'New takes on time' : a critical dissertation on time-distort fiction, and, The serpent house : a novel for children

Abstract

This project consists of a reappraisal of children’s historical 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 the two pieces of work have informed each other. The research component of the project argues that the critical consensus, which suggests 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.