Fafnir (Dec 2021)
Through the Portals of the Mind: A Paracosmic Study of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
Abstract
The worlds that children build in their minds may hold the child’s interest for a consistent period of time and evolve into full-fledged paracosms, or may last only for the duration of a single playtime. Studying a child’s fantasy world can be compared to mapping the uncharted terrains of the child’s psyche. Many parallel worlds have been recorded in the pages of fantasy literature for children. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, published in 2002, is one such book about a young protagonist’s adventures in a parallel world. This paper studies the parallel world of the eponymous protagonist as a paracosm to illustrate that this imaginary world can serve as effective means to understand the budding mind of Coraline.
