Estudio comparativo de la literatura infantil portuguesa de Luísa Ducla Soares y rumana de Ana Blandiana: Censura de claveles y bigotes.

Comme un million de papillons noirs by Laura Nsafou:How an Afrofeminist Picture Book Gave the Impetus to a Discussion about Inclusive Children's Literature in France Élodie Malanda (bio) The need for inclusive children's and young adult (YA) literature in France has only recently started being discussed in mainstream spaces. The absence of inclusivity in children's literature has been a topic1 in the main journal about children's literature in December 2019 but no study on ethnic diversity in children's books has been done, and no broad movement like #WeNeedDiverseBooks2 has emerged. The traditional French model of universalism implicitly erases all collective identity other than the French one, making it difficult to raise the question of the needs of minority groups. Thus, for a long time, the only voices advocating the need for more inclusivity in children's literature were the lone ones of individual blogging parents or librarians. This changed when, in September 2017, a young author of Congolese and Martinique descent, Laura Nsafou, published the picture book Comme un million de papillons noirs. With this story celebrating nappy, textured hair and showing mainly Black characters, the need for racial and ethnic diversity in children's and YA literature suddenly became a topic in French mainstream media. Before her fame as an author, Nsafou was already a well-established Afrofeminist blogger known as Mrs. Roots. Since 2013, her posts about the gender and race discrimination faced by Black women in France helped spread the ideas of Afrofeminism—an Afro-French feminist movement that fights against the oppression of Black women by men and by white women and claims the right for Black women to speak for themselves. Nsafou's picture book is deeply shaped by her Afrofeminist activism. Comme un million de papillons noirs tells the story of Adé, a Black girl who gets [End Page 164] bullied for her nappy hair and who, throughout the story, learns to love her hair and thus to accept herself. Despite being considered "unsaleable" by traditional publishing houses, the picture book is currently in its fourteenth printing and has received media coverage from major national newspapers like Libération, Le Nouvel Obs, Le Monde, the women's magazine Glamour, and the online newspapers HuffPost and Slate. Titles like "La diversité, grande absente de la littérature de jeunesse" (Amétis)—"Diversity, the big absentee in children's and YA literature"—pointed out the lack of diversity as the number one subject of the articles about Nsafou's picture book. It seems Comme un million de papillons noirs launched the interest of French mainstream media for the diversity issue in children's and YA books. This paper examines how one children's book served as the catalyst to grow broad discussions about inclusive children's literature in France. On the one hand, it shows how Comme un million de papillons noirs challenges the French understanding of universalism and how the narrative choices of Laura Nsafou succeeded in raising the attention of mainstream media to the lack of representation of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) children in children's literature. On the other hand, it analyzes the social context of the book's publication, linking its success to social media activity, which has been changing the power relation between authors of color and the mainly white industry of French publishing. 1. French Universalism and the Impossible Discussion about Inclusive Children's and YA Literature The reticence of France to acknowledge the need for more ethnic and racial diversity in children's and YA literature is deeply rooted in France's self-concept as a country where everyone is equal and where no distinction of race, ethnicity, or religion is made. The first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a core statement of the French Revolution, declares: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good." This idea remains valid today: the first article of the current constitution (adopted in 1958) says that "France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It guarantees equality of all citizens before the...

