[Download] "Disrupted Expectations: Young/Old Protagonists in Diana Wynne Jones's Novels (Critical Essay)" by Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Disrupted Expectations: Young/Old Protagonists in Diana Wynne Jones's Novels (Critical Essay)
- Author : Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 85 KB
Description
THE WORKS OF DIANA WYNNE JONES SHOW A CONTINUING THEME OF DISGUISED age and age disruption. This question of disguised ages fits within larger concerns with disguise and complex time travel, examined in great detail in the chapter "Time Games" in Farah Mendlesohn's Diana Wynne Jones: Children's Literature and the Fantastic Tradition. Questions of age confusion are particularly notable in works for young readers, for whom age is considered a pressing concern. More than twenty years ago, the research of Dale Johnson, Gary Peer, and Scott Baldwin gave solid academic support to the premise that young readers read books with protagonists their own age or a few years older. "If your target audience is seven, make your hero nine, if your audience is fourteen, make your heroine seventeen," says Eugie Foster, in an essay about how to write for children. A substantial minority of authors have ignored this guideline, with varying success, and as the market for crossover fiction grows (Falconer 2), the age of the implied reader becomes a fuzzier concept. Jones's works, in particular, have never fallen tidily into categories defined by protagonist and implied reader age. In an interview with the BBC, Jones directly addressed the reader/ protagonist age truism, writing that "it was thought at one time that the main characters always had to be children. This turns out not to be true" ("Writing"). Many Jones books play with the very concept of age: protagonists who age in more than one direction, protagonists who don't know their own age, protagonists in disguise as characters older or younger than themselves. Howl's Moving Castle stars Sophie, a young woman who spends most of the book disguised as an old one, while one of Howl's Moving Castle's sequels, House of Many Ways, offers up Sophie's husband Howl in the body of an outrageous toddler. Ageless, godlike beings disguised as children or young adults are a common feature, either with their knowledge (such as Eight Days of Luke's Luke) or without it (such as Archer's Goon's Howard). In The Spellcoats and The Homeward Bounders, young protagonists Tanaqui and Jamie spend the book discovering their mystical powers and become ageless, godlike beings by the stories' conclusions. In Fire and Hemlock, both protagonists are Polly's own age (which ranges from 10-19), and her perception of the ages of characters around her are so complex as almost to defy explanation.