Abstract This article draws attention to a neglected topic in historical geography: the names children give to places that matter to them. In doing so, it seeks to make a contribution to the rapidly developing field of children’s geography and to bring together two rarely connected research areas: geographical and psychological research into children’s play and literary research on cartography in children’s fiction. Although early studies of the spatiality of children’s play emphasized the need for research into children’s toponymy, there has as yet been little scholarly response. The present study focuses on a specific form of children’s toponymy current in early and mid twentieth-century England: transfigurative naming. This is where familiar places in the child’s home neighbourhood are given exotic names, sometimes in an ongoing, processual dialogue with fictional cartography (as in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series). Investigation of four life-writing case studies suggests that transfigurative naming drew on discursive sources that were contingent on time, space and class, but that there were nevertheless important commonalities in the circumstances in which it arose and the purposes it served. The most striking of these was that transfigurative naming was deployed by children and youths in stable affective and residential contexts seeking to explore and extend their ‘home range’. It is argued that this may reflect a developmental dialectic between security and growth. The article concludes by considering some of the methodological and conceptual challenges scholars will need to address to achieve a more comprehensive knowledge and understanding of children’s toponymns.

中文翻译：

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远近家：儿童地名和想象的地理，c。1870 – c. 1950年

摘要 本文提请注意历史地理学中一个被忽视的话题：孩子们给他们重要的地方起的名字。在此过程中，它力求为快速发展的儿童地理学领域做出贡献，并将两个鲜有联系的研究领域结合起来：儿童游戏的地理和心理学研究以及儿童小说中的制图文学研究。尽管对儿童游戏空间性的早期研究强调了对儿童地名研究的必要性，但目前学术界几乎没有回应。本研究侧重于 20 世纪早期和中期英国儿童地名流行的一种特定形式：变形命名。这是孩子家附近熟悉的地方被赋予异国情调的名字，有时是持续的，与虚构制图的过程对话（如亚瑟兰瑟姆的燕子和亚马逊系列）。对四个生命写作案例研究的调查表明，变形命名利用了随时间、空间和阶级而定的话语来源，但在它出现的环境和它所服务的目的方面仍然存在重要的共性。其中最引人注目的是，儿童和青少年在稳定的情感和居住环境中使用变形命名，寻求探索和扩展他们的“家庭范围”。有人认为，这可能反映了安全与增长之间的发展辩证关系。