Association for Childhood Education International (1989). Bibliography of books for children. Wheaton, MD: Author. Beaty, J. J. (1997). Building bridges with multicultural books for children 3-5. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bishop, R. S. (1994). Kaleidoscope: A multicultural booklist for grades K-8. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Bosma, B., & Goth, N. D. (Eds.) (1995). Children's literature in an integrated curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press/International Reading Association. Day, F. A. (1994). Multicultural voices in contemporary literature: A resource for teachers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Dreyer, S. S. (1989). The bookfinder: A guide to children's books about the needs and problems of youth aged 2-15. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service. Dyson, A. H., & Genishi, C. (Eds.). The need for story: Cultural diversity in classroom and community. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Garcia, J., & Pugh, S. L. (1992). Children's nonfiction multicultural literature: Some promises and disappointments. Equity and Excellence, 25(2-4), 151-154. Gillespie, J. T. (1990). Best books for children: Preschool through grade 6. New York: Bowker. Harms, J. M. (1996). Picture books to enhance the curriculum. New York: H.W. Wilson. Huck, C. S., Hepler, S., & Hickman, J. (1994). Children's literature in the elementary school (4th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Jalongo, M. R. (1988/1993). Young children and picture books: Literature from infancy to six. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Jensen, J. M., & Roser, N. L. (1993). Adventuring with books: A book list for preKgrade 6. Urbana, IL: National Council of teachers of English. Kraus, N. (1997). Storytelling figures: A Pueblo tradition. Book Links, 7(3), 32-36. Kruse, G. M. (February, 1992). No single season: Multicultural literature for all children. Wilson Library Bulletin, 30-31. Kruse, G. M., & Horning, K. T. (1991). Multicultural literature for children and young adults: A selected listing of books 1980-1990 by and about people of color. Madison, WI: Wisconsin Department of Education. Lima, C. W., & Lima, J. A. (1993). A to zoo: Subject access to children's picture books. New York: Bowker. Micklos, J. (1995/1996). 30 years of minorities in children's books. Reading Today, 13(1), 61-64. Miller-Lachman, L. (1991). Our family, our friends, our world: An annotated guide to significant multicultural books for children and teenagers. New York: Bowker. New York Public Library (1989). The black experience in children's books. New York: Author. Norton, D. E. (1995). Through the eyes of a child: Introduction to children's literature. Columbus, OH: Merrill. Oliver, E. I. (1994). Crossing the mainstream: Multicultural perspectives in teaching literature. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Raines, S., & Isbell, B. (1994). Stories: Children's literature in early education. Albany, NY: Delmar. Rothlein, L., & Meinbach, A. M. (1991). The literature connection: Using children's books in the classroom. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman/GoodYear. Rothlein, L., & Meinbach, A. M. (1996). Legacies: Using children's literature in the classroom. New York: HarperCollins. Rudman, M. K. (1993). Children's literature: Resource for the classroom. Norwood, MA: ChristopherGordon. Sims, R. (1982). Shadow and substance: Afro-American experience in contemporary children's fiction. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Slapin, B., & Seale, D. (1991). Through Indian eyes: The native experience in books for children. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers. Smith, C. A. (1989). From wonder to wisdom: Using Stories to help children grow. New York: Penguin. Smith, K. P. (1993). The multicultural ethic and connec-

Arabic-Language Children's Literature:A Project of the International Youth Library Jochen Weber (bio) Despite their geographical size as well as cultural and political importance, Arabic-speaking countries still play a comparatively minor role in international children's and youth literature. Even though interest has grown in recent years, Arabic-language children's and young adult books and their authors and illustrators are little noticed internationally. This is also true of the German-language book market, in which translations from Arabic are still in short supply and the availability of non-translated original-language books is low. There are hardly any booksellers specializing in Arabic literature. Public libraries and school libraries are often inadequately equipped with books for young Arabic-speaking readers. One reason for this is the lack of information for librarians, educators, and other mediators about trends and recommended titles. The authors and illustrators, as well as topics and contents of Arabic-language children's books, are mostly unknown in Germany, although the need for and interest in exchange with the Arabicspeaking world has grown. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. This lack of knowledge and access has become particularly evident since 2015, when the number of refugees and immigrants from Syria, Iraq, and other countries arriving in Europe greatly increased. A large proportion of the migrants arrived in Germany, where they needed to be admitted, sheltered, cared for, and integrated as quickly as possible. The demand for original-language multilingual media soon grew in libraries and schools, as well as in institutions where refugees and those seeking protection live. Children's books are important mediums and mediators for integration. They can be inclusive and promote intercultural exchange. Books written in the original language can provide a piece of home for young people who have fled war or poverty and strive to preserve their language as a link to their origins. At the same time, this literature can also build bridges to the Arab world, which is [End Page 93] often perceived in a stereotypical and prejudiced way. The prerequisite for this productive exchange is that Arab children's and young adult books are made known in German-speaking countries and brought to libraries, and translations are encouraged. This situation inspired a three-year project, which the International Youth Library (IYL) launched in 2017 and is pioneering in Germany. The project is funded by the city of Munich and aims to provide an insight into Arabic-language children's literature while recommending books that might be suitable for use in libraries, kindergartens, and schools. The project also encourages German-language publishers to take a closer look at the children's book production in Arabic-speaking countries and to discover books that could be of interest to their book market and deserve to be translated. The IYL is happy to have enlisted the Syrian scholar and cultural historian Azad Hamoto, who has been living in Munich for several years, to work on this project. The work began with a survey of the Arabic-language children's and young adult book market. Which subjects, themes, and genres play a significant role? Which authors and illustrators deserve special attention? Where are interesting, important publishers located? With these questions in mind, numerous titles from the current publishing programs have been reviewed and critically examined over the past few years as part of the project. Hasmig Chahinian, specialist for Arabic-language children's and youth literature at the Centre National de la Litteŕature pour la Jeunesse (CNLJ—IBBY France) at the French National Library, assisted with valuable advice and insights. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. In the spring of 2018, the IYL published a reference catalog presenting recommended titles. In May 2019, a second catalog followed (Figures 2 and 3). A third catalog will be published in spring 2020 at the completion of the three-year project. The twenty-eight-page German-language catalogs each offer forty annotated titles, along with bibliographic data, images of book covers, and brief biographical information on authors and illustrators, as well as a name and subject index. On the occasion of the publication of the first catalog, the...

