Sophister Option Description Template 2019-20

Option Name: Home & Away in Children’s Literature

Option Short Title: Home & Away in Children’s Literature

ECTS Weighting: 10

Semester/Term Taught: MT

Option Content & learning aims

The home-away-home narrative pattern is crucial to children’s literature. This narrative pattern treats these two kinds of space as opposites and so assumes a tension between home and away spaces. Yet while the home offers comfort, familiarity and sanctuary, it can also be a painful place, the site of nostalgia, the uncanny, and even dread. The unknown territories beyond the domestic sphere may be sources of fear and trepidation, yet they also offer the possibility for adventure and the journey away from home often symbolises personal development and growth.

This module offers students the chance to explore the representation of homes and journeys in a range of children’s fiction, from quest narratives and adventure stories to domestic fantasies. Using literary geography and topoanalysis, we will examine the function of the home and the journey as setting, symbol and structural motif in children’s literature and investigate how experiences of home impact on our understanding of the unfamiliar. How do encounters with the other influence our feelings about home? Is leaving the home is a necessary part of growing up? How does the physical journey relate to personal, emotional or spiritual growth? What triggers the journey away from home in children’s literature?

The module assessment allows space for both reflective and critical responses to fictional spaces and students are encouraged to make use of discussion forums on Blackboard between seminars.

This module aims to introduce students to a range of critical approaches to home, space and landscape in literature including Judith Flanders’ work on the 19th century cult of domesticity, Yi- Fu Tuan’s work on social and cultural attitudes to space, J.S. Duncan’s work on symbolic landscapes, Dennis Cosgrove and WJT Mitchell’s work on landscape and ideology. The module is support with a Talis Aspire reading list to enable students to find and access resources from the Library with ease.

Option Content (in order of reading):

Louisa M. Alcott, Little Women (1868)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908)

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)

Shaun Tan, The Arrival (2006)

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie (1935)

Mary Norton, The Borrowers (1952)

Beverley Naidoo, The Other Side of Truth (2000)

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (2003)

Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness (2005)

Eoin Colfer, Andrew Dorkin, Illegal (2017)

Marie Cecerie et al., Space and Place in Children’s Literature 1789 to the Present; Judith Flanders, The making of home (2014); Janet Floyd and Inga Bryden, Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth- century Interior (1999); Georgina Downey (ed.), Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns (2013), Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape (1999), Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (1974)

Reading list will be finalized before the start of term.

Assessment Details

1) Short written piece defining “home” or “away” (1,000 words 20%)

2) One essay (4,000 - 5,000 words 80%)

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module students will be able to

 Discuss and evaluate the representation of domestic spaces and journeys in children’s literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century  Apply close-reading techniques and analytical skills and be able to compare and contrast different literary representations of homes and journeys in the texts on the module  Engage with a range of key critical approaches to home, landscape and space in literature and evaluate the usefulness of a range of these approaches  Demonstrate and test your knowledge of spaces in children’s literature through seminar discussion and debate  Identify the aspects of the module interest you most and undertake independent research as the basis for an essay  Demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of the material on the module and your confident engagement with relevant critical methodologies and theoretical frameworks in an essay  Apply the skills acquired above to a range of other texts and modules on the course