A Bakhtinian reading of fantasy chronotopes in modern children’s fantasy literature

Abstract

Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of the literary artistic chronotope and the interdisciplinary spatiotemporal theories of geocriticism, this study identifies three particular modes of the fantasy spatiotemporality presented in modern children’s fantasy works. They are the epic chronotope, the “fantastic” time-travel chronotope and the heterotopian chronotope. Each fantasy chronotope is examined in the specific but interrelated textual contexts of selected children’s fantasy works in relation to the three main research questions: (i) How is the fantasy chronotope embodied and strategically deployed in the focused children’s fantasy works? (ii) What ideas and values are conveyed by its syntagmatic interplay with other chronotopes that characterise the textual quotidian world? (iii) How do characters, through their spatiotemporal practices, negotiate with the divergent chronotopic values that converge and wrestle in the textual universes? This study builds on existing works in relation to chronotopic considerations and develops the understanding of the fantasy chronotope in these particular ways: a) It moves the study of the fantasy chronotope from generalities to specific instances, so that the inner diversity of the fantasy spatiotemporal arrangements can be perceived and explored. b) It examines the syntagmatic spatiotemporal relations constructed between the fantasy and the “real” in individual children’s fantasy works and their connotations. In so doing, it reveals how each of the identified fantasy chronotopes can be strategically deployed in fantasy cartographies to convey meanings and values. c) This study also delves into the spatiotemporal embedding of human actions that is distinctively shown in fantasy chronotopes. This is done by reading characters’ spatiotemporal practices in and their negotiations with the projected fantasy worlds. d) Taking Bakhtin’s literary artistic chronotope as the link, my reading of the fantasy chronotopes also demonstrates an interpenetrative and reciprocal relation between fantasy spatiotemporal imaginations and the theoretical interpretations of space and time in geocriticism