Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals

Drawing on a cognitive poetics approach to reception studies, this volume examines the use of a limited and powerful set of spatial metaphors - palimpsest, map, and fractal - to organize the classical past in works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature for preteen and adolescent readers. It argues that while a given text may embrace multiple metaphors in presenting the past, associations between dominant metaphors, genre, and outlook emerge to suggest that particular spatial metaphors reflect different modes in children’s literature and encourage different cognitive effects in readers.