238Reviews such lists is difficult, however, when the collection as a whole manages to maintain a high level of interest. Bassett's headnotes about each critic are brief but accurate. Michigan State UniversityLinda W. Wagner Block, Ann and Carolyn Riley, eds. Children's Literature Review: Excerpts from Reviews, Criticism, and Commentary on Books for Children and Young People. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1976. 201 pp. Cloth: $25.00. Commire, Anne. Something About the Author: Facts and Pictures about Contemporary Authors and Illustrators of Books forYoung People. Vol. 8. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1976. 221 pp. Cloth: $25.00. Nearly 10,000 new or reissued children's book titles were published last year, and the amount ofnew material for children has been increasing geometrically for the past decade. An editor for a national reviewing publication recently said that each week he reads between two and three hundred children's books. Experienced librarians, in command of their fields, often conceed, in private, their inability to sort through the mountain of material necessary to make their acquisition requests. Criticism and scholarship in children's literature has also burgeoned during the past ten years in response to this tremendous outpouring of children's books and the concommitantneed forcritical tools to handle them. Both of these volumes reflect this growth and the fact that, with increasing frequency, critical opinion is being based and choices ultimately are being made on the basis of reviews and prior knowledge of an author's or illustrator's work. Neither of these two works would be neccessary were it not for the impossibility for many researchers, librarians, and teachers to keep up with the field. Doing so, in fact, has become like one of the labors of Psyche. The Children's Literature Reviewis the first volume in a projected, open-ended series. It attempts to present, through edited summaries from reviews and othercritical sources, a representative picture of what reviewers are saying about a children's book author and his works. The format for each entry is to offer a few brief, biographical facts (all too brief) followed by a series of general statements about the author's importance. The latter can run to ratherlengthy, acute assessments ofan author's work, or they can read like theblurbs that used to be run for foreign films in lieu of coming attractions (the book vacillates between those two extremes). Finally, each reviewed work by the author is given at least one reviewer's comment. The reviewers' remarks tend to be edited for their assessments of the book's utility, appropriateness, and value. The sections of the reviews we have here would probably be the parts we would check, too, but we do not have, because of the space limitations, the detail or the accretions of argument that have led the critic to his judgment. In the case of short articles this is less important than in the case of excerpted sections of books where a much broader thesis may beinformingthe critic's judgment, and this over-view does not find its way into the fragment we are given. One of Block and Riley's criteria for selection oftheir excerpts is"Will today's student, teacher, or critic find this pertinent to today's needs?" This purpose is stated broadly enough to include many "needs" and, indeed, it does perform a very useful service of making a wealth of critical material availablz for quick reference. It is helpful for getting Studies in American Fiction239 a grasp of recent authors of children's books, among them Joan Aiken, Lloyd Alexander, Roald Dahl, Meindert Dejong, Paula Fox, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Virginia Hamilton, Nat Hentoff, Madeline L'Engle, Maurice Sendak, I. B. Singer, and E. B. White. Some"masters" have found their way into the book: A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, and Edward Lear. There should be more time devoted in the text to these acknowledged classics of children's literature lest we sacrifice what is important about the past to the overwhelming"needs" of the "present". I think one of the flaws of the book is that it doesn't balance established authors and works with more contemporary ones to give the reader...

