Portals, agency and the negotiation of liminality in 'A Tale of Time City and Johnny and the Bomb'

This paper focuses upon the portal trope in Diana Wynne Jones's A Tale of Time City and Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Bomb, suggesting that the portal trope is not just a practical narrative conveyance but a liminal space in which negotiation of discourse comes to the fore. In light of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope, the portal is rendered a nexus point of time and space in which multiple discourses meet and blend. Characters, in entering a portal space, must negotiate these discourses, absorbing and appropriating them a phenomenon that both alters the characters and the discourses themselves. From this theoretical lens, the portal trope articulates the fluidity of discourse as well as the processes of subject negotiation that characterise much of fantasy literature for children.