ABSTRACT
Over the course of the last decade or so, a widespread critical conversation has developed about the role of place in children’s literature. Many agree that there is a ‘central preoccupation in children’s literature with the nature of selfhood and its relationship to place’. 1 This occurs, moreover, within a larger framework in which children’s texts tend to focus on the development of the self: frequently following the contours of the Bildungsroman, they represent the metaphorical passage of their young protagonists through a process of growth and acculturation. This metaphorical passage, in turn, is often reinforced by a parallel movement through space. Like their fairy tale forebears, the protagonists of children’s novels may be cast out of house and home, or required to engage in quest-voyages through which they prove their mettle and come to a greater understanding of their place in the world. As Canadian scholar Mavis Reimer writes, ‘the most valued story in English-language Canadian children’s literature is a narrative in which the central child character, pushed out of an originary home … journeys to an alien place and, after a series of vicissitudes … chooses to claim the unfamiliar space as a new home’. 2 The need to find a fit between self and place, then, is the driving force behind many children’s narratives: children leave home, but only to find home.
