Kritikk og barnelitteratur: En kvantitativ og kvalitativ studie av konsekrasjonsmarkører

Abstract

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