Editorial

This issue of Papers presents four essays canvassing a diverse range of theoretical and textual interests. Beverley Pennell&rsquo;s &lsquo;Ozzie Kids Flee the Garden of Delight: Reconfigurations of Childhood in Australian Children&rsquo;s Fictions&rsquo; tracks shifts in how childhood is conceptualised in contemporary Australian fiction for children, using as focus texts Joanne Horniman&rsquo;s Sand Monkeys and Odo Hirsch&rsquo;s trilogy of &lsquo;Hazel Green&rsquo; books. This essay argues that cultural discourses around children and childhood have shifted from an emphasis on adulthood and childhood as distinct and separate domains of experience, and from the idealisation of childhood as it manifested in Romantic textuality, to a blurring of boundaries between children and adults. In Australian texts, Pennell sees this shift as incorporating an increasing democratisation of power relations between adults and children, and an appreciation of the diversity of child populations. This essay invites comparative studies which explore the extent to which representations of childhood in Australian texts are similar to those evident in other national literatures for children.<br /

Playing at bullying : the postmodern ethic of Bully (Canis Canem edit)

This&nbsp;essay discusses Bully (Canis Canem Edit), considering the game\u27s antecedents (narratives involving young people in school settings) and the features which set it apart from other teen texts. It discusses the controversy surrounding the game and comes to the conclusion that the principal reasonfor&nbsp;unease on the part of parents and educational authorities is that Bully\u27s postmodernist ethic evades the binaries of liberal humanism and calls into&nbsp;question the foundations&nbsp;on which conventional ethical systems are based. Tbe paper considers several episodes from the game to flesh out its&nbsp;arguments about how the game manifests features of postmodernist textuality in its propensity for simultaneously deploying and interrogating references to historical and contemporary cultural practices

Reading indigeneity : the ethics of interpretation and representation

The transmission of indigenous stories is a fraught enterprise. In contrast to Western practices of the free circulation of ideas, many indigenous cultures view their stories as sacred, and have strict rules about who may tell certain tales, and in what settings and with whom they may be shared. Indigenous storytellers and novelists who want to tell contemporary stories also face the minefields of a history of (mis)representation of their cultures\u27 values and practices. Australian literary scholar Clare Bradford picks her way carefully through this minefield, identifying its perils and proposing a self-reflexive practice that enables scholars to approach these works with sensitivity; Abenaki children\u27s author Joseph Bruchac adds his own impressions and frustrations as an author to Clare\u27s frank assessment of the possibilities of criticism, cross-talk, and mutual understanding in the field

Picturing Australian history: visual texts in nonfiction for children

Time is one of the most prominent themes in the relatively young genre of children\u27s literature, for the young, like adults, want to know about the past. The historical novel of the West grew out of Romanticism, with its exploration of the inner world of feeling, and it grew to full vigor in the era of imperialism and the exploration of the physical world. From the end of the 18th century, children\u27s books flourished, partly in response to these cultural and political influences. After Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, literary works began to grapple with skepticism about the nature of time itself. This book explores how children\u27s writers have presented the theme and concept of time past. While the book looks primarily at literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, it considers a broad range of historical material treated in works from that period. Included are discussions of such topics as Joan of Arc in children\u27s literature, the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, colonial and postcolonial children\u27s literature, the Holocaust, and the supernatural. International in scope, the volume examines history and collective memory in Portuguese children\u27s fiction, Australian history in picture books, Norwegian children\u27s literature, and literary treatments of the great Irish famine. So too, the expert contributors are from diverse countries and backgrounds.</div

Editorial

When The Who sang about teenage angst in the 60s, their rock anthem &lsquo;Talking about my Generation&rsquo; captured the divide between youth and beyond. Today, another divide &ndash; the digital divide &ndash; speaks to the issues of access, capital, and input that follow digital technologies. Like the earlier &lsquo;me generation&rsquo;, the new millennium D(igital) generation remains enigmatic, its members variously praised for their technological wizardry, criticised for their self-absorption, and pathologised for their unsociability. The D generation does not comprise youth alone, but the young are more exposed than others to the influence of new media and digital technologies. And like previous youth generations, they are often viewed as degenerate. A cybernetic degeneration symbolising society&rsquo;s fears and cultural anxieties concerning the dehumanising prospects of technology appears most vividly in arguments about youth (Green &amp; Bigum&rsquo;s &lsquo;aliens in the classroom&rsquo; [1993] is an apt description in this respect). Such negative rhetoric presents a dystopic view that tempers the more utopian, but equally reductionist visions of new technologies.<br /