Border Crossing:Dual Readership and the Dynamic Adult-child Relationship in Neil Gaiman’s Novels for Children

• Main Authors: Chin-Wen Chang, 張瀞文
• Other Authors: Feng-Hsin Liu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/ua22ur

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系所 === 100 === Neil Gaiman, the outstanding storytelling genius, has switched path from writing adult’s literature to children’s literature in the millennium. Same as his adult’s works, Gaiman’s children’s works are rich in literary issues and have received various notable rewards. They are enjoyed not only by child readers, but also prevailing among adult readers. The aim of the thesis is to place Gaiman’s two children’s novels, Coraline and The Graveyard Book, in the context of crossover novels, exploring the dual readership and dynamic adult-child relationship in the novels. My thesis is divided into three parts. Chapter One explores the reasons behind the appeal of the two crossover novels. Instead of regarding crossover reading as a degradation of adults, the thesis views it as unveiling the advancement of children’s literature in these few decades. The reasons for this dual readership also exhibit the two books’ multiplicity and subversiveness, which are put into further discussions in Chapter Two and Chapter Three, respectively. Chapter Two gives weight to the ambivalence and intricacy of the two novels by applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. I argue that the non-border and two-faced features in carnivalesque which are also characterized in the two stories subvert the traditional story pattern of children’s literature. Chapter Three connects the Bakhtinian carnivalesque and children’s literature and calls into attention the seesaw relationship between adult and child characters. This thesis concludes that in the novels, child characters possess the power to destabilize the dominance of adult characters. However, as carnivalized texts, children’s novels as such serve as a safety valve for child characters to release negative energies, and as a chance to renew the harmonious relation between adult and child characters.