ABSTRACT
This collaborative chapter is based on a project at the University of Siegen, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), on “Canon Formation and Social Imaginaries in British Children’s Literature.” Arguing that texts considered as canonical share not only aesthetic features but also a collective understanding of cultural values, we apply a functional approach to research in canon formation and canon change in children’s literature, drawing on the concept of social imaginaries (as outlined by Castoriadis (1987), Anderson (2000), Appadurai (1996) and, especially, Taylor (2004)) as a practice for the construction of collective identities. After a brief outline of the project’s theoretical framework the chapter then focuses on those concepts which Charles Taylor has identified as fundamental for social imaginaries in Western European societies: democracy, secularism and Europe. A general assessment of the implications these imaginaries may have for research on canon formation (with a focus on children’s literature) will be given before the chapter then proceeds with two case studies which illustrate how the proposed approach could be applied for analysing canon formation processes: A discussion of decision processes in selected Robinsonades from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries serves to elucidate the structural processes implied in the ‘democratic’ social imaginary. An analysis of developments in the representation of mentorship in fantastic literature from the nineteenth to the twentieth century reveals the significance of the imaginary of ‘secularism.’
