Children's literature of the twentieth century

For this paper, we shall discover and look for insights in the light of creating awareness for the purpose and objective of understanding the impact of 21st century literature upon the cognitive imagery and development.

Twentieth-century children's literature is full of characters going back: Wendy revisits Neverland; heroes and heroines of boarding school stories return to school; Bilbo travels "there and back again"; and Lyra and Will promise to reenter the Botanic Garden year after year. In this article I focus on two instances in children's literature where characters return to a significant landscape from their past: the first occurs in Nina Bawden's Carrie's War (1973) and the second in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, specifically in Prince Caspian (1951), although I shall also be making reference to The Last Battle (1956) (Holbrook, pp. 3). Aside from the fact that Carrie and the Pevensie children are also evacuees, at first glance there seems little else to connect Carrie's War and Prince Caspian; however, it is perhaps not insignificant that Bawden and Lewis were both displaced by war (Bawden herself was an evacuee in the Second World War while Lewis was wounded while serving in France in 1917) or that Bawden studied philosophy (along with politics and economics) at Oxford in the 1940s while Lewis was a fellow teaching English literature and language there.

Their novels share a strong sense of treasured and mythical place and an even stronger relationship between remembered landscapes and remembered selves. Druid's Grove and Narnia evoke powerful memories and emotions for the fictional adults and children who revisit them. These characters act as revenants of a kind, experiencing a jolt of recognition alongside a strong sense of change in both the place of return and their own identity. Carrie's War and Prince Caspian therefore provide a useful comparison pair, offering complex perspectives on the trope of return as the adult Carrie revisits her childhood environment and the Pevensie children return to the topography of their first adventure in Lewis's fantasy world. Indeed, the French term revenir with its spectral connections to the "revenant" and thus an implication that death inhabits these places is even more apt; as I shall go on to explain. Exploring the revisited landscapes of Druid's Grove and Narnia allows us to consider how place constructs child and adult identities in these children's books, while the complex themes of memory, aging, and mortality within them help us understand some of their uncanny power.

Studies of space and place in literature, particularly children's literature, rely heavily on Romantic ideas about nature and its influence on individual imagination and growth. Real and fantastic landscapes provide the setting for adventures and character development but also reflect the child's status as natural. Roni Natov notes the particular force of pastoral in children's literature and argues that the "green world," as she puts it, represents a retreat from unnatural civilization. More than this, the child in children's literature can also "serve as the green ...