My JNT essay titled ‘Opening a Window or Pulling Back the Curtain’ is based on a section of my PhD thesis which I completed at the University of Nottingham in 2023. My doctoral research explored a variety of interactive postmodern and metafictive strategies in popular middle grade fiction, using stylistic analysis to highlight the linguistic, narrative and structural complexities of children’s literature. In particular, I concentrated on the ways in which pseudo-oral, over-obtrusive, visibly inventing narrators seem to speak directly to the audience outside the text and, in doing so, dramatize child-readers as active participants in the storytelling process. One chapter of my thesis focused on metalepsis specifically, and this served as the foundation for my JNT essay.
In the original version I delineated between rhetorical and ontological metalepsis only, the former being the equivalent of brief narratorial asides while the latter completely conflates logical narrative boundaries to create a blended space between storyworlds. Using three case study middle grade authors – UK Children’s Laureate, Cressida Cowell; musician-turned-bestselling-author, Tom Fletcher; and the weird, wonderful and blatantly fictional, Pseudonymous Bosch – I demonstrated that metaleptic transgressions are not always as binary as one might imagine, and subsequently proposed a sliding scale to show how different types of metalepsis can be linked together or happen concurrently within a text. When I then came to write my JNT essay, I discovered Serafini and Reid’s work on blended transgressions in children’s picturebooks which aligned brilliantly with the ‘in-between-ness’ I’d discussed in my PhD thesis. As such, I was able to develop my metaleptic spectrum to include Serafini and Reid’s blended categories such as ‘Minimal Acknowledgement’, ‘Acknowledgement Throughout the Story’ and ‘Co-Constructing Storyworlds’ to illustrate different levels of readerly engagement and interaction through a range of narrative transgressions.
Although metalepsis can be complicated and often requires sophisticated reading strategies to navigate successfully, a core theme in my JNT essay is that child-readers are more than capable of handling it. In fact, its popularity as a narrative technique in contemporary children’s fiction suggests that children don’t just understand metalepsis and other complex postmodern devices – they really enjoy them too! Since the 1990s (if not before), we have seen postmodernism and metafiction become normalized in mainstream children’s literature, yet this can sometimes be overlooked by well-meaning but misguided adults who think books for children must automatically be simple to suit the target readership. Anecdotally, I’ve lost count of how many colleagues have been surprised when I say that my research examines the kinds of techniques commonly associated with ‘highbrow’ postmodern authors like John Fowles, Luigi Pirandello, Flann O’Brien and so on, just in books for 8 to 12-year-olds instead. They’re then even more shocked when I tell them how prevalent those techniques are in contemporary children’s literature across the board!
While children’s literature scholarship has come on in leaps and bounds in this regard, I think it’s important that we continue to champion the academic and artistic value of reading material for younger audiences. That’s one of the reasons I’m so thrilled that this special issue has been put together and I feel incredibly privileged to be sharing my research with JNT readers alongside the other scholars featured in this collection. I concur entirely with Haifeng Hui’s comments in the introduction to this special issue in which he states that children’s literature is overdue sustained narrative analysis; the same can be said for my other research field of stylistics in which analysis of children’s literature has, until recently, remained rare. I hope, as Dr Hui addresses in his introduction, that special issues like this will spark a scholarly dialogue between different fields of research and therein enable us to continue illustrating the diversity, value and fun of studying children’s literature. In my own life, this is an ethos I always try to promote, and I imagine it will feature heavily in a monograph titled Language, Style and Storytelling in Postmodern Children’s Literature which I am currently preparing for Routledge. After all, children’s literature is as dynamic, playful and engaging as it is stylistically and structurally sophisticated, and I encourage everyone to rediscover (and embrace!) its magic.
