Kritikk og barnelitteratur: En kvantitativ og kvalitativ studie av konsekrasjonsmarkører

Theme: Children's Literature Reviews - How, Where and Who? Ill. Jenny Nyström from Barnkammarens bok, 1882. Critique and Children's Books: A Quantitative and Qualitative Study of Consecration Markers It is a common practice that books of fiction for adults contain excerpts of reviews and other quality markers on their covers. This article investigates to what extent so-called consecration markers are used on the covers of children’s picturebooks (3–6 years) in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. We study where the consecration markers are positioned – on the front cover or on the back. We also examine whether there are any differences between the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish literary systems regarding the use of consecration markers. In addition, we investigate who the agents behind them are. Are they critics, “ordinary readers” or other consecrators? Using a corpus of some 5,200 book covers (front and back), collected in libraries in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, as a point of departure, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Our results show that the use of consecration markers is much more widespread in Sweden than in Norway and Denmark. For the Norwegian and Swedish corpora, our results demonstrate that the typical consecration marker is an excerpt from a critic, positioned on the back cover of the picturebook. For the Danish corpus, the mention of prizes is seen as the most important consecration marker. Our study also shows that for translated books, the critic is in most cases from the target culture

"Der det er bilder så kan man slappe litt av": Ungdommers vurderinger av lettlest skjønnlitteratur

Theme: Children's Literature Reviews - How, Where and Who? Ill. Jenny Nyström from Barnkammarens bok, 1882. "Where there are pictures, you can relax a bit": Young People’s Assessments of Easy-to-read Fiction This article examines young people’s reviews of a selection of Norwegian easy-to-read YA fiction books. The purpose of the study is to gain more knowledge about young people as actual readers and critics of easy-to-read literature, but also to gain insight into what makes a literary text easier to read. Our empirical material consists of 129 reviews from the digital archive of Uprisen, a literature prize awarded to the best Norwegian YA novel of the year. We have analysed the reception of three easy-to-read YA novels across different genres. The analysis is grounded in theories of reading processes and multimodality, as well as the field’s own definitions of easy-to-read literature. Our findings show that young readers primarily associate readability with linguistic simplicity and brevity. At the same time, they point to connections between readability and aspects such as content, theme, composition, credibility, and originality, as well as opportunities for immersion and identification. However, there are also statements that reveal a tension between easy-to-read language and more complex themes, content, narrative structures or forms of presentation. Although all three books fall under the category of easy-to-read, they are not unequivocally perceived as such by all reviewers. Both compressed text and multimodal formats appear challenging. The analysis shows that young critics do not share a uniform understanding of what is easy or difficult to read, which underlines that the categorization of readability cannot be regarded as a straightforward or objective category

Pia Vuorio, Problemföräldrar kan ni vara själva! Föräldrar och familjedynamik i svensk ungdomsbok 1968–1979

Review/Recensio

Heterografi och högläsning: Om olika alfabet och deras funktioner i svenska bilderböcker

Theme: Multilingualism and Children's Literature. Ill. Henry Lyman Saÿen - Child Reading (1915–1918). Smithsonian American Art Museum, object number 1968.19.11. Heterographics and Reading Aloud: On Different Alphabets and Their Functions in Swedish Picturebooks Multilingual literature that uses more than one alphabet or script system can be labelled as heterographic. The purpose of this article is to explore uses of heterographics as a literary device in a selection of Swedish picturebooks, published between 2013 and 2023. The intention is to exemplify different types of embedded heterographics. How are they shaped? Which functions do they fulfill? What impact may they have on the reading aloud of a picturebook? Guided by multimodal perspectives, as applied within literary multilingualism studies, intermedial studies, and picturebook research, reading aloud is regarded as a shared event. Both reader and listener are active and co-creative, as the visual-spatial dimension of the iconotext is realized in an auditory-temporal way. The article opens with a discussion of heterographics in relation to the page turn direction of picturebooks. Then four books in Swedish, which integrate Persian or Arabic script as well as an example of pseudo-script, are examined. It is demonstrated how heterographics may be inserted in the picturebooks’ verbal or visual texts, where they can take on aesthetic, thematic, and performative functions. In this way, they exhibit their beauty, contribute to strengthening themes of friendship and hope, or make readers experience similar feelings of threat or joy as the picturebooks’ characters, encountering scripts they do not know

Introduction to Volume 47

Introductio

Barnlitteraturkritikens ordning: Recensioner av barnlitteratur i svenska dagstidningar och bloggar 2006 och 2016

Theme: Children's Literature Reviews - How, Where and Who? Ill. Jenny Nyström from Barnkammarens bok, 1882. The Order of Children’s Literature Criticism: Book Reviews of Children’s Literature in Swedish Newspapers and Blogs in 2006 and 2016 Based on computational analyses of book reviews of children’s literature in relation to other literary criticism from the years 2006 and 2016 in daily press and book blogs, this study examines the discursive order of children’s book reviews. The study is inspired by the analytical model employed by Lina Samuelsson in Kritikens ordning (2013). Specifically we focus on the characteristics of children’s book criticism and questions whether it differs from other literary reviews, and if so, how. The article identifies several essential features present in children’s book reviews, and discusses possible differences between reviews in the daily press and those on book blogs. We conclude that our mixed-methods approach – “computational” combined with “traditional” – allows us to highlight both similarities and differences between children's literature criticism and literary criticism in general, and that there is value in examining children’s book reviewing from both digital and traditional perspectives

”En obotlig surgurka” : Litteraturkritikkens vurderinger av humoren i Astrid Lindgrens Pippi-bøker i Sverige og Norge

Theme: Children's Literature Reviews - How, Where and Who? Ill. Jenny Nyström from Barnkammarens bok, 1882. ”An incurable grouch”: The Critical Assessment of Humour in Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Books in Sweden and Norway Astrid Lindgren’s books about Pippi Longstocking were immediately successful in Sweden and Norway. At the same time, they caused a moral panic among some Swedish literary critics. In this article, I examine the Pippi trilogy’s reception in Sweden and Norway from a new perspective. Firstly, I provide an overview of the reception of the first three Pippi books (published in 1945, 1946, and 1948) in Swedish and Norwegian newspapers to uncover and compare national trends. Secondly, I discuss the reviewers’ assessments of the books’ humour. Research on both literary humour and literary criticism have experienced a resurgence in recent years. Still, the assessment of humour in literary reviews and the particular challenges of reviewing children’s literature need further exploration. Through a humour-theoretical analysis, I discuss how Lindgren’s first critics understood humour and the role humour played as a literary critical criterion. The examination reveals that the humour was seen as a central criterion by both Swedish and Norwegian critics. However, the Swedish reception, while more professional, was more often marked by moral and aesthetic reservations regarding the critics’ understanding of the humour. In the reviews I study, the humour was mainly paraphrased and demonstrated, rather than discussed and analysed. But in a small selection of observations and literary comparisons, we may find entry points to a deeper understanding of why Pippi is so funny

Henrik Edgren, En kungsådra för nationens samhörighet. Läsebok för folkskolan i det sena 1800- och det tidiga 1900-talets skola och samhälle

Review/Recensio

Introduktion: Barnlitteraturkritik – hur, var och vem?

Theme: Children's Literature Reviews - How, Where and Who? Ill. Jenny Nyström from Barnkammarens bok, 1882. Introduktion: Barnlitteraturkritik – hur, var och vem

Helene Ehriander och Eva Söderberg (red.), Mer om Astrid Lindgren: Författaren, förläggaren och filmskaparen

Review/Recensio