Reviewed by: Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (bio) Beverly Lyon Clark . Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. The reception of children's literature in general, and the history of children's literature research in particular, are areas of research long in need of further exploration. Clark's engaging study is a detailed and thorough analysis which focuses on the marginalization of children's [End Page 112] literature in the United States, both by the mainstream critical establishment and within the academy. Based on the study of primary materials such as reviews and articles in both the popular press and scholarly journals, lists of recommended books, anthologies, and literary histories, Clark's monograph sheds light on the changing attitudes toward children's literature and childhood in America in the course of 150 years. Whereas children's literature was highly regarded by the nineteenth-century cultural elite, many critics and scholars have been dismissive of this topic since the beginning of the twentieth century, downplaying children's literature as "kiddie lit" and "childish." These devaluative terms reveal fundamental shifts in the assessment of the literary value of books read by both children and adults, leading to an increasing bifurcation of high and low literature. Clark divides her book into eight chapters. In the first chapter she gives a summary of the central theoretical concepts she employs, ranging from reception theory to gender studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. Overall, however, Clark reflects on the causes for the disregard of children's literature by theoretical approaches such as New Criticism, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and New Historicism. Whereas these theories reach out across the boundaries marked by gender, race, ethnicity, and class, they generally do not consider age as a relevant analytical category. Even scholars who specialize in feminist studies have rarely recognized the position of the child, although in nineteenth-century literary criticism children's books were often regarded as suitable reading for both women and children. This once-firm connection between feminism and childhood has nonetheless been weakened in favor of an adult-centered perspective influenced by the image of childhood as a stage of immaturity which needs to be surpassed. In the next chapter Clark turns to two key figures in the representation of childhood at the turn of the century. By opposing Frances Hodgson Burnett's bestselling children's book Little Lord Fauntleroy to Henry James' adult novel What Maisie Knew, a text written from the child's point of view, Clark stresses the complexity of the changing attitudes toward childhood. The close textual analysis of these books demonstrates the depth of Clark's understanding of both contemporary literary conventions and the discussion of gender issues. Whereas Burnett's contributions to children's literature were regarded as "great literature," thus stressing her critical acclaim in the nineteenth century, her works disappeared from lists of recommended reading after 1910. In order to gain reputation in the academy, James and his circle stressed the unsurmountable opposition of childhood and maturity, thus supporting [End Page 113] the bifurcation of children's and adult literature. In addition, James's main thesis, which is based on an "incongruity between attention to youth and attention to style" (36), leads frequently to an "invisibility" of children's books in the popular press and in academic and literary circles. Against this background, in the third chapter Clark offers a sketch of the changing institutional frameworks associated with literature, based on an extensive reading of American periodicals from the mid-1850s to the end of the twentieth century and on a concise study of three important literary histories: Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-21), Literary History of the United States (1948), and Columbia History of the United States (1988). America's most well-known literary journals regularly reviewed books written for both children and adults. Clark focuses on the decisive role of Horace Scudder, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, all of whom advocated and published children's literature and contributed to its high esteem with reviews in journals such as Youth's Companion and...

Indigenous Young Adult Novels:An Introduction Eric Gary Anderson (bio), Angela Calcaterra (bio), and Christopher Pexa (bio) This special issue participates in a watershed moment in the history of Indigenous Young Adult (YA) literature. In 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) for the first time awarded the Caldecott Medal for "the most distinguished American picture book for children" to an Indigenous artist, Michaela Goade (Tlingit), who illustrated We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom (Turtle Mountain). The following year, the ALA for the first time presented a Newbery Medal Honor Award for "distinguished contribution to American literature for children" to an Indigenous writer, Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache), for her novel A Snake Falls to Earth. The ALA also included several Indigenous works in its "2022 Notable Children's Books" list: Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids, edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee Creek), whose novel Hearts Unbroken (2018) is the subject of one of the essays in this issue; Borders by Thomas King (Cherokee); Healer of the Water Monster by Brian Young (Navajo Nation); Sharice's Big Voice: A Native Kid Becomes a Congresswoman by Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) and Nancy K. Mays; and We Are Still Here! Native American Truths Everyone Should Know by Traci Sorell (Cherokee). Such mainstream recognition and approbation is, of course, but part of the story. Indigenous people have been telling stories for young audiences for a very long time and writing children's and young adult books for well over one hundred years. From oral literatures that enthralled Indigenous youths gathered around the fire, to early written work by Charles Alexander Eastman (Dakota), Zitkála-Šá/Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Dakota), Francis La Flesche (Omaha), Susette La Flesche (Omaha), and Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), to more recent YA texts including The Birchbark House (1999) by Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), The Night Wanderer (2007) by Drew Hayden Taylor (Curve Lake First Nations), Wabanaki Blues (2015) [End Page 265] by Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (Mohegan), The Marrow Thieves (2017) by Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay Métis), Apple in the Middle (2018) by Dawn Quigley (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe), and Firekeeper's Daughter (2021) by Angeline Boulley (Anishinaabe), Indigenous