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Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes
Edited by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 7] 2017
► pp. 59–74

Chapter 3
A subtle cartography

Navigating the past in children’s fiction

The shift from rural to urban is mapped out in fiction, providing crucial reference points in environmental and cultural history. The old-fashioned worlds depicted in L.M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill and Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy are mapped not visually but verbally, conveying a strong sense of place that roots the characters with an intrinsic cartography. In this chapter, the author applies ecocriticism to fiction from the past to explore how personal geography and physical geography are entwined and informed by the other. The author analyzes the ways in which substantial and experiential contact with the land helps the protagonists develop their geographic literacy.
Article outline
  • Ecocriticism
  • Geographic literacy
  • Personal cartographies
  • Ecocriticism: Where is nature?
  • Nature and transformation
  • The nature of the green places
  • Ecocritical navigation
  • Critical nostalgia
  • Mapping the past
  • Author queries
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.7.04gra
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Nelson, Claudia & Anne Morey
2019. Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction, DOI logo

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