's and young adult literature scholarship.

Editor Aïda Hudson's collection enters this important conversation by drawing our attention to the significance of "imaginative geography," defined in her introduction as "imaged earth writing," or subjective visual perspectives of material place (1). Hudson derives "imaginative geography" from the work of Edward Said, who argues that the West's imperialist dichotomy distinguishes "our" place as separate from "their" place. For Said, and for Hudson, place is created through mentality, something that becomes located through the act of picturing it. Other aspects of imaginative geography that Hudson deems crucial are "place-attachment," a concept from ecocritic Lawrence Buell that posits imaging as central to feeling connected to place, and the mythical, which in the work of J. R. R. Tolkien connects to lived experiences of war, colonialism, and domination. While beginning with Said makes sense for the theoretical foundation, the introduction would benefit from some engagement with the substantial recent work done in the subfields of children's geographies and literary geographies. Further consideration of extant scholarship would also enable the introduction to ground its arguments in additional nuance. For example, the collection's emphasis on literature invites an exploration of how these essays are positioning representative place as different from—or connected to—material place.

The seventeen essays in Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography are, as Hudson states, largely "geographically based critical considerations of literature written in English from the early nineteenth century to the present, for the young in Canada, Britain, the United States, and Ireland" (13). As such, they constitute a confident attempt to provide readers with a broad overview of representations of place across nation and time. Four distinct sections with varying numbers of academic essays are interspersed with two interludes and a postlude. These latter chapters are written by Canadian children's authors who discuss their work's relationship to imaginative geographies. I appreciate the inclusion of the interludes and postludes, given their creative approach to the conversation here, and find their interjection between the more traditional essays to be effective. Scholar and middle-grade writer Deirdre F. Baker deserves special mention for her "Earth, Sea, and Sky Writing in Becca...