authors have captivated young and adult audiences alike with stories that feature young protagonists, coming-of-age plots, and crucial insights about being and becoming in an often hostile world. Publications including Mandy Suhr-Sytsma's Self-Determined Stories (2019) and Debbie Reese (Nambé Owingeh) and Jean Mendoza's co-edited "American Indians in Children's Literature"—a blog devoted since 2006 to the critical analysis of Indigenous people in children's and YA literature and to the promotion of Indigenous-authored YA texts—have highlighted the long-standing significance of Native YA literatures for Indigenous communities. And the American Indian Library Association (AILA), founded in 1979 and an affiliate of the ALA, "addresses the library-related needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives. Members are individuals and institutions interested in the development of programs to improve Indian library, cultural, and informational services in school, public, and research libraries on reservations" ("About AILA"). Beginning in 2006, AILA has biennially presented the American Indian Youth Literature Awards, which are juried by a majority-Indigenous committee. Despite this important work, however, scholarship largely has not kept up with the proliferation and increasing visibility of Indigenous YA literature. For this special issue, we wanted to instigate a timely intervention by gathering essays that examine Indigenous YA novels both in their own right and in conversation with the conventions of settler YA fiction more broadly. But, as these essays clearly demonstrate, what is most needed right now is detailed consideration of the texts themselves and the ways they negotiate the continuing systemic presence of a settler colonialism that reaches much farther and deeper than just settler YA writing. This is to say that the most pressing questions and concerns these authors raise about Indigenous YA fiction are the same pressing concerns and questions that drive much intellectual work in Native American and Indigenous Studies. The essays in this issue consider, for example, how Indigenous YA fiction addresses Indigenous sovereignty, community, resistance, resurgence, trauma, fear, dreams, desires, and futurities. Like Indigenous...

Reviewed by: The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature by Karen Coats Lara Saguisag (bio) Karen Coats. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Students, educators, and scholars who are seeking comprehensive and accessible critical introductions to the study of children's and young adult literature have a few notable titles to choose from. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer's The Pleasures of Children's Literature, originally published in 1991 with a third edition released in 2003, remains an essential introductory handbook on children's literature studies. In the more recent Reading Children's Literature: A Critical Introduction (2013), Carrie Hintz and Eric Tribunella cover a wide variety of forms, genres, and themes and skillfully guide readers in using the lens of age, race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and ability to arrive at nuanced readings of texts for young people. It seems fair to expect that a new critical introduction to children's literature studies not only match the scope and accessibility of existing titles but also offer new perspectives and content. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature by Karen Coats undoubtedly meets these expectations. This thoughtfully organized, wide-ranging, and innovative book draws from cultural studies, literary studies, and child development studies in its consideration of diverse forms and genres. Chapter 1 deftly illustrates how knowledge of the histories of ideologies of childhood is fundamental to understanding the histories of literature for young people. Chapter 3 works to demystify literary theory, assuring readers that "we are always already theorists" (84); framed by an anecdote in which a teenaged girl and her friends dissect her conversation with her crush, the chapter covers a variety of theoretical paradigms including formalism, deconstructionism, New Historicism, and reader response criticism. Other chapters provide substantial discussions of poetry, picture books, films, folk narratives, nonfiction, realistic fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. Each chapter is supplemented by case studies, prompts for writing and discussion, and suggestions for further reading, including Internet sources. These supplements will likely be effective in generating vibrant classroom discussions, increasing student engagement, and helping emerging scholars become confident, independent researchers. The volume is primarily addressed to undergraduate and graduate students, but it will also appeal to educators who are looking for creative approaches to structuring and enlivening their courses as well as experienced scholars who are committed to keeping pace with contemporary debates that are animating children's and young adult literature studies. I do wish that chapter 6, which discusses images in children's literature, did more to clarify the differences between various visual-verbal narrative forms. The chapter certainly enables readers to develop a vocabulary to discuss [End Page 147] pictures in texts for young people. It historicizes the functions of illustrations in children's books and shows how attention to visual elements as well as issues of production and audience can yield varied and rich interpretations of visual-verbal narratives. But some discussion of, say, the different ideological frameworks and histories of picture books and comics may be necessary to illustrate the complex ways pictures in visual-verbal narratives for young people are apprehended by readers across time and culture. As the whole, the book instructs readers to be responsible, inquisitive scholars. And it does so in such an openhearted manner. In her introduction to the volume, the author provides a short biography and invites readers to "call her Karen" (5). As such, Karen not only models the practice of acknowledging one's cultural position; she also deliberately establishes a tone of affability, demonstrating that an intimate, personal approach is not necessarily incompatible with meaningful scholarship. In the final chapter, Karen invites new scholars to "[enter] the professional conversation," providing comprehensive lists of journals and professional associations as well as advice on research, writing, and disseminating one's work. Throughout the book, Karen cracks jokes, shares personal anecdotes, acknowledges questions she continues to wrestle with, and urges readers to disagree with and complicate the points that she makes. In short, she displays how pleasure, uncertainty, and exchange of knowledge are part and parcel of the practice of scholarship. Bloomsbury Introduction pays attention to recent trends in children's...

