JPA Mapping of Lists

I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to properly map List collection types. I can't change the schema at all, and I don't have the ability to change the way they are stored from the serialized form to the Array projection. I'm also pretty locked into using JPA for Java interoperability, as I'd like to be able to change out the backing database arbitrarily.

I didn't see any existing posts about this and it doesn't seem like the community is too focused on JPA, but hopefully someone has encountered and resolved this. I looked at the source for Cache71Dialect and there are some references to the list-related method calls but I'm not sure how to use them.

In my use case I'd like to be able to map both a list of primitives, and also a list of entities using JPA. In the second case its probably more complicated because it involves a join.