T is for time.
You know, “parsley, sage, rosemary and time”. A time to be born
and a time to die. The time garden. A
wrinkle in time. A stitch in time. Time cat. A traveller in time. The
tale of time city. Bedtime for Frances. Time to get out of the bath,
Shirley. I have written about them all.
And some more that do not have the word “time” in the title.
I had a chapter on time
displacement in my thesis, but I don't think I did anything
revolutionary, just categorised time-related fantasemes.
I
wrote a book the initial title of which was “Time and archaic
thought in children's literature”, but the marketing people said it
wouldn't sell so it was changed to From
mythic to linear: Time in children's literature.
It is my favourite book, and I am a bit upset that it hasn't been
noticed more because I am doing something that hasn't been done
elsewhere. I look at the way time is presented in children's books,
old and new, realistic and fantastic. I look at two kinds of time:
chronos,
the measurable time, and kairos,
the mythical, sacred time, and how children's literature
systematically utilises the latter to portray the condition of
childhood. The idea of kairos
and chronos
comes from the myth and religion scholar Mircea Eliade, and it
complements in a fascinating way Bakhtin's carnival, since the
suspended carnivalesque time is of course kairos,
but
you cannot stay there forever.
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