Storytelling and Affect in Sonya Hartnett’s The Children of the King (2012)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2015vol23no2art1117Keywords:
storytelling and affect, Sonya Hartnett, The Children of the King (2012)Abstract
Melbourne writer Sonya Hartnett frequently explores the ways in which a sense of place impacts on the development of identity. In her memoir Life in Ten Houses (2012), Hartnett maps each of her novels to her place of habitation at the time of writing, describing the relationship between each place and herself and the subsequent impact of this dialectic on the creative process. This reciprocal relationship between narrative and lived experience is examined in Hartnett’s novel The Children of the King (2012). Using perspectives on temporality from phenomenology and cultural memory and incorporating ideas of place from human and cultural geography, this article proposes that Hartnett uses the device of embedded narrative to examine the affective qualities of storytelling and place on the subject. This juxtaposition invites the reader to consider the fluid notions of identity inspired by embodied oral storytelling along with the perceptual opportunities afforded by the physical, sensorial world. Hartnett encourages the reader to critically assess the reliability of narrative, narrator, and the process of subjective judgement that occurs when responding to story. This recalls Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) work on historiographic metafiction, which, as she describes, has the effect of demarginalising the literary ‘through confrontation with the historical’ (p. 108). Metafictive historiographic novels, as Robyn McCallum (1999) articulates: ‘foreground the discursive and textual conventions of history writing, usually by physically incorporating and representing historical texts and discourses in ways that destabilise the relation between fiction, history and reality’ (p. 230). In The Children of the King this destabilisation is achieved through Hartnett’s double plot structure which calls attention to the constructed and affective elements of historical and fictional narratives and by the employment of the gothic mode within a realist frame.
Metrics
References
Anderson, Jon (2010). Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces. London and New York: Routledge.
Carroll, Jane Suzanne (2011). Landscape in Children’s Literature. New York and London: Routledge.
Cresswell, Tim (2004). Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Edwards, Sophie Anne (2010). ‘La Cloche, Northeastern Ontario: Liminal Passages’. Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-Putra (eds) Process: Landscape and Text. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi
Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon.
French, Marilyn (1986). Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals. London: Cardinal.
Hartnett, Sonya (2012). Life in Ten Houses (e-book). Melbourne : Penguin.
---. (2012). The Children of the King. New York and London: Penguin.
Hay, Simon (2011). A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. New York and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Horwath, Jan (ed.) (2001). The Child’s World: The Comprehensive Guide to Assessing Children in Need. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley.
Hutcheon, Linda (1998). A Poetics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge.
Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis (eds) (2008). The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. New York and London.
Kornberger, Horst (2008). The Power of Stories: Nurturing Children’s Imagination and Consciousness. Edinburgh: Floris Books.
Manier, David and William (2010). ‘A Cognitive Taxonomy of Collective Memories’. In Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nűnning (eds) A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
McCallum, Robyn (1999). Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity. New York and London: Taylor & Francis.
Merleau-Ponty, Merleau (2014). Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1945).
Meteling, Arno (2010). ‘Genius Loci: Memory, Media and the Neo-Gothic’. In Maria del Pilar Blanco. and Esther Peeren (eds) Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. New York and London: Continuum.
Nikolajeva, Maria (2010). Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Trites, Roberta Seelinger (2000). Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
