Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

Part Four: Narrative Time

part four { Narrative Time This last section, devoted to narrative time, begins with Susan Stewart’s “Shifting Worlds: Constructing the Subject, Narrative, and History in Historical Time Shifts,” a study of the ways children’s historical timeshift narratives make visible the constructedness of storytelling to the child reader. The role of the metafictive continues in Martha Hixon’s discussion of how the nonlinear nature of Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood performs as a model of the recursive writing process for young readers. As Jones’s book forces the reader to revise notions of character identity, so Angelika Zirker’s essay “‘Time No Longer’: The Context(s) of Time in Tom’s Midnight Garden” discusses the ways that Pearce’s novel shifts contexts throughout the story so that the young reader is asked to consider ghosts, magic, time travel, and dream as explanations for temporal (dis)order. Narrative time in literature for the young is, contrary to popular assumption, hardly limited to either singularity or linearity. These different techniques used by writers for the young show confidence in the implied reader’s ability to navigate different temporal arrangements. Perhaps of most interest is the way each essay points to a relationship between the temporal experiments in the novels and the construction of identity within the text. To what extent are temporally sophisticated novels for the young necessarily novels that comment on (and model?) identity development for young readers? ...