Description
Current maps in children's literature offer imaginative methods of viewing the world and of witnessing and understanding a child's maturation of selfhood. They also alert us to significant shifts in some social mechanism--political, personal, or cultural--so map study is a revitalizing way to identify the changes that are occurring in terms of children's civil and personal agency. This thesis examines the use of maps within children's stories, particularly two forms: maps that are given to or found by children, and the mapping that children conduct on their own. I focus on three primary texts (including one series) that speak to current social and political anxieties and consequently subvert classical manifestations of maps: S.S. Taylor's The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon (2012), J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, and Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009). While Taylor's and Rowling's books offer ideal examples of children inheriting maps from their fathers, Larsen's features a young boy who creates maps and charts for himself. Thus, each text offers valuable and unique perspectives on how children grapple with the power dynamics between them and adults via cartography. The first two texts reveal the nature of resistance that inevitably forms against institutional and authoritarian structures (manifesting as physical rebellion) while the last text shows that mapping leads to a more internal form of resistance against the social structure that defines the child himself. Each text helps us understand that resistance in the culture of childhood shares common ground with other cultures of resistance, opening the path toward postcolonial connections and showing us that the drive for agency and selfhood is a universal one indeed.
