Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature

Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature is the first comprehensive study that investigates the representation of maps in children’s books as well as the impact of mapping on the depiction of landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes in children’s literature. The chapters in this volume pursue a comparative approach as they represent a wide spectrum of diverse genres and national children’s literatures by examining a wealth of children’s books from Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The theoretical and methodological approaches range from literary studies, developmental psychology, maps and geography literacy, ecocriticism, historical contextualization with both new historicist and political-historical leanings, and intermediality to materialist cartographies, cultural studies, island studies, and genre studies. By this, this volume aims at embedding children’s literature in a broader field of literary and cultural studies, thus situating children’s literature research within a general context of literary theory.

Peter Hunt, Cardiff University, UK:
This is a wide-ranging and original exploration of a fascinating and neglected area of children’s literature studies. Its juxtaposition of cognitive theory, cartography, and cultural, political and literary thinking takes us from fact to fiction, from Middle-earth to Milan, from the Enlightenment to contemporary fantasy, from novels to picturebooks. The connections between childhood and children’s books, the mind and the map, and different cultural views of the world demonstrate the value of cross-disciplinary and international collaboration in the rapidly-developing field of cognition and literature.