Reviewed by: Art & Story: The Role of Illustration in Multicultural Literature for Youth Michelle H. Martin (bio) Art & Story: The Role of Illustration in Multicultural Literature for Youth Ed. Anthony L. Manna and Carolyn S. BrodieFt. Atkinson: Highsmith, 1997 Art & Story: The Role of Illustration in Multicultural Literature for Youth offers readers the best children's book illustration speeches and conference presentations from the annual Kent State University Virginia Hamilton Conferences between 1985 (the year of the first conference) and 1996. Following their 1992 volume, Many Faces, Many Voices, Multicultural Literary Experiences for Youth: The Virginia Hamilton Conference, this second volume from the Hamilton Conferences addresses editors Anthony L. Manna and Carolyn S. Brodie's concern that the conference is not giving ample attention to the visual elements of multicultural children's literature. The material presented here suggests that the conference is now contributing much to the national and international dialogues on children's picture book illustration. The volume begins with an interview that the editors conducted with Virginia Hamilton about the role of illustration in picture books. Since Hamilton writes but does not illustrate her own picture books, her comments shed light on the relationship (or sometimes the lack thereof) between the editor, the author, and the illustrator; her comments emphasize that Hamilton's long-standing success as a writer has given her a greater measure of control over the visual elements of her books than she would have if she were less successful. Manna and Brodie include contributions by the following authors, illustrators, editors, and publishers in this volume: Arnold Adoff, Pat Cummings, Floyd Cooper, Brian Pinkney, Vera B. Williams, Shonto Begay, Lulu Delacre, Patricia Polacco, James Ransome, Dianne Hess, Opal J. Moore, Sue McCleaf Nespeca, and Maureen White. Reading about children's literature from the perspective of the authors, artists, conference organizers, and the "gatekeepers" (who determine what does and does not get published) may help readers to understand the complex dynamics of this genre as an industry, a literary field of study, an educational arena, and an important source of culturally rich entertainment for countless children. Four appendices provide invaluable information on the history of the Virginia Hamilton Conference as well as helpful lists of multicultural children's and young adult literature and media. While I can envision a number of good uses for Art & Story, I was disappointed with the lack of structure in most of the speeches. The majority of the contributors offer interesting vignettes from their life and work and talk about the creation and/or publication of specific texts; many share how established authors have inspired and helped them. Although themes related to creativity as a minority artist recur throughout the chapters, few of the individual speeches have an underlying argument, and there seems to be little, as a volume, that ties the chapters together. Perhaps this is in part a function of the editors' having compiled into a single volume unedited speeches that span eleven years which have no unifying question or theme. Despite this weakness, the contributions of Patricia Polacco, Arnold Adoff, and Opal J. Moore stayed with me long after I had finished reading the volume. Every writer has a story to tell, but in her essay "Heroes," Polacco stands out as a storyteller extraordinaire. Apparently holding a scarf in her hand during the speech, Polacco introduces the audience to her babushka, a word which also means "grandmother" in Russian. Polacco tells the story of her mother's attachment to her native land through the babushka and how her mother's mother made a quilt from the fabrics of their native Russia so that her daughter could remember all of the people to whom those clothes once belonged. By using good storytelling, Polacco argues convincingly for the essential role of excellent storytelling in family preservation and the importance of authentic cultural voices in multicultural children's literature. While reading Polacco's chapter, one can easily forget that this is an essay about her stories rather than a story itself. Adoff's two-page chapter, "To Lisa Desimini," is by far the most creative and unusual contribution in the [End Page 173] volume. Typed (ostensibly on a typewriter) in bold...

