Comparative Children’s Literature: What is There to Compare?

Literary texts do not appear in a vacuum. Literature in Western society has been written for several thousand years, and literature written specifically for children has existed for at least two hundred years. Thousands of children’s books are published every year. Writers have usually read books by other writers or are at least aware of them. In the case of children’s writers, they are most likely to have read the major children’s classics, but they have probably also read mainstream literature. Whether conscious about this or not, writers are affected by what they read and even by what they have not read, but only heard about. Not all people today have actually read Shakespeare, but many know the plots and characters of at least the most famous plays. Literature is also disseminated through other channels, such as film, television, comics and computer games. When we read a book, we are often struck by its similarities to others we know. For instance, if we compare The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone we will observe many similarities: events, happenings, settings, characters, symbols, and messages. At the same time, we will most likely note that in many ways the two novels are different and perhaps contemplate the nature of the difference

The Child As Self-Deceiver: Narrative Strategies in Katherine Paterson's and Patricia MacLachlan's Novels

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Memory of the Present: Empathy and Identity in Young Adult Fiction

Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new, stimulating approaches to literary texts and neuroscientists with new insights about human emotions, empathy, and memory through evidence from fiction. What have so far been largely neglected are the implications of cognitive criticism for the study of literature targeting a young audience, whose theory of mind and empathic skills are not yet fully developed. A cognitive approach to children's and young adult literature has to meet several challenges less relevant in general fiction. Firstly, how is a young fictional character's consciousness represented by an author whose cognitive and affective skills are ostensibly superior? Secondly, how do texts instruct their young readers to employ theory of mind in order to assess both the young protagonist's emotions and their understanding of other characters' emotions (higher-order mind-reading)? Thirdly, how can fiction support young people's development of their theory of mind? The paper will discuss these issues with a particular focus on memory and identity, expressed textually through tense and narrative perspective. Drawing on work by Lisa Zunshine (2006) and Blackey Vermeule (2010), the predominantly theoretical argument will be illustrated by a contemporary young adult novel, Slated (2012), by Teri Terry

Stemme, magt og genus i børne- og ungdomslitteraturen

Maria Nikolajeva beskæftiger sig med stemme, genus og magt i børnelitteraturen.Hvilken effekt har det eksempelvis, når en mandlig forfatter benytter sig af en kvindelig fortællerstemme – og når voksne skriver, som om de er børn

Reviews

The 1990 J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar. Illus. by Ted Nasmith. Reviewed by Paula DiSante. Letters: A Study in Friendship. C.S. Lewis and Don Giovanni Calabria. Reviewed by Nancy-Lou Patterson. Joseph Campbell, An Introduction. Robert A Segal. Reviewed by Nancy-Lou Patterson. The Magic Code: The Use of Magical Patterns in Fantasy for Children. Maria Nikolajeva. Reviewed by Pat Reynolds. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography. James Brabazon. Reviewed by Nancy-Lou Patterson

Ecoliteracy through imagery: a close reading of two wordless picture books

The purpose of this paper is to propose some ways of reading two wordless picture storybooks which have recently been published, by Suzy Lee and Bernardo Carvalho respectively. The objective is to analyse the ways in which the visual discourse can create an effective narrative using a variety of pictorial strategies. These works were not idly chosen, however. Both are concerned with ecoliteracy, having narratives that tell a story about a specific relationship between humans and the sea. Depicting maritime scenarios, the two picture books promote a special and symbolic approach to the natural environment. The narratives help to configure the environment as more than merely an undifferentiated space inhabited by living beings, this being the most elementary concept of ‘‘environment’’; rather, it is seen as an ecological arena involving the interaction between the landscape and the living beings it harbours. As such, the books assume the role of promoting not only habits of proto-literacy, but of ecoliteracy too.CIEC – FCT research unit 31

Engineering stories? A narratological approach to children's book apps

With the rise of smartphones and tablet pcs, children's book apps have emerged as a new type of children's media. While some of them are based on popular children's books such as Mo Willems’ Pigeon books or Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, others were specifically designed as apps. This paper focuses on examining book apps under the aspects of implied user strategies and narrative structure. Using a narratological framework that also takes into account the unique characteristics of the medium, a terminology for the analysis of book apps will be sketched out. Furthermore, an exemplary analysis of iOS books apps for pre- and grade school children comes to the conclusion that, far from offering the child users room for individual creativity, a large number of apps rather train their users in following prescribed paths of reading

Bakom rösten. Den implicita författaren i jagberättelser

”Jagformen används ofta i litteraturen om och för unga vuxna för att ge dessa en röst, för att komma så nära inpå unga människors tankar och känslor som möjligt. Samtidigt uppstår det flera berättartekniska problem, då det alltid finns en klyfta mellan det berättande och det upplevande jaget.” Maria Nikolajeva undersöker jagberättelsen ur ett maktteoretiskt perspektiv