Reading About Solidarity and Collective Action: Social Minds in Radical Fantasy Fiction

This article employs the theory of social minds proposed by Alan Palmer (Social Minds in the Novel, 2010) to argue for the emergence of a group-based thinking, feeling, and acting focused on reforming the status quo, using David Whitley’s Agora trilogy (2009–2013) as an example of Radical Fantasy. This particular subgenre of fantasy is seen as radical in the way it envisions an intergenerational struggle by the oppressed against political, racial and economic injustice, resulting in a new social order (Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2016). The notion of transformation, it is argued, is a characteristic quality of mental functioning in Radical Fantasy storyworlds. Beyond examining Whitley’s trilogy in these terms, the article also argues for a broader interest in intergenerational collective action in the field of children’s literature as a way of acknowledging texts that extend the aetonormative paradigm of children’s books (Nikolajeva, 2010)

Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action

Despite its rightful concern with childhood as an essentialist cultural construct, the field of children’s literature studies has tended to accept the endemicity of asymmetrical power relations between children and adults. It is only recently, under the influence of children’s rights discourses, that children’s literature scholars have developed concepts reflecting their recognition of more egalitarian relationships between children and adults. This essay is a result of the collaboration between child and adult researchers and represents a scholarly practice based on an intergenerational democratic dialog in which children’s voices are respected for their intrinsic salience. The presence of child researchers in children’s literature studies confirms an important shift currently taking place in our field, providing evidence for the impossibility of regarding children’s literature only as a manifestation of adult power over young generations

Construing the child reader: a cognitive stylistic analysis of the opening to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2009) charts the story of Nobody Owens, a boy who is adopted by supernatural entities in the local graveyard after his family is murdered. This article draws on the notion of the “construed reader,” and combines two cognitive stylistic frameworks to analyse the opening section of the novel. In doing so, the article explores the representation and significance of the family home in relation to what follows in the narrative. The analysis largely draws on Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007), but also integrates some aspects of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), which allows for a more nuanced discussion of textual features. The article pays particular attention to the way Gaiman frames his narrative and positions his reader to view the fictional events from a distinctive vantage point and subsequently demonstrates that a stylistic analysis of children’s literature can lay bare how such writing is designed with a young readership in mind

Reading as Synthesis of Immersion and Interactivity: Multimodal Metaphors in "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" Combo

In addition to being praised for promoting the healing power and the pedagogical potential of literature, William Joyce and Moonbot Studios’ The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, a cross-media narrative,which consists of four thematically related but discrete versions of one story a film, an e-book app, a picturebook and an IMAG-N-O-TRON app, has been criticized for two main reasons. First, it has been revealed that the book emphasizes the significance of books at large at the expense of foregrounding the benefits and mechanics of the act of reading. Second, one of its components, the e-book app, has been regarded as ineffective in enhancing the reading experience due to its limited interactive options. Whereas we partially agree with the latter argument, we nevertheless argue that, if seen as a whole, the Lessmore combo employs a catalogue of metaphors, such as reading is sharing or reading is remaining young, with a view to deepening and refreshing the reader/viewer/user’s appreciation of reading as an activity that fosters one’s affective and cognitive development. Significantly, depending on the narrative platform, these metaphors can be cued textually, visually, musically or/and kinesthetically. Focusing specifically on the metaphor reading is engaging with fictive minds, this article explores how the Lessmore film and its remediations recycle that metaphor along with encouraging the experience of immersion or/and interactivity.In addition to being praised for promoting the healing power and the pedagogical potential of literature, William Joyce and Moonbot Studios’ The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, a cross-media narrative,which consists of four thematically related but discrete versions of one story a film, an e-book app, a picturebook and an IMAG-N-O-TRON app, has been criticized for two main reasons. First, it has been revealed that the book emphasizes the significance of books at large at the expense of foregrounding the benefits and mechanics of the act of reading. Second, one of its components, the e-book app, has been regarded as ineffective in enhancing the reading experience due to its limited interactive options. Whereas we partially agree with the latter argument, we nevertheless argue that, if seen as a whole, the Lessmore combo employs a catalogue of metaphors, such as reading is sharing or reading is remaining young, with a view to deepening and refreshing the reader/viewer/user’s appreciation of reading as an activity that fosters one’s affective and cognitive development. Significantly, depending on the narrative platform, these metaphors can be cued textually, visually, musically or/and kinesthetically. Focusing specifically on the metaphor reading is engaging with fictive minds, this article explores how the Lessmore film and its remediations recycle that metaphor along with encouraging the experience of immersion or/and interactivity

Thinking and doing with childism in children's literature studies

In this article we share our reflections on how childism has enabled us to navigate theoretical assumptions shaping our field and develop new positions and research practices fostering child–adult interdependencies. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak has relied on childism as a framework for the introduction of participatory research with young readers as a way for advancing child–adult collaboration. Macarena García-González has deployed childism to think about adultism and its analogies to sexism. Although we offer a critique of childism as an essentializing concept, we also show how for both of us it has served as a gateway towards other approaches, and especially post-anthropocentric understandings both of texts, readers and the world and of our critical engagements. Finally, we argue that childism may remain a productive starting point for further openings in children's literature and culture studies and childhood studies if it becomes a plural and messy notion that questions the discourse of hope for a better future as defining children's lives

Chapter 7. Dynamics of age and power in a children’s literature research assemblage

The link between age and power in children’s literature has been explored through various lenses in recent years, with some scholars emphasizing the adult’s power and others focusing on the child’s power. To add to the current debate, this chapter analyses empirical qualitative data from readers’ reflections on their own age and the age of characters in the Dutch children’s book Iep!, written by Joke van Leeuwen. The chapter aims to adopt a “post-age” (Haynes & Murris 2017) perspective, with the participants’ individual experiences of Iep! becoming entwined and changed through encounters with human beings and matter