A Critical Dissertation on Time-Distort Fiction and the Serpent House, A
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‘New Takes on Time ’: A critical dissertation on time-distort fiction and The Serpent House , a novel for children. Barbara Henderson A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Supervisors: Professor Kimberley Reynolds Professor Jackie Kay School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Faculty of Arts and Humanities 2012 ABSTRACT This project consists of a reappraisal of children’s hist orical time-distort literature and a children’s novel within the genre, entitled The Serpent House , aimed at readers aged 9 -12. The submission consists therefore of a critical piece of academic research into the genre, which reflects throughout on how th e two pieces of work have informed each other. The research component of the project argues that the critical consensus, which s uggests that children’s historical literature employing time -distort elements is prone to conservatism and convention, misrepresents this body of writing. As I show from its earliest examples, it has been a genre at least as progressive as any other in children’s literature. An overview and two detailed case studies demonstrate these innovative elements. The chronological overview and the texts that make up the case studies illustrate ways in which writing of this kind has been and continues to be experimental at a variety of levels. Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988) was chosen for its challenging content and Gary Crew’s Strange Objects (1990) for its experimental form . Analysing the primary texts and the related scholarship was part of the process by which I shaped my aspirations and creative decisions while writing The Serpent House and so the academic submission leads into a reading of my children’s novel, which forms 70 per cent of the submission. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Although this project began with a writer’s compulsion to tell a story, it has been improved immensely because it was shaped within the pr ocess of the Creative Writing PhD. My thanks therefore go to my two supervisors: to Kimberley Reynolds, for her support, wisdom and unfailing patience, as well as her great generosity with her time and expertise, and to Jackie Kay, whose inspirational input into the novel has made it an infinitely better piece of work. I would like to thank fellow PhD and MLitt students for their readiness to critique my work. Chris Clark has been a source of great support throughout the process , as has Helen Limon. I am grateful for the support of everyone in the Children’s Literature and Creative Writing departments of Newcastle University. Finally, many thanks to my husband Mark, particularly for proof-reading and formatting the submission, and Patrick, whose IT skills retrieved a crucial lost document. The love and encouragement of Mark, Naomi, Patrick and Mary has meant everything. iii Table of Contents ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... iii PREFACE .......................................................................................................................vi CHAPTER 1. THE SERPENT HOUSE AND THE RESEARCH-CREATIVE NEXUS .............................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 The Serpent House : Background and Preliminary Decisions ....................... 1 1.2 Key research questions for The Serpent House ............................................. 5 1.3 History and Fiction ........................................................................................ 6 1.4 Illness in the Victorian and Medieval Chronotopes ...................................... 7 1.5 Stretching Time in The Serpent House ........................................................ 10 1.6 Talking to the Past ....................................................................................... 11 1.7 Other key aspects of research informing The Serpent House ...................... 16 CHAPTER 2. A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME-DISTORT ......................................... 20 2.1 ‘A curious new form’: Nesbit, Kipling and early time -distort texts............ 25 2.2 Seeking ‘what was lost’: Time -distort texts in the post-war context .......... 30 2.3 Female Quests: Patterns in time-distort texts of the 1980s ......................... 38 2.4 Fin de siècle time-distort: the 1990s ............................................................ 46 2.5 The Future of Looking Backward: twenty-first century time-distort .......... 52 CHAPTER 3. THE HOLOCAUST AS TIME-DISTORT FICTION - Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic .................................................................................................... 55 3.1 Time-distort and The Devil’s Arithm etic ..................................................... 56 3.2 Memory and Maturity.................................................................................. 70 3.3 Defending The Devil’s Arithmetic ............................................................... 75 CHAPTER 4. STRANGE SYNERGY - Radical Form in Gary Crew’s Strange Objects ............................................................................................................................. 79 4.1 Strange Objects ........................................................................................... 80 4.2 Hybrid Genres - Strange Objects as time-distort ........................................ 81 4.3 Crew on Strange Objects ............................................................................. 83 4.4 Radical Form 1: Multiple Voices ................................................................ 84 4.5 Radical Form 2: Jigsaw Puzzle and Collage ............................................... 86 4.6 Radical Form 3: Open text .......................................................................... 87 4.7 Radical Form 4: Truth or fiction? ................................................................ 88 iv 4.8 Radical Form 5: The Use of Horror ............................................................ 91 4.9 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 92 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 94 APPENDIX 1. Terminology .......................................................................................... 95 ‘Time -distort’ fiction ......................................................................................... 95 Historical Time-distort as a Genre .................................................................... 96 Chronotope ........................................................................................................ 98 APPENDIX 2: Exemplary and Influential Time-Distort Works - a Timeline of Children’s Historical Time -Distort Fiction ................................................................ 100 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 103 Primary sources ............................................................................................... 103 Secondary sources ........................................................................................... 107 v PREFACE The starting point for the thesis was the creative urge to tell a story. What began as two separate historical fictions and family stories eventually merged to form one children’s historical time -distort novel, The Serpent House , which became the creative part of this submission. 1 The term ‘time -distort’ is one that I have coined for the works discussed in this thesis. An explanation of the term, why it is necessary and a time-line of representative works are provided in the appendices. The realisation that such a term was needed arose from research undertaken to deepen my creative practice. The research project which begins this submission was designed to acquaint me with the development and critical history of the kind of novel that I intended to write: the genre traditionally known as either time-slip or time-travel fiction, meaning fiction in which a character or characters move between two or more historical periods. Having completed the investigation, I was in a position to employ, depart from, subvert or challenge this genre ’s conventions (see Appendix 1) and was aware of mistakes for which previous writers have been criticised. In the course of the study it became clear that this is an under- researched aspect of children’s literature and that critical thinking about it has not kept pace with the primary material. In addition to employing aspects of this learning in The Serpent House , then, I have further used the critical component of this submission to correct and challenge aspects of received thinking about historical fiction that moves between primary and secondary time periods. For this submission, then whilst there are two distinct discourses: the creative work of children’s fiction which forms the larger section of the submission and the examination of the primary texts and related scholarship within my chosen genre. The overall submission reveals the intratextual relationship between the two. 2 The research led me to the recognition that because most critical studies of time-distort fiction have tended to look at a small number of well-known texts, many written