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature ed. by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva Nina Goga Companions are needed both in life and literature. Old companions do not need to be rejected because new ones appear. New companions are not necessarily better than old ones, but they may be different and hence able to offer new perspectives, guide through unexplored fields, and confront or challenge with their surprising queries. This also applies to The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature, compiled and edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva. The two editors have gathered together a team of twenty-four skilled researchers, including themselves. Even though most of them are affiliated with Anglo-American institutions, they still cover a wide range of topics. The Companion is structured in three parts. The first part contains eleven chapters dealing with contemporary directions in children's literature scholarship. Amongst these, there are several related to the larger field of ecocriticism, such as the chapters on posthumanism (Flanagan), animal studies (Jaques), feminist ecocriticism (Curry), and spatiality (Carroll). The large number of chapters concerned with environmental and ecocritical issues is indicative of overall changes within the field of children's literature research. In comparison, The Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature (2009) contains only one chapter on animal and object stories and one on fantasy's alternative geography. It seems that in 2009 these two chapters were samples of "what comes next?" The second part offers eight chapters on contemporary trends in children's and young adult literature, covering themes of great current interest, such as seriality (Kümmerling-Meibauer), translation (Lathey), and picturebooks in foreign language learning contexts (Mourão). It also covers chapters on what may be the most difficult field to circumscribe, namely digital or multimodal children's literature. More (technically) descriptive than literary explorative, these chapters may prove to be difficult for inexperienced students. Perhaps the field itself has grown too vast and disparate to be covered within a few chapters. The editors, Beauvais and Nikolajeva, state that their companion first of all seeks to "capture the most recent trends and phenomena in children's and young adult literature itself as well as international research; to anticipate the possible new avenues that research can take" (5). While the current trends and phenomena are considered in the first two parts, new avenues are explored in the third and final part, called "Unmapped Territories." Among the contributors to this part are, in addition to the editors themselves, three scholars who also authored other chapters in the volume (Kokkola, Joosen, and Flanagan). The nine chapters that constitute this part are generally shorter and more suggestive than the other chapters. The topics covered range from distant reading to evolutionary criticism and genetic studies. Regardless of the compelling labels, some of the proposed territories turn out to be less unmapped than one might initially think. Several chapters in the volume could be put forward as outstanding examples of academic thinking and writing; Vanessa Joosen's chapter on age studies in children's literature [End Page 69] is a case in point. Its purpose is "to explore how any age influences the human body, mind and behavior and how relationships between generations are shaped" (79). Joosen clearly states the focus of the chapter, maps the theoretical framework, and provides the readers with an instructive close reading of a selected children's book. Finally, the author calls upon other scholars to pay attention to age in children's literature: "children's literature studies needs to draw more on age studies to address the construction of age for young readers if it does not want to reproduce age-related prejudice naively" (88). It has been a true delight for the reviewer to discover The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature to be an up-to-date, wide-ranging, and future-oriented companion that can be recommended to a broad audience. It is an inspiring encouragement to map new territories of children's literature or to carefully reconsider and nuance those already sketched. Nina Goga Western Norway University of Applied Sciences Copyright © 2018 Bookbird, Inc.

Reviewed by: Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture ed. by Jessica R. McCort Tiffany Morin (bio) Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture. Edited by Jessica R. McCort. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Horror has long found a place in children's stories, from the Grimms' fairy tales to the Goosebumps books. Early on, this fear served a didactic function, as it was used to encourage childhood mindfulness. Since the days of the Brothers Grimm, however, the relationship between horror and children's literature has grown more complicated. As it is only in recent decades that horror has been recognized as a genre within children's and adolescent fiction, there remains quite a bit of ground to be covered in studying it. Jessica McCort's goal in developing this book was to "examine a variety of texts that engage, both overtly and subtly, with constructs of gothic horror in order to begin to demonstrate the pervasiveness and the appeal of horror in children's and young adult literature, film, and television," with the intention of looking "for patterns in the narratives' rules of engagement with the horror genre, as well as with their audiences" (5). While some adults argue that horror fiction is inappropriate for child and young adult readers, many of the chapters in this book suggest that "elements of horror can be viewed as beneficial for young readers and viewers because they encourage children to recognize that there are real dangers in the world they will have to confront, unveiling the terror in the familiar" (22). Ultimately, children are better equipped to deal with real horror after confronting it in the safety of a fictitious world. The first chapter, Justine Gieni's "Punishing the Abject Child: The Delight and Discipline of Body Horror in Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter," discusses how the German psychiatrist's 1854 children's book uses frightening stories to teach children about "etiquette, safety, and hygiene" (37). As a picture book, Struwwelpeter might be presumed to be aimed at young children; however, the verses have found audiences of many ages. Scholars interested in children's picture books or childhood studies are thus not the only ones who might find this essay worth their attention; scholars of nineteenth-century German literature should consider Gieni's ideas as well. Gieni maintains that "Hoffman's use of violence is not gratuitous or pedagogical, but rather a transgressive and satirical indictment of a historically and culturally specific social order" (38). This claim undoes the idea that Struwwelpeter is a didactic text; Gieni sees it rather [End Page 253] as an ambiguous work that uses horror to question the "dominant social order" (38) while delighting its audiences. Gieni argues that because the gruesome punishments are so exaggerated, they become amusing, helping children to "face their fears through laughter" (39). She analyzes three examples from Struwwelpeter to show how they function to inspire reactions of fear and laughter as satire within nineteenth-century German discourse. That modern readers are often shocked by the content, Gieni suggests, "reveals as much, if not more, about culture today" as it does about Hoffman's outlook (57). While the appropriateness of Struwwelpeter for the modern child is still in question, this essay makes an interesting addition to the conversation about the book's literary value. In the second chapter, "A Wonderful Horrid Thing: Edward Gorey, Charles Dickens, and Drawing the Horror out of Childhood Death," A. Robin Hoffman discusses how children's literature deals with the concept of a child's death. This essay would be especially interesting to scholars whose interests fall within the Victorian era. The chapter explores how Dickens influenced Gorey's writing, contrasting the two authors' treatments of child deaths. While the children in Dickens's stories highlight the sacredness of childhood, which renders their deaths—represented primarily through words—even more tragic, Gorey's work is satiric and does not shy away from showing death in pictures. Hoffman compares the illustrations in each author's stories, noting of Gorey that "the page layouts and elements of book design interact with twentieth-century American attitudes to render childhood death an object...

The Delights of Impossibility:No Children, No Books, Only Theory Roderick McGillis (bio) Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary in "theorizing," in making sense out of what was happening. —bell hooks My title refers to impossibility. Let me explain. We have convincing studies of children's literature that demonstrate the non-existence of children, their books, and writing about their books. Children are non-existent because the notions of childhood we have are constructions of adults who cannot recall precisely what it was like to be a child; all definitions of the child and childhood are made by those who are not children, and therefore these definitions do not speak of something absolute, but rather of something relative that satisfies the desires and hopes of the adults who make the definitions. Children's books do not exist because, once again, adults write books for children, and in doing so seek to draw children into the world as the adult perceives it; children, whatever they are, do not (or only rarely) write the books they read. And the criticism of children's books does not exist because it cannot exist if there are no children's books to criticize; indeed, even if there were such things as children's books, the criticism of them would still come from those adults who occupy positions of authority within the institutions that offer commentary on books: the popular press, the more specialized journals, and the universities. In other words, what we call children's literature is an invention of adults who need to have something to write about, something to play with, something to help them construct a vision of the way things are and ought to be so that the present generation, and more importantly, the next generation will behave according to standards those adults who write children's books and publish them feel comfortable with. The previous paragraph echoes, rather faintly, the work of Jacqueline Rose (The Case of Peter Pan; or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, 1984) and Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child, 1994). I evoke these writers not to sanction their theories or to criticize them, but rather to raise some of the problems we have with children's literature. The first problem is, then, definition. Rose and Lesnik-Oberstein problematize the definition of children's literature by arguing that such a literature does not exist. For those who think that it does exist, another problem arises: how do we define children's literature vis-à-vis its audience? In other words, when we speak of children's literature, do we speak of books marketed for people of a certain age, and if so, then what age? Are fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds children? Are people who wear diapers children? Just whom do we refer to when we say "children"? At what age does one stop being a child? Is there such a creature as an "inner child" in each of us? And even if we can decide the answer to these questions, we have another problem, one that Peter Hunt keeps insisting on: how do we incorporate a sense of history into what we mean by children's books? If the term "children's books" refers to those books that children read, then what does this say about all those books long forgotten, but perhaps recently dredged up by literary scholars of a historical bent who snoop about the by-ways of literary history for the likes of Eliza Fenwick or Mary Martha Sherwood or Catherine Sinclair or Lucy Clifford or L. T. Meade or Evelyn Everett-Greene? Who reