Textbook Alternating Narratives in Fiction For Young Readers Twice Upon A Time 1St Edition Perry Nodelman Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

Alternating Narratives in Fiction for
Young Readers: Twice Upon a Time 1st

Edition Perry Nodelman (Auth.)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/alternating-narratives-in-fiction-for-young-readers-twic
e-upon-a-time-1st-edition-perry-nodelman-auth/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Leadership Philosophy in the Fiction of C S Lewis Aaron

Perry
https://textbookfull.com/product/leadership-philosophy-in-the-
fiction-of-c-s-lewis-aaron-perry/
The Readers Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction Third

Edition Neal Wyatt
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-readers-advisory-guide-to-
genre-fiction-third-edition-neal-wyatt/
Endurance young readers edition My Year in Space and

How I Got There Kelly
https://textbookfull.com/product/endurance-young-readers-edition-
my-year-in-space-and-how-i-got-there-kelly/
Town Mouse and Country Mouse (Penguin Young Readers,

Level 1) 1st Edition Arlene Wong
https://textbookfull.com/product/town-mouse-and-country-mouse-
penguin-young-readers-level-1-1st-edition-arlene-wong/
Researching the Archaeological Past through Imagined
Narratives A Necessary Fiction 1st Edition Daniël Van
Helden (Editor)
https://textbookfull.com/product/researching-the-archaeological-
past-through-imagined-narratives-a-necessary-fiction-1st-edition-
daniel-van-helden-editor/
Narratives in Research and Interventions on

Cyberbullying among Young People Heidi Vandebosch
https://textbookfull.com/product/narratives-in-research-and-
interventions-on-cyberbullying-among-young-people-heidi-
vandebosch/
Once Upon a Time Lord The Myths and Stories of Doctor

Who Ivan Phillips
https://textbookfull.com/product/once-upon-a-time-lord-the-myths-
and-stories-of-doctor-who-ivan-phillips/
Dolores Huerta Stands Strong The Woman Who Demanded

Justice Biographies for Young Readers Marlene Targ
Brill
https://textbookfull.com/product/dolores-huerta-stands-strong-
the-woman-who-demanded-justice-biographies-for-young-readers-
marlene-targ-brill/
Time Limited Adolescent Psychodynamic Psychotherapy A

Developmentally Focussed Psychotherapy for Young People
Stephen Briggs
https://textbookfull.com/product/time-limited-adolescent-
psychodynamic-psychotherapy-a-developmentally-focussed-
psychotherapy-for-young-people-stephen-briggs/
Critical Approaches to Children’s
Literature
Series Editors
Kerry Mallan
Faculty of Education
Children and Youth Research Centre
Kelvin Grove, Queensland
Australia
Clare Bradford
School of Communication and Creative Art
Deakin University
Burwood, Victoria
Australia
This timely new series brings innovative perspectives to research on chil-
dren’s literature. It offers accessible but sophisticated accounts of contem-
porary critical approaches and applies them to the study of a diverse range
of children’s texts - literature, film and multimedia. Critical Approaches to
Children’s Literature includes monographs from both internationally
recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new
combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and
cultural studies illuminate the study of children’s texts.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14930
Perry Nodelman
Alternating
Narratives in Fiction
for Young Readers
Twice Upon a Time
Perry Nodelman
CRYTC, Department of English
University of Winnipeg
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-50816-0 ISBN 978-3-319-50817-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50817-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934526
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adapta-
tion, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter
developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration © Chris Cheadle / Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book began in a classroom a number of years ago—or rather, in the

spirit of ‘twice upon a time’, in two classrooms. The classrooms were
occupied by University of Winnipeg students in two sections of a course
of Canadian children’s literature, one section taught by my colleague
Mavis Reimer and one taught by me. As Mavis and I explain in an essay
we later wrote about these classes, ‘Teaching Canadian Children’s
Literature: Learning to Know More’ (Nodelman and Reimer 2000), we
had noticed that many of the novels we were thinking of teaching shared
similar plots or characters. Some of them even had the same words in their
titles. Nor could we think of many American or British books that focused
so much on these matters. Wondering if these shared characteristics might
represent something distinctly Canadian, we decided to organize our
courses around these novels; and since we were both teaching the course
in the same term, we realized we could double our group of specimen
novels by choosing a completely different group of them for each of our
classes. Once the courses began, each of us invited our students to con-
sider what the novels had in common and what that might mean; and for
balance and as a challenge to any generalizations we might try to make, we
also included a number of novels that seemed to represent less central
concerns. After our students developed lists of shared qualities, we visited
each other’s classes to tell the other students about our own students’ lists
and ask for their input, with the result that the students in the two classes
were able to add to and complicate each other’s ideas.
One of the items on the list our students had produced by the end of the
term went like this: ‘Most (but not all) of the novels switch repeatedly
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
between two contexts, or have two stories going at the same time. For
example, the novel might be structured around two different points in a
series of events (flashbacks), two different focalizing characters, or two
different historical settings. The two contexts come together dramatically
at the central moment of the plot.’ As Mavis and I report in our essay,
then, ‘Perry Nodelman has developed an interest in the prevalence of
narratives with two focalizations that our students helped make us aware
of. He has been developing an increasingly lengthy list of Canadian
children’s novels that operate in this way, and begun to speculate about
their significance’ (Nodelman and Reimer 2000, p. 31).
The many years of speculating that followed have resulted in this book.
It would not have existed without the perceptive students in those courses
so many years ago, or without Mavis Reimer’s part in that old project.
But, you might well ask, doesn’t this book discuss novels produced
elsewhere than Canada? Yes, it does—lots of them. My first forays into
thinking about alternating narratives concentrated on Canadian issues, as
revealed in two essays published in the journal Canadian Children’s
Literature, ‘Of Solitudes and Borders: Double-Focalized Canadian
Books for Children’ (2003) and ‘A Monochromatic Mosaic: Class, Race
and Culture in Double-Focalized Canadian Novels for Young People’
(2004). At the time, I note, I was identifying the quality that I was
studying as ‘double-focalization’. It was only after realizing that narrative
theorists used that term to refer to a quite different phenomenon that I
began to speak about ‘alternating narratives’. I also wrote ‘At Home on
Native Land: A Non-Aboriginal Canadian Scholar Discusses Aboriginality
and Property in Canadian Double-Focalized Novels for Young Adults’, a
chapter in Home Words (2008), a book about ideas of home in Canadian
literature for young people edited by Mavis. The book as a whole grew out
of another item from those lists our students had developed: ‘Questions
about the safety and comfort of home are central to these novels.’
But then, as I continued to work on this topic, I kept encountering
American, British, and Australian books that exhibited some of the same
characteristics. With fairly easy access to books in English from other
places, and with writers, editors, and critics in vastly different places
aware of and often influenced by what is happening elsewhere, English-
language children’s literature tends to be an international phenomenon. I
soon realized I had to give up my idea that there was much that was
distinctly Canadian about alternating narratives except the fact that there
were so many of them, that Canadian writers seemed to be particularly
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
drawn to producing them. As I have argued in my earlier work on this

subject, the alternation of narratives in Canadian novels does indeed
resonate in intriguingly distinct ways in the context of Canadian history
and culture. But as I hope this book reveals, those Canadian novels also
share much with many other books for young readers published in the
USA, the UK, and Australia. In order to highlight the international scope
of this study, I have identified the country and date of publication of each
of the novels with alternating narratives I discuss here when I first mention
them. As my project has developed, at any rate, I have come to believe
that, while the Canadian-ness of the Canadian novels I discuss here is
significant, there is equal significance in the ways in which they reveal the
consistent themes and patterns of writing for young people produced
internationally—the themes and patterns I explore as being characteristic
of writing for young people in my 2008 book The Hidden Adult: Defining
Children’s Literature.
As I expanded my focus to include novels from other places, I had a lot
of assistance in finding the novels for young people with alternating
narratives that my project came to include. Requests for examples of
such books that I made on the Child_Lit (Theory and Criticism of
Children’s Literature) and Yalsa-Bk (YALSA Book Discussions) listservs,
and on Facebook and other social media, resulted in far more titles than I
had originally thought possible. The helpful staff in the children’s depart-
ment at McNally Robinson bookstore in Winnipeg added still more, as did
Judith Ridge in response to requests I made to her for information about
Australian novels with alternating narratives. With the help of these
resources and others, I was able to develop a list that has now grown to
include over 400 novels.
I am not the first scholar to be intrigued by novels for young readers
that include alternating narratives, and I am pleased to acknowledge the
extent to which my thinking about them has been especially influenced by
the work of two others. Robin McCallum offers an insightful exploration
of what she identifies as ‘interlaced dual narration’ in her 1999 book
Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of
Subjectivity; and Melanie Koss’s doctoral dissertation, A Literary Analysis
of Young Adult Novels with Multiple Narrative Perspectives Using a
Sociocultural Lens (2008); Melanie was kind enough to give me access
to it.
I also owe a debt to Carol Matas. Carol and I have collaborated on two
fantasy series of novels for young readers: the four books of the Minds
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
series and the three books of the Ghosthunter series. We had published the
earlier volumes of the Minds series before I began my scholarly work on
novels with alternating narratives. Even so, it took me some time to realize
the significance of the title of the first of those novels: Of Two Minds.
Carol and I chose that title both because the novel’s two central characters
each have unusual mental abilities and because the two of us were the
minds that created it. But Of Two Minds and all the other books I have
written with Carol switch between the points of view of two central
characters. They are all of two minds, all novels for young readers that
offer alternating narratives. I suspect that much of what I have learned as
a scholar about such books emerges from my efforts to tease out what
Carol and I had done in our novels and why we had done it without any
theoretical awareness of its implications.
Because most of my work as a scholar has emerged from my under-
graduate and graduate-school training as a close reader in the tradition of
what was once called the New Criticism, it tends to focus on very few
texts. As a result, trying to make sense of the large body of novels with
alternating narratives that I came to be aware of was a challenge for me. I
would not have been able to meet that challenge without the assistance of
some very helpful software: Devonthink Pro Office allowed me to create a
database of the novels I was reading and an efficient system of tagging the
various aspects of my subject to which they seemed to have specific
relationships. Once I had developed that database, OmniOutliner Pro
allowed me to determine the best order in which to discuss those various
aspects of the novels. I am grateful to the developers of these products for
making the organizational aspects of my project so relatively effortless.
Finally, I am especially grateful to Asa Nodelman for his careful work in
getting the manuscript of the book in shape for submission to the
publisher.
This book is dedicated to Billie Nodelman, who has been one of the two
voices in the alternating narratives that make up the unified story of our
marriage for the past forty-six years.
CONTENTS
1 Alternating Narratives: An Introduction 1

2 Alternating Narratives as Puzzles 21
3 Alternating Narratives and Represented Writing 43
4 Fictional Collage as Alternating Narratives 67
5 Distance Education: The Readerly Effects of Alternating
Narratives 89
6 Alternating Narratives as Variations of Each Other 121
7 Structural Ideologies in Alternating Narratives:
Individuality 143
Connection and Community 163
Indigeneity 199
List of Works Cited 235
Index 243
ix
CHAPTER 1
Alternating Narratives: An Introduction
Why, to begin with, twice upon a time? Because twice is not once. Telling
a tale twice, as writers do when they provide different descriptions of the
same events from the alternating points of view of different characters
involved in them, is a relatively sophisticated form of storytelling, a form
that readers expect in complex adult fictions by difficult writers like
Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner, but one that seems miles away from
the simpler world of stories of the sort that often begin ‘Once upon a
time’––far enough away to make stories told twice seem alien in the
context of literature for young readers.
Once upon a time, most typically, there was . . . a tiny mouse, a timid
rabbit, a lonely princess, a youngest son. Once upon a time, above all,
there was a child or youth, a boy or girl about to experience something
interesting or exciting, something that will somehow make his or her life
better. ‘Once upon a time’ is one of the primary markers of stories told for
children, a signal anyone familiar with Euro-American culture in the last
few centuries will understand. The focus on ‘once’ is suggestive: Reports
of events that happened ‘once’ tend to be one-sided. The tale about the
three little pigs is just that, and only peripherally a story about the wolf
they interact with. Even in retellings of the tale like Jon Scieszka’s The
True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf (USA 1992), there is still just
one story told once, describing the events as the wolf experienced them––
though admittedly, readers need to remember the other more familiar
© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Nodelman, Alternating Narratives in Fiction for Young Readers,
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50817-7_1
2 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS
story of what the pigs thought was happening in order to understand the
humour of this alternate version.
That singularity of focus might happen because, while ‘once’ is clearly
not now, there is an important way in which for young readers it is now, or
at least supposed to be now. Perhaps unlike Scieszka’s Wolf, which seems
to require a more knowing and therefore less sympathetic audience, many
stories describe situations that once happened to someone else in such a
way that they encourage young readers to recognize a similarity to them-
selves and their own situations now. They ask young readers to see
themselves in their main characters as a way of teaching them something
about themselves. Perhaps the mice or princesses or children who lived
once upon a time learn something in the course of their experience that
young readers can, ideally, understand as a lesson for themselves. Or
perhaps the mice or princesses or children simply represent what adults
imagine young people are or ought to be, so that young people reading
about them might learn to admire and adopt a similar youthfulness.
Conventionally, and therefore, for most people nowadays, most often,
‘once upon a time’ is a signal that the story to follow is not only about
the fictional characters and situations it describes––that it is also about
who its young readers ideally are or ought to become.
As happened once, so things continue on in contemporary literary
texts intended for young readers––not just those for young children,
but also the teen audiences ‘young adult’ literature declares itself to be
intended for. Whether they begin with ‘Once upon a time’ or not, texts
for young people tend to tell one story––a clear line of events concen-
trating on one identifiably childlike or youthful central character who
young readers are being invited to identify with; as John Stephens
rightly says, ‘the majority of children’s fictions employ only one foca-
lizing character’ (2010, p. 56)—that is, the one from whose point of
view events are being described. The main characters of these texts are,
like James Barrie’s Peter Pan or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, char-
mingly egocentric, ingenuously anarchic, and incredibly lucky; or like
Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit or Frank L. Baum’s Dorothy in Oz,
simultaneously brave in the face of danger and meekly happy to
acknowledge their need for adults to protect them from it. As I have
argued in my book The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature
(2008), texts for young people often reaffirm the same conventional
assumptions about what it means to be childlike or youthful, and often
invite young readers to understand themselves in these ways.
1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 3
In order to encourage young readers to do so, these texts convention-

ally focalize events from their main characters’ point of view and provide
those characters’ responses to them. Whether the story is told in first
person (as in, say, Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
or Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight or third person (as in E.B. White’s
Charlotte’s Web or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books), it tends to describe
events as the young protagonist would see them or understand them. A
comment by Laura Amy Schlitz in a note in her Newbery Award-winning
book Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! (USA 2007) reveals how key that focus
is to widespread conceptions of writing for children: ‘It really isn’t possible
to write a play with seventeen equally important characters in it . . . . So I
decided to write seventeen short plays—monologues—instead of one long
one, so that for three minutes, at least, every child could be a star’ (viii). As
adults most often understand the process, every child reading any text
written for children should be a star, and is encouraged to be one by
identifying with a focalizing character.
Schlitz does not acknowledge the possible confusion of a child trying to
figure out how to respond to a text unconventional enough to contain
seventeen different role models for stardom—–or for that matter, twenty-
two, as there are in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Not only is it more difficult
to follow two or more interwoven stories at once, but it seems logically
impossible to identify with two or more different characters at once. Once
upon a time, identifying is easy. Twice upon a time, it is not––especially for
readers who have been trained by their experience of many books to
expect always to be able to identify. Such a reader will start out reading
the first part of a book identifying with its focalized character. But then
chapter two comes along with a different focalized character, often one
with different ideas about the same events. What is an obedient reader
trained in convention to do? Suddenly see through the blindness or
inadequacy of the first character’s version of events? Refuse to accept the
second character’s views altogether? Try to be empathetic with and see
oneself as similar to two quite different people? Or learn to be less ego-
centric in one’s reading habits, just give up on identifying altogether,
distance oneself from both characters, and become a detached observer,
a critically thoughtful outsider?
Whichever of these choices individual readers make, they are no longer
reading as most adults assume most young people do read and ought to
read children’s and young adult fiction. Telling the same story twice or
more, first as one character experiences it and then as one or more others
do, flies in the face of common adult assumptions about how young
readers ought to read and even about why children’s and young adult
literature exists.
In The Rhetoric of Character in Children’s Fiction (2002), Maria
Nikolajeva offers a discussion of Susan Cooper’s novel Seaward (USA
1983) that shows what happens when a reader with a strong awareness
of the conventions of literature for young people experiences a novel built
on alternating narratives. The alternating narratives of Seaward tell the
stories of Cally and Westerley, who start out in quite different and separate
worlds but find themselves together in a dreamlike fantasy place, where
they first have separate alternating adventures and then meet, after which
the novel continues to report their differing responses to their shared
adventures as they head towards the sea. Their adventures involve fantastic
beings and events based in Welsh legends and rife with allegorical over-
tones, so that the book reads like a kind of symbolic psychic journey, with
everything that happens more meaningful than real.
At one point, Westerly and Calliope are told that the world they are in is
not their own, ‘but it is an image of your own. An echo’ (Cooper 1983,
p. 125). In operating as a description of such an echo, Seaward seems to
be exactly the kind of text that invites identification to promote self-
understanding––or it would be, if it were about one main character rather
than two alternating ones. Nikolajeva describes her response to these
events in this way:
Writing about Seaward in 1990, I without the slightest doubt interpreted it

as Cally’s story, viewing Westerley as her companion, Animus, or helper. I
believe that my choice was affected by the author’s as well as my own
gender. Several years later, one of my female students wrote a paper about
Seaward, interpreting it just as unproblematically as Westerley’s story. This
gave me serious reasons to reconsider intersubjectivity in the novel.
(Nikolajeva 2002, p. 92)
After a few pages of interpretation, she concludes, ‘The intersubjective

reading of the characters enables us to reconcile the two separate narra-
tives, the two separate inner journeys, viewing them as two sides of the
same quest for self, in which the two concrete figures are interchangeable,
not least because their gender complementarity makes their story more
universal’ (p. 94). Finally, whether one character or the other is the ‘real’
one does not matter, because under the apparent two-sidedness there is
really just one story with one shared and indeed universal meaning being
told here. One can identify with both the characters because they are
actually differing facets of the same unique entity.
Later in The Rhetoric of Character, in a discussion of John Marsden’s
Letters from the Inside (Australia 1991), Nikolajeva reaches a similar con-
clusion. While the novel proceeds by means of alternating letters between
one girl in prison and one out,
Viewing the novel as a depiction of an inner world rather than of external

events, we may suggest that the whole correspondence is the product of one
person’s imagination. Perhaps Tracey is suffering from an identity split and
has written letters to herself . . . . on the other hand, the source can be
Mandy’s fancies, caused by her anxiety about her brother. Since there is
no authorial discourse to guide the reader, the reliability of both voices is
dubious. (p. 255)
What fascinates me is the anxiety that Nikolajeva, a knowledgeable spe-

cialist in literature for young people, expresses about the possibility that
there might be two different and unresolved points of view operating in
these novels. The anxiety seems to arise from generic expectations about
how texts for young people operate and should be read––as stories about
characters readers should identify with in order to learn about themselves.
As I have suggested, a reader cannot easily identify with two different
characters at the same time. The anxiety is resolved when the two different
characters can be read as a single complete one––one who can be identi-
fied with, understood as an un-conflicted whole and learned from, and
who thus accords with conventional expectations of how texts for young
people work.
But as Nikolajeva reveals, Seaward and Letters from the Inside are
complex and ambivalent enough to challenge those conventional expecta-
tions. I turn instead, then, to what appears to be a much more conven-
tional novel. Kevin Henkes’s Words of Stone (USA 1992) is much like
Henkes’s other children’s novels, like, say, Olive’s Ocean or Protecting
Marie. All three are quiet, introspective stories about sensitive children
on the brink of adolescence, learning to deal with their emotional pro-
blems in ways adults hope child readers will learn from. But unlike the
other two, Words of Stone has two alternating central characters––and that
makes Words of Stone a telling example of the kinds of problems stories
told twice create.
As the novel begins, Blaze lives on a hill in rural Wisconsin with his
grandmother and widowed father, and Joselle has come to visit her grand-
mother on the other side of the hill. He is small for his age, shy and
withdrawn, while ‘her arms and legs looked meaty’ (Henkes 1992, p. 22)
and she is confident and aggressive; he thinks of her as ‘this curious girl
who reminded him of wild, impish, confident children he had only known
in books’ (p. 86). But despite their apparently opposite characters, their
situations are similar. Both are isolated and solitary. Joselle has been
isolated by her mother’s decision to leave her at her grandmother’s and
seems to be rather antisocial, but Blaze seems to have chosen his current
solitude, for at school ‘he was treated with genuine fondness by students
and teachers alike’ (p. 16) and readers learn that after his mother’s death,
he destroyed one of each pair of animals in his toy Noah’s ark, ‘because a
pair of anything didn’t seem right’ (p. 15)––as perhaps a pair of protago-
nists does not seem right in a children’s novel?
Nevertheless, this pair has other things in common. Both have similar
reasons to be unhappy. Not only is Blaze without a mother, but his father
is ‘a private person’ (p. 16), his distance revealed by the art he makes:
‘Everyone in Glenn’s paintings seemed to be detached, lost in a cool,
claustrophobic dreamworld’ (p. 41). Joselle has no memory or knowledge
of her father, and her mother has grown tired of dealing with Joselle and
has dropped her daughter off at her grandmother’s in order to be at home
alone. Their grandparents seem equally solitary. His says of hers, ‘I’m not
even too familiar with Floy . . . . I guess the hill is big enough and our
houses are far enough apart to keep our lives separate’ (p. 89).
Nevertheless, Blaze’s father is beginning a new relationship with a
woman Blaze likes and who gradually draws him out of his isolation and
into a connection with her; and Joselle’s mother is also close to the
beginning of a new relationship, this one with a man Joselle has little use
for and who, oppositely, seems to be pulling her mother away from her.
For readers of texts for young people, the plot that develops here is
unlikely to be surprising; the two protagonists meet, and after various
misundertandings, become friends. Having heard about Blaze from her
grandmother, Joselle decides to ‘complicate the life of Blaze Werla’ (p. 32)
in order to feel better about her own complicated life by arranging stones
on the hillside into his dead mother’s name; she does not know that Blaze
gathered the stones as a memorial for his mother. When they meet and
become friends, he does not know she was the perpetrator of what he has
rightly understood as an attack on himself; and she lies to him about other
things also, because she believes he would not want her for a friend if he
knew the truth. When Blaze does learn the truth, the friendship turns
sour––and before a reconciliation can take place, Joselle and her grand-
mother also learn a truth, this one about her mother not having left as they
had thought, and so Joselle is sent back home again. At the end of the
novel, however, Blaze reads the words ‘I’M SORRY’ on the hillside
(p. 151), realizes Joselle is back, and sets out to renew the friendship––
and also, to tell his own family things he has kept hidden from them. As
happens in many novels for young people, a happy ending occurs when
characters isolated from and at odds with each other see past their appar-
ent differences, arrive at a better understanding of what they misunder-
stood before, and come together to form a new relationship based on what
they now know they have in common.
But if what happens is not surprising, how it is described might be.
Because the focus switches between Blaze and Joselle––a few chapters
labelled with his name followed by a few labelled with hers––identifying
with one or the other, as texts for young people conventionally invite
readers to do, seems difficult. At first, moving from Blaze’s understanding
of events to Joselle’s after he first sees the mysterious words on the hillside
might strike readers as an invitation to explore her experience simply to
gather more information about Blaze, with whom they have already been
invited to identify. Indeed, one of the first things the text reveals is that
Joselle has been responsible for what so distressed Blaze, which might well
invite distance from her and more sympathy for him. But then this chapter
also reveals why she did it, how it emerges from her own sadness and
isolation, a revelation which invites empathy––and, therefore, perhaps,
identification? ––with her also.
But as I have suggested, that doubling of identifications is difficult, if
it is even possible—and meanwhile, the text seems to be inviting read-
ers to do something different. Most immediately, it moves attention
away from what the characters experience onto how they experience it.
A once-told story focalized through its main character invites readers to
see things as the main character does without even necessarily being
aware of doing so. But a second focalizer seems to demand an aware-
ness of how the two different characters represented are in fact differ-
ent––how they perceive and think about their experience in different
ways. As the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin suggests of what he understands
to be the polyphonic fiction of Dostoevsky, ‘those elements out of
which the hero’s image is composed are not features of reality––features
of the hero himself or of his everyday surroundings––but rather, the

significance of these features for the hero himself, for his self-consciousness’
(1984, p. 48). For Bakhtin, the focus in Dostoevsky is on ‘the hero’s
discourse about himself and his world’ (p. 53); for readers of texts with
alternatingly focalized narratives like Words of Stone, the consciousness
that structure creates of differing understandings of the same events
similarly invites a focus on the character’s discourse about themselves––
on how they understand themselves. As might be expected, then, much of
the text of Words of Stone describes Blaze and Joselle’s efforts to under-
stand themselves and their own behaviour.
In doing so, it invites readers to connect the two. Why provide two
different points of view if not to invite a comparison of them? Indeed,
Mike Cadden sees that opportunity as a key to the ethical value of Young
Adult novels with alternating narratives. In more conventional novels with
just one focalized central character, ‘by employing an all-too-reliable
young adult’s consciousness, the YA novelist often intentionally commu-
nicates to the immature reader a single and limited awareness of the world
that the novelist knows to be incomplete and insufficient. It is a sophisti-
cated representation of a lack of sophistication; it is an artful depiction of
artlessness’ (2000, p. 146). If a writer feels an ethical need to, as Cadden
says, ‘help the reader to recognize the contestability of any immature
consciousness in the narrative’ (p. 147), providing another narrative
focused through another character is one way doing so: ‘no single position
in the text is clearly endorsed or becomes clear at the expense of others,
which enables the reader to consider the rightness of the positions based
on the specific details of the narrative’ (p. 147). Exactly because it creates a
distance that prevents easy identification with one character, the opportu-
nity for comparison is ethically responsible.
The text of Words of Stone explicitly invites that sort of comparison.
When Joselle’s mother leaves, her grandmother says, ‘It could be worse––
that little Werla boy from around the hill doesn’t even have a mother’
(Henker 1992, p. 25). After telling about Blaze, she adds, ‘So you see . . .
you’re not the only one with a complicated life’ (p. 27). Joselle’s response
to the comparison is itself comparative: ‘She hoped that the skinny red-
head’s life story would be worse than hers’ (p. 26), and her creation of the
words of stone emerges from the comparison: ‘She wasn’t exactly sure why
she had done it––except she sensed that if she could make someone else
more confused than she was, the weight of her own emotions might be
lifted’ (p. 37).
As a reader making the kinds of comparison these passages seem to be

inviting, I find myself drawn away from empathy with the characters into
the aesthetic distance of a more analytical kind of thinking about them. I
no longer just experience along with them, I also find myself thinking
about the meaning of their experience for themselves and also for me. I
can do so because of the expectations I have developed from my earlier
experiences of reading literary texts––and most significantly here, an
expectation that all the components of such texts fit together, that they
cohere as a whole. Certainly texts are, as many readers often claim, open to
a multiplicity of interpretations depending on what different readers bring
to them. But I suspect that readers who are sympathetic enough with a
literary text to have had a positive experience of it have done so on the
basis of some conscious or unconscious thinking about, and some overall
conviction of having grasped, a sense of its completeness as an experience
that they find personally satisfying.
Developing such a sense is a learned skill, and some inexperienced
readers may not have learned it yet. But even texts for the most inexper-
ienced readers operate on the assumption that those readers know––or are
in the process of learning to know––how to think about texts in ways that
will reveal the relevance of the different parts of the texts to each other.
Even word books for babies assume that their neophyte intended audience
will understand that meaning emerges from making connections between
words and visual representations of the objects the words stand for (and,
often, teach that skill in the process of assuming it and therefore allowing
adults sharing the books to teach it to those who do not yet know it).
Assuming, then, that even the least experienced of young readers
operate with (or are in the process of learning) assumptions about a
text’s cohesiveness, I conclude that I am not likely to be alone in finding
myself responding to the alternating narrative of Words of Stone as a sort of
detective trying to solve a mystery; Nikolajeva has a similar response to
Seaward. Why this departure from normal expectations? In trying to
answer that question, I respond to the text as something to think about,
not just something to empathize and identify with.
Having shared Blaze’s confusion when he first sees the words of stone,
for instance, I then respond to the following but, it turns out, chronolo-
gically earlier section that tells of Joselle’s thoughts as she decides to
arrange them, as the solution to a mystery. I am also aware that it is a
solution Blaze himself is unaware of––that I know more than he does,
which makes it harder for me to think of myself as being similar to him.
Later, the novel reminds me of my superior knowledge when Blaze

decides that the wrong person, his father’s girlfriend, is responsible for
arranging the stones (p. 62), and when, after Joselle befriends him, he
thinks, ‘If they did become true friends, maybe he could tell her about the
words of stone. Maybe she’d know what to do’ (p. 84). I become aware of
similar ironies when Blaze concludes, after Joselle tells him her lie that she
is an orphan like him, ‘And to have Joselle confide in him about her father
bonded them’ (p. 89). The same dynamic moves in the opposite direction
when I read Joselle’s sections with a deeper knowledge of what Blaze is
thinking than she has. Because the novel so often invokes its readers’
awareness of having more knowledge of a complex situation than the
characters involved in the situation do, it encourages readers to resist
identification with those who know less.
Observing Blaze and Joselle from the outsider’s viewpoint created by
my knowing twice as much about their situation as each of them do, I can
see not only differences in their understanding, but also, threads of con-
nection between them that they themselves are not aware of––for instance,
a shared interest in observing life on the other side of the hill: ‘Sometimes
Blaze lay on the hill and watched the Stark house. Nothing interesting ever
happened’ (p. 17); or ‘Joselle noticed movement on the hill. It was the
red-haired boy. Blaze Werla. Joselle watched him intensely . . . ’ (p. 30).
Indeed, ‘Sometimes Joselle tried to see herself through Blaze’s eyes’
(p. 100).
Since Blaze and Joselle’s tendency to observe each other matches what I
have viewed as the novel’s invitation for me as a reader to observe them, I
might, at this point, retract my earlier statement that the characters are not
easy to identify with. The structure of alternating narratives has actually
created an identification by inviting me to see as they do. But the way they
see requires, paradoxically, that I empathize with detachment.
Observation requires some distance from what one observes––a photo-
graph or painting makes little sense to those who put their noses on it. The
observational mode created by the alternating narratives draws attention
to the distance, the separation and isolation, that are such key factors in
both Blaze and Joselle’s experiences. Readers learn through alternating
insights into Blaze and Joselle’s thoughts how they misunderstand each
other and also, how they deliberately and often successfully misrepresent
themselves to each other. Each of their stories focuses on what they choose
to keep hidden and whether or not they will tell it––and when the secrets
become known, it does, at first, draw them even further apart.
The effect is of two solitudes, only barely breached in the brief and even
then partially illusory moments of their friendship. By the end of the novel,
they have had some contact and developed more understanding of each
other than they first had, and they seem to be moving from isolation into
connections with each other and with the adults in their lives. But tell-
ingly, the novel ends before their reunion. There is a sense that other
people are always more complicated than we ever know, that human
beings will always misunderstand each other, be isolated and at a distance
from each other even when at their closest. The observational distance that
emerges from alternating two narratives turns out here to be a metaphor
for the novel’s view of how people always interact with each other.
That view seems surprisingly pessimistic in the context of a novel
intended for young readers. Fiction for young people usually tends to be
more utopian in its descriptions of relationships, less focused on what
hampers contact and more determined to assume that how one person
comes to understand things is a universal truth––one universal enough to
be shared by others, to sustain a happy ending, and to represent how
readers ought to understand things also. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising
that Words of Stone––still, after all, a children’s novel––seems to insist on
the possibilities of contact and connection between its characters even
while reinforcing their isolation and separation. It does so in a number of
ways.
First and most obviously, its two solitaries meet and come, at least a
little, to understand and empathize with each other. As Joselle helps Blaze
past his fear of her grandmother’s dog, she thinks, ‘He needs me . . . .
Blaze Werla needs me’ (p. 98); and in the last paragraphs of the novel, a
happy ending involving togetherness does seem to be about to emerge
from Joselle’s ‘I’M SORRY’ and Blaze’s decision to forgive her and to tell
his secrets to his family. Second, the comparisons that emerge from Blaze
and Joselle’s alternating narratives and reveal their similar isolation also
invite readers to think of the two characters in relation to each other, and
to see what they share: their detached and absent parents, their lack of
contact with other children, their observational habit and imaginative ways
of thinking, their pleasure in inventing imaginary people––he imaginary
friends, she the characters evoked by differing perfumes in a game she
teaches him. Third, the novel contains many symbols of connection.
Unlike his father’s paintings of ‘detached’ objects, for example, the one
Blaze paints contain symbolic objects that all imply connections between
people: ‘His key collection also symbolized Joselle, since she had it now.
And Joselle’s button represented both of then, too; it was hers, but it was
in his possession. We’re all linked in certain ways, he thought’ (p. 138).
Joselle also envisages a similar linkage as she forms the word ‘ORPHAN’
on the hill: ‘she wasn’t entirely certain if she was referring to Blaze Werla
or to herself’ (p. 71).
All of these connections undercut the novel’s focus on isolation in a way
that brings it closer to the mainstream interest of children’s fiction in
contact and communication. But the isolation also undercuts the attempts
at connection. For me, the final effect is the tension of a happiness not
quite achieved by a community of isolates, a happy ending that sadly seems
to represent all that we human beings in our inevitable separation from
each other can hope for. Furthermore, while the happy ending seems to be
there as one of the characteristics necessary to define the novel as a text for
young readers, the sadness that permeates it both emerges from and is
supported by its structure of alternating narratives. This form of telling the
same story twice seems seriously at odds with the more optimistic con-
ventions of literature for children and young adults––just as does the
presence of many monologues in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!).
But Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! won the Newbery Medal as the worth-
iest text of American children’s literature in its year of publication. And in
recent decades, young readers have had a growing number of opportu-
nities to read books that operate in such unconventional ways. Since the
1970s and increasingly in the last few decades, publishers of children’s
books in the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia have been producing
books with not just one central character, but two, three, four, or more
equally prominent characters described in turn in alternating narratives
often labelled with the characters’ names and often focalized through each
of their experiences and responses. As I have worked on this book, I have
come upon over 300 English-language novels for children and young
adults with two alternating narratives (many of these labelling their alter-
nating narratives with their two central characters’ names), almost fifty
with three alternating narratives, and at least fifty more with four or more
alternating narratives. Furthermore, ‘Alternating Narratives’ or ‘Different
Focalizers’ are not the sort of terms used in library catalogue classifica-
tions, so identifying books of this sort in advance of reading them is not
always easy. I know there are many more such novels in existence, and yet
more continue to be published.
Not all of the alternating narratives in these novels are obviously or
consistently focalized through one of the characters they describe. In Mal
Peet’s Tamar (UK 2005), for instance, not only are there alternating
narratives describing events in the lives of different characters, but also,
there are switches in focalization amongst the characters involved within
one of the narratives. In Julie Hearn’s The Minister’s Daughter (UK
2006), one of the narratives offers an omniscient narrator who is capable
of entering the thoughts of any or all of the characters and does so with
different characters at different moments.
Furthermore, other novels for young readers offer other forms of
narrative fragments in alternation with each other. Some, like Cornelia
Funke’s Inkheart (Germany 2003) use fragments from other authors or
from imaginary texts as epigraphs to each of their chapters. In Jonathan
Stroud’s Heroes of the Valley (UK 2009), the epigraphs tell a continuous
story on their own; each chapter begins with an excerpt from the tale of a
great hero, and what follows describes what is represented as the real
events that the tale is based on. In novels like Teddy Steinkellner’s Trash
Can Days (USA 2013), meanwhile, materials from other sources are
interspersed amidst and among narratives describing events as the char-
acters experience them: Facebook updates, IMs, blog entries, handouts
from the principal, letters between the principal and a teacher, notes the
characters write to each other. And in texts like Jan Mark’s The Hillingdon
Fox (UK 1995), the entire novel consists of alternating diaries or journals
written by the characters.
In all these cases, the alternation of differing narrative fragments invites
young readers to figure out the connection of the fragments with each
other in order to understand the story as a whole. In all of them, what
happened once upon a time emerges from what happened differently twice
or more within that time or in some related time. While this book centrally
concerns novels like Words of Stone with alternating chapters or sections
focalized through different characters, I also consider a wide range of
other uses of alternating fragments, in the belief that they all relate to
each other and produce similar problems for readers and similar literary
and ideological implications.
While ‘once upon a time’ is still by far the most common kind of
storytelling for young people, twice or thrice or many times upon a
time is no longer even mildly unusual. We might well ask why so many
novels for young readers repeat the same devices that appear in Words
of Stone. Might the widespread use of these devices mean that they are
less challenging to the norms of literature for young people than they
seem? In her study of novels of this sort for young adults, Robyn
McCallum concludes that ‘the dialogic potential of multivoiced and

multistranded narratives is frequently contained through implicit
authorial control manifest in the narrative, and thematic and intertex-
tual structures used to organize and structure the various narrative
strands or voices. These strategies also deny characters agency and
disable intersubjectivity’ (1999, p. 37). Furthermore, McCallum sug-
gests, ‘interlaced dual narration [what I am here calling “alternating
narrative”] . . . can be a particularly problematic form. The tendency to
structure narrative point of view oppositionally often entails that one
dominant narratorial position is privileged and dialogue is thus sub-
sumed by monologue’ (p. 56). Perhaps such novels are less ethical than
Cadden believes.
Considered in that light––and in the light of Nikolajeva’s attempts to
read dual narratives as single ones––Words of Stone might actually be more
one-sided than it at first appears, more conventionally like more obviously
normative texts of children’s literature. The apparent balance of equalities
that the alternating narratives imply and that keeps Blaze and Joselle
isolated from each other even at the end may be undermined by what
McCallum identifies as a privileging of one dominant narratorial position.
For one thing, the novel offers many hints that Blaze and Joselle represent
two different social groups. Blaze’s father is a teacher who does art, and his
grandmother keeps a comfortable middle-class home, tends a garden, and
makes all their meals from scratch. Joselle’s mother buys their clothes in
thrift shops. Her grandmother’s house is messy and her furniture worn,
and her cooking consists mostly of reheating pre-prepared products. While
it is never said, it seems clear that readers are to assume that Blazes family’s
lifestyle is preferable. While Joselle aspires to join Blaze’s family, Blaze
never expresses an equivalent wish to join hers; and it is obvious that
Joselle’s mother’s isolating and self-indulgent ways represent a less desir-
able form of parenting than the interest, concern, and affection his rela-
tives and his father’s girlfriend offer Blaze––obvious, indeed, that any
willed isolation from others is less desirable than attempts to empathize
and reach out. The novel simply takes it for granted that the habits and
values of Blaze’s family are superior to those of the one Joselle seems to
belong to.
But even if texts with alternating narratives subvert their potential for
varying from conventional values, I still have to ask why so many of them
exist in the first place. Why express the same familiar values in unnecessa-
rily more complicated ways?
The existence of so many novels with alternating narratives might

simply be a sign that children’s literature is becoming different and more
complicated, possibly because childhood and the children it addresses have
become different and more complicated. For Eliza Dresang, technological
changes in how people communicate with each other have led to equiva-
lent changes in writing for young people: ‘Three digital age concepts
underpin and permeate all the radical changes that are taking place in
literature for youth: connectivity, interactivity, and access’ (1999, p. 12).
As my discussion of Words of Stone reveals, the use of alternating narratives
could certainly represent an interest in connectivity and interactivity.
While Maria Nikolajeva accepts that, ‘in our time, impulses from film,
TV, video, teenage fashion, rock texts, the toy industry, advertisements,
cartoons and entertainment are important in the evolution of children’s
literature’ (1996, p. 65), she sees a move towards the kinds of complexity
alternating narratives represent as inherent in the way specific kinds of
literature operate. For her, it is the pressure of the ‘semiosphere’ of
children’s literature––the discreet but evolving collection of codes that
define what it is––that makes it ever more complicated. Once a literary
code has become established, it becomes standardized, so that ‘the longer
a code has been central, the greater the risk that it will become petrified
and lose its appeal to readers. At this point, peripheral and therefore more
flexible codes come and take its place’ (p. 63). In traditional children’s
literature, once-told tales with single main characters readers can identify
with have been central; and so, from a point of view like Nikolajeva’s, it is
almost inevitable that twice-told or thrice-told tales will come to be
written, and, simply in being innovative, achieve acclaim.
Elsewhere, in an article called ‘Exit Children’s Literature’, Nikolajeva
suggests ‘an ever-growing segment of contemporary children’s literature is
transgressing its own boundaries, coming closer to mainstream literature’
(1998, p. 222), and concludes that ‘sooner or later, children’s literature
will be integrated into the mainstream and disappear’ (p. 233). In recent
years, certainly, the growing number of adults who enjoy what is still
called Young Adult literature, and the development of a similar but slightly
more sophisticated genre of ‘New Adult’ fiction, might suggest that
Nikolajeva’s prediction is coming true, albeit more so because more adults
are responding to simple texts than because writing for young people is
becoming more sophisticated. By and large, however, children’s literature
tends to be a resilient genre, quite resistant to change. Despite Dresang’s
and Nikolajeva’s claims about a growing sophistication, a trip to the
children’s section of a bookshop will quickly reveal that the vast majority
of books published for children or young adults are much like already-
existing texts, much like books for young people have always been. Unlike
the novels I am discussing here, most offer one central child or teen
character’s focalization, contain no other narrative fragments, and arrive
at something that can easily be interpreted as a moral.
Furthermore, as I have suggested might be happening in Words of
Stone, many apparently non-conventional books for young people repli-
cate recurring themes and conventional characteristics of writing for
young people under their apparently non-conventional surfaces. Perhaps
because adult ideas about childhood and youth have not really changed
even in an apparently different technological age, the literature resists
change, pulls innovation back towards what is conventional.
Nevertheless, some recent writing does at least appear to be multivocal
and otherwise unconventional, and Dresang and Nikolajeva suggest why
innovations like alternating narratives might bring success to writers and
publishers––for instance, awards like the Newbery medals awarded to
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, Louis Sachar’s Holes (1998), Lynne Rae
Perkins’s Criss Cross (2005), and Clare Vanderpool’s Moon Over
Manifest (2010) as their year’s best book for young people by an
American; or the Michael L. Printz award for best Young Adult book
published in America awarded to Aidan Chambers’s Postcards from No
Man’s Land (awarded in 1999), Angela Johnson’s The First Part Last
(2003), Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006), Melina
Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road (2009), John Corey Whaley’s Where Things
Come Back (2011), and Nick Lake’s In Darkness (2012); or the
Carnegie medals awarded to Robert Swindells’s Stone Cold (1993),
Chambers’s Postcards (1999), Mal Peet’s Tamar (2005), and Patrick
Ness’s Of Monsters and Men (2010) for the best children’s novel published
in the UK; or the Canadian Governor-General’s Award for Wendy
Phillips’s Fishtailing (awarded in 2010) and Caroline Pignat’s The Gospel
Truth (2014). Texts of this sort announce themselves as engaged
responses to contemporary childhood, as being current and relevant
enough to bring great power in the field of children’s publishing. But if,
in fact, this more complex and sophisticated writing does cleave to con-
ventions enough to represent excellence in the field despite its apparent
contemporaneity (and I believe that in order to gain recognition it must
do that), then it can accomplish two things at once: It can seem powerfully
current at the same time as it reconfirms the older and even more powerful
convention. It can co-opt innovation in the service of a one-sided con-

servative tradition.
That possibility comes to seem particularly relevant in a consideration,
not of innovation in texts for young people generally, but of the use of
alternating narratives specifically. According to Bakhtin, novels are inher-
ently polyphonic, containing a variety of different voices and thus inevi-
tably representing a variety of different points of view that therefore
undermines the authority of any single one of the views. As Rachel
Falconer suggests, Bakhtin posits ‘a pair of forces that, throughout the
history of language, have been constantly at war’ (2010, p. 165). The first
‘is ‘monologic,’ centripetal and unifying’ (p. 165)––and thus confirmative
of mainstream social ideologies. The second force––the dialogic––’is cen-
trifugal and strives continually to evade capture in official discourse’
(pp. 165–6). As Falconer suggests, ‘dialogism is clearly the privileged
force in Bakhtin’s analysis’ because it ‘represents the force of language in
its most democratic, generative, and creative aspect’ (p. 166).
While novels always represent a dialogical heteroglossia––a variety of
differing voices and positions––powerful ideologies work to make fiction
more monological by trying to impose an official point of view and an
official language over the many different voices. On the other hand, as
McCallum argues, the use of multiple narratives can enable ‘the construc-
tion of a range of perceptual, attitudinal and ideological viewpoints asso-
ciated with the subject positions occupied by characters’ and ‘can efface,
and thereby destabilize, a reader’s sense of an implicit single authoritative
narratorial position’ (p. 36). That is especially true in what Sara Day calls
‘multivoiced narration’: ‘These novels—in which narrative responsibility is
shared by at least two narrators or focalizers—enact Mikhail Bakhtin’s
concept of polyphony by explicitly demonstrating the mutual influence
and interplay of multiple voices’ (2010, p. 66).
McCallum identifies Paul Zindel’s The Pigman (USA 1968) as an early
precursor of the many books for young readers that uses ‘interlaced binary
narrative’––another term for what I am here calling alternative narratives. But
while The Pigman alternates between the teenaged Lorraine and John’s
descriptions of their encounters with an old man they befriend and betray,
the two cast doubt on the dialogism of alternating narrative by offering just
one understanding of what happened and what it might mean. They write
about what happened after the events, in a journal that will record what has
now become history, so that any earlier variations in their responses have been
absorbed by their shared knowledge of what it all has led to, their shared
interpretation of what it means, and their implicit agreement with what each
other has already written as they take up the story in successive sections. The
Pigman thus uses its alternating narratives to confirm a one-sided view of the
events it describes. Two different people have come to see things the same
way––the one and only right way. In bypassing and even erasing the differ-
ences that seem to justify its alternating structure, The Pigman might well offer
insight into what later, less obviously monological books are in the process of
doing also.
Lest that seems overly pessimistic, however, and in the name of dialo-
gics, I would also like to propose an alternate possibility. In writing for
young people, the pressure of the genre might well lead to texts subsum-
ing the potential for dialogue in alternating narratives in an underlying
monologism; but then the very presence of the two dialogues might open
a way beyond the monologic. Once there are two or more streams pre-
sent––and once the two streams seem to possess equal status, as they so
often claim to do in the texts I am considering here––then there are
opportunities for alternate readings of them. Such texts might then be
understood to speak beyond and even against their own intentions, to
move beyond the monologue hidden in their dialogue to an actual and
actually ambivalent dialogue. Perhaps Blaze’s family’s values are less attrac-
tive than Joselle’s after all?
At any rate, my intention in this book is to take a closer look at a range
of texts for young people with two, three, and more alternating narratives,
and with other uses of alternating narrative fragments, in order to develop
a better sense of how the alternating structures and voices work and what
sorts of values they operate in aid of. I focus first on the ways in which
authors set up and make use of alternating narratives, and how the alter-
nating narratives work to shape and give structure, and therefore meaning,
to the stories they tell. Following that, I consider ways in which, as
differing versions of the same events, alternating narratives operate as
variations of each other––versions in writing of how variations operate in
music. I then explore how the form of alternating narratives supports and
allows for the expression of significant themes and ideologies in literature
for young people, and how writers make use of this form to support or
subvert monological understandings of the world young readers live in.
Underlying all these discussions is an effort to develop a better under-
standing of how a form so apparently alien to the conventions of writing
for young people has come so quickly to be understood as conventional,
and an effort to understand how alternating narratives do and do not
transgress the conventions of writing for young people, and do and do not
represent what is old and what is new. My attempts to answer these
questions build on—and thus, inevitably, test and problematize—the
ideas about the conventions of writing for young readers that I considered
in my book The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature.
My focus throughout is on literary structure––on how the relationships
of alternating narratives work to shape their effect on readers and their
meanings. My work here then relates to Fredric Jameson’s project in The
Political Unconscious of viewing aspects of literary construction that have
been more traditionally seen in purely aesthetic terms as historically based
conveyors of ideological content––as expressions of what he identifies as
‘the ideology of form’ (1981, p. 76). For Jameson, the production of
aesthetic or narrative form is ‘an ideological act in its own right, with the
function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable
social contradictions’ (p. 79); the ideological messages of such solutions
are ‘distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of the work’ (p. 99).
While I base my considerations of fictional structure in the ‘New Critical’
kind of close reading of texts that I first learned as a graduate student many
decades ago, and while I engage with structural and narratological
approaches to the novels I discuss, my project here connects most sig-
nificantly with the kinds of narratology Monica Fludernik refers to when
she says, ‘These approaches attempt to combine ideological frameworks
. . . with the more formal concerns of narratology’ (1996, p. 51).
In pursuing my goal of understanding alternating narratives, I refer
both to texts for younger readers and texts for somewhat older ones––to
what I identify more generally as ‘texts for young readers’. There has been
much critical discussion of how what is called ‘young adult’ literature is
similar to and/or different from what we call ‘children’s’ literature––the
extent to which young adult literature can be understood, as Karen Coats
suggests, ‘as a type of literature that has its own constellation of concerns
that mark it as distinctive from literature for either children or adults’
(2011, p. 317). There can be no question that it does, indeed, tend to
have different concerns––as different as the lives of younger children from
the lives of the teenagers it focuses on often are. As Coats suggests, ‘YA
literature is organized around the same sorts of tensions that occupy the
physical bodies and emotional lives of its intended audience’ (p. 316),
especially in terms of questions of power and sexuality. Nevertheless, as I
argue in The Hidden Adult, I believe that YA fiction, which almost always
shares with children’s fiction the fact that it is written by writers older than
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Chapitre Ier. — De l’Éducation : Principes et moyens 131
d’action
Chapitre II. — De l’Éducation : Quelques aspects 161
L’Argent. — Le Ménage. — De la Parure. — De la
Discussion. — Éducation sexuelle. — Mariage, amour,
famille.
Chapitre III. — De l’Instruction : Principes et moyens
d’action 199
Le Lycée. — Le Foyer. — La « Valise ». — Comment
apprendre. — Le Choix d’un métier.
Chapitre IV. — De l’Instruction : Quelques lacunes 233
Les Langages secrets. — La Constitution. — Soi-même. —
« Self-defence ». — Planter un clou. — Les
« applications ».
E. GREVIN — IMPRIMERIE DE LAGNY

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MAINS
PROPRES ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in
these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it
in the United States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of
this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept
and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and
may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the
terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of
the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as
creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research.
Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given
away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with
eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject
to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree
to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from
the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in
paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a
few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.
See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do
not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing,
performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the
work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of
course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™
mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely
sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of
this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its
attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without
charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying,
performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this
work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes
no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in
any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™
work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or
with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is
accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the
United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must
comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a
part of this work or any other work associated with Project
Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you
provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work
in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in
the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating
the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may
be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a
copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or
damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph
1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner
of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must
return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity
that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may
demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the
problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur:
(a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b)
alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project
Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.
It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and
donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a
secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help,
see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can
be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the
widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and
keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in
locations where we have not received written confirmation of
compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of
compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no
prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in
such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of
other ways including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how
to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

Textbook Alternating Narratives in Fiction For Young Readers Twice Upon A Time 1St Edition Perry Nodelman Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Textbook Alternating Narratives in Fiction For Young Readers Twice Upon A Time 1St Edition Perry Nodelman Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alternating Narratives in Fiction for

Young Readers: Twice Upon a Time 1st

Leadership Philosophy in the Fiction of C S Lewis Aaron

The Readers Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction Third

Endurance young readers edition My Year in Space and

Town Mouse and Country Mouse (Penguin Young Readers,

Narratives in Research and Interventions on

Once Upon a Time Lord The Myths and Stories of Doctor

Dolores Huerta Stands Strong The Woman Who Demanded

Time Limited Adolescent Psychodynamic Psychotherapy A

More information about this series at

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934526

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration © Chris Cheadle / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book began in a classroom a number of years ago—or rather, in the

drawn to producing them. As I have argued in my earlier work on this

1 Alternating Narratives: An Introduction 1

List of Works Cited 235

Alternating Narratives: An Introduction

© The Author(s) 2017 1

In order to encourage young readers to do so, these texts convention-

Writing about Seaward in 1990, I without the slightest doubt interpreted it

After a few pages of interpretation, she concludes, ‘The intersubjective

Viewing the novel as a depiction of an inner world rather than of external

What fascinates me is the anxiety that Nikolajeva, a knowledgeable spe-

of the hero himself or of his everyday surroundings––but rather, the

As a reader making the kinds of comparison these passages seem to be

Later, the novel reminds me of my superior knowledge when Blaze

McCallum concludes that ‘the dialogic potential of multivoiced and

The existence of so many novels with alternating narratives might

convention. It can co-opt innovation in the service of a one-sided con-

E. GREVIN — IMPRIMERIE DE LAGNY

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

Section 3. Information about the Project

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Section 4. Information about Donations to

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make