A topoanalytical reading of landscapes in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence (1965-1977)

Abstract

In setting out to understand the construction and function of landscapes in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence, I realised that Cooper’s landscapes were not unique but confonned to a series of tropes or paradigms which can be seen in many canonical British children’s texts. I suggest that these tropes may be traced to medieval literature where they are first articulated in the vernacular. The identification and analysis of these landscape tropes — topoi - requires a new critical approach which will combine recent theories about interstitial space together with earlier morphological and topoanalytical studies. My thesis has, as its central objective, the development of an interdisciplinary branch of analysis which might usefully provide a framework for future study of literary landscapes and thus inform a new critical approach to the analysis of children’s literature. Rather than studying Cooper’s landscapes in isolation, this thesis proposes a new interdisciplinary critical methodology for the study of the landscapes in children’s literature for which Cooper’s Sequence is the test- case.