Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? Nordic Ecocritical Approaches to Children’s Texts

Abstract

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? Nordic Ecocritical Approaches to Children’s Texts Catherine Olver (bio) Goga, Nina, Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Bjørg Oddrun Hallås, Aslaug Nyrnes, editors. Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures: Nordic Dialogues. Palgrave, 2018. 299 pp. $119.99 pb. ISBN 9783319904979. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures revisits the connections between cultural constructions of “nature” and “child.” The collection asks to what extent texts use traditional tropes “to place the child in an idyllic and romantic relation to nature” (6) and whether they reflect and engage with contemporary environmental challenges. Along with the expected analyses of picture books and novels, Nina Goga, Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Bjørg Oddrun Hallås, and Aslaug Nyrnes’s collection features a chapter on picture-book apps and another on a television series, as well as a pleasing amount of attention to illustrated poetry from several traditions. It focuses on contemporary Nordic texts but also includes chapters on Ted Hughes, Catalan poetry, The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, and novels by Mordicai Gerstein, Philip Pullman, and David Almond. The reference to “cultures” in the title acknowledges the specificity of cultural links between nature and the child, such as the Nordic emphasis on children’s nature competence, while highlighting the need to compare different cultural concepts of nature if humanities scholars wish to facilitate international co-operation on environmental issues. Most chapters are written by scholars associated with the research group “Nature in Children’s Literature: Landscapes and Beings—Fostering Ecocitizens,” led by Nina Goga and based at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. This edited collection makes the group’s productive discussions available to the wider community of ecocritics and scholars working in young people’s texts and cultures. The volume is [End Page 215] usefully organized into sections on “Ethics and Aesthetics,” “Landscape,” “Vegetal,” “Animal,” and “Human.” Marianne Røskeland opens the section on “Ethics and Aesthetics” by tackling the dilemma that, on the one hand, the desire to master nature is a cause of our environmental problems, and on the other, that “[m]astering one’s surroundings is also central in any child’s development . . .” (28). Her reading of the Norwegian picture book Sånt Som Er (Things That Are) details how the book challenges the reader’s anthropocentric process of categorizing objects; Røskeland brings Wolfgang Iser’s “gaps” and “negation of expectations” (138) to bear on James J. Gibson’s “affordances” (119) through her argument that a child reader perceives possible ways of using natural objects depicted in the book according to their own personal interests and physical limitations. The root meaning of “aesthetics,” relating to perception, arises again in chapter 3 as Gunnar Karlsen considers what it means to appreciate nature aesthetically and why it matters for the development of ecocitizens. He argues for a moderate cognitive view which combines some knowledge of the natural world with the multisensory experience of being in it—though when reading, emotional responses matter more than multisensory experiences for readers to develop moral skills. Nina Goga’s chapter demonstrates how the aesthetics of the novel Ishavspirater (The Ice Sea Pirates) and its environmental ethics are bound together in plot and character development. She extends Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” to propose that the protagonist of The Ice Sea Pirates is “a hero collector; one who collects and gathers experiences through her travels and encounters . . .” (60), moving from inherited knowledge about interspecies ethics to the understanding that comes from experience. In the second section on “Landscape,” Aslaug Nyrnes and Ahmed Khateeb each return to Rousseau, partnering Émile with the contemporary texts Tonje Glimmerdal (Astrid the Unstoppable) by Maria Parr and Stian Hole’s Garmann Trilogy. Both chapters explore contemporary children’s growth in pastoral landscapes using Terry Gifford’s concept of the “post-pastoral,” which “successfully suggests a collapse of the human/nature divide while being aware of the problematics involved” (26). Kristin Ørjasæter continues the investigation of post-pastoral and anti-pastoral landscapes by jumping into the jungles of Svart elfenben [End Page 216] (Black Ivory) and Skriket fra jungelen: En filmroman...