Cover not available
Part of
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
References

Primary sources

Fisher, Dorothy C.
1987 Understood Betsy. New York NY: Dell (first published 1916).Google Scholar
Montgomery, Lucy M.
1988 Jane of Lantern Hill. Toronto: McLelland (first published 1937).Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Branch, Michael P.
2002 Saving all the pieces: The place of textual editing in ecocriticism. In The Greening of Literary Scholarship, Steven Rosendale (ed.), 3–25. Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press.Google Scholar
Cashman, Ray
2006 Critical nostalgia and material culture in Northern Ireland. Journal of American Folklore 119(427): 137–160. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chawla, Louise
2002 Spots of time: Manifold ways of being in nature. In Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural and Evolutionary Investigations, Peter Kahn & Stephen Kellert (eds), 199–225. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Connerton, Paul
1989 How Societies Remember. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cummins, June
2004 Understood Betsy, Understood Nation: Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Willa Cather Queer America. Children’s Literature 32: 15–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Epperly, Elizabeth & Gammel, Irene
1999 Introduction: L.M. Montgomery and Canadian culture. In L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, Elizabeth Epperly & Irene Gammel (eds), 3–14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Francis, Mark
1995 Childhood’s garden: Memory and meaning of gardens. Children’s Environments 12: 1–16.Google Scholar
Glotfelty, Cheryll
1996 Introduction: Literary studies in an age of environmental crisis. In The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty & Harold Fromm (eds), xv–xxxvii. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Grafton, Janet Marie
2010 Girls and Green Space: Sickness-to-Health Narratives in Children’s Literature. Master of Arts thesis, University of British Columbia at Vancouver.Google Scholar
Hendrick, Harry
1997 Constructions and reconstructions of British childhood: An interpretive survey, 1800 to the present. In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, Allison James & Alan Prout (eds), 33–62. London: RoutledgeFalmer.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda
1998 Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Ladino, Jennifer K.
2012 Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville VI: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Lasch, Christopher
1984 The politics of nostalgia. Harper’s (November 1984): 65–70.Google Scholar
Leavis, Frank R. & Thompson, Denys
2000 The organic community. In The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, Laurence Coupe (ed.), 73–76. New York NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lerer, Seth
2008 Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lousley, Cheryl
2007 Knowledge, power, and place: Environmental politics in the fiction of Matt Cohen and David Adams Richards. Canadian Literature 195: 11–32.Google Scholar
Lukens, Rebecca J., Smith, Jacquelin J. & Ciffel, Cynthia M.
2012 A Critical Handbook of Children’s Literature, 9th edn. London: Pearson.Google Scholar
Nodelman, Perry
1996 Progressive Utopia: Or, how to grow up without growing up. In Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature, 3rd edn, Sheila Egoff & William Sutton (eds), 74–82. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Norcliffe, Glen & Simpson-Housely, Paul
1992 No vacant Eden. In A Few Acres of Snow: Literary and Artistic Images of Canada, Paul Simpson-Housely & Glen Norcliffe (eds), 1–15. Toronto: Dundurn Press.Google Scholar
Pratt, Annis
1981 Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Reed, Edward
1996 The Necessity of Experience. New Haven CN: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sigler, Carolyn
1994–95 Wonderland to wasteland: Toward historicizing environmental activism in children’s literature. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 19(4): 148–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sobel, Dava
2013 Forword: For the love of maps. In On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, by Simon Garfield, 11–14. New York NY: Gotham.Google Scholar
Squire, Shelagh. J.
1992 Ways of seeing, ways of being: Literature, place, and tourism in L.M. Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island. In A Few Acres of Snow: Literary and Artistic Images of Canada, Paul Simpson-Housley & Glen Norcliffe (eds), 139–146. Toronto: Dundurn Press.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis
1995 Essays in the Art of Writing. London: Chatto & Windus.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond
1973 The Country and the City. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar