“some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us”: David Mitchell, Russell Hoban, and metafiction after the millennium

This article appraises the debt that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After clearly mapping a history of Hoban’s philosophical perspectives and Mitchell’s inter-textual genre-impersonation practice, the article assesses the degree to which Mitchell’s metatextual methods indicate a nostalgia for by-gone radical aesthetics rather than reaching for new modes of its own. The article not only proposes several new backdrops against which Mitchell’s novel can be read but also conducts the first in-depth appraisal of Mitchell’s formal linguistic replication of Riddley Walker

The outside child, in and out of the book

The Outside Child, In and Out of the Book is situated at the intersection between children’s literature studies and childhood studies. In this provocative book, Christine Wilkie-Stibbs juxtaposes the narratives of literary and actual children/young adults to explore how Western culture has imagine

Re-viewing Margaret Mahy : landscapes of language and imagination

The paper focuses on a range of Mahy’s young adult writing including her “triptych”: The Haunting (1982), The Changeover (1985), The Tricksters (1986), and her recent epic fantasy, The Magician of Hoad (2009) (published in the UK as Heriot [2009]). The theoretical framework uses aspects of geocriticism and spatiality to support the paper’s analytical focus on Mahy’s distinctive generic contribution to New Zealand young adult literature. In particular it explores Mahy’s use of “real-and-imagined” landscapes brought together here in Soja’s idea of “Thirdspace,” and Upstone’s “Post-space,” and argues that Mahy’s fictional spaces are deterritorialized in order to reteterritorialize and revision new forms of “reality.

Imaging fear : inside the worlds of Neal Gaiman (an anti-Oedipus reading)

There is nowhere anything lasting, neither outside me, nor within me, but only incessant change. I nowhere know of any being, not even my own. There is no being. I myself know nothing and am nothing. There are only images: they are the only things which exist, and they know of themselves in the manner of images . . . I myself am one of those images; indeed, I am not even this but only a confused image of images.

The feminine subject in children's literature

Christie Wilkie-Stibbs draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan in her analysis of particular children's literature texts to demonstrate how a feminist analysis opens up textual possibilities that may be applied to works of children's fiction in genera

Reframing narrative : photographic memory in Penelope Lively's family album

This article draws upon photographic and narrative theories. Through close textual reading, I decode British Booker Prize–winning Penelope Lively’s novel Family Album (2009) as a montage of verbal snapshots framing two generations of family life through the culturally institutionalized familial gaze—as seen through the “camera-eye.” Benjamin’s “unconscious optics” uncover Family Album as a narrative of generational resistance and disquiet irreducible to myths of family depicted in the “album’s” iconic images. I argue that this novel marks a significant development in Lively’s creative imagination, and narrative structure more widely, in its ability to materialize personal memory via the use of verbal images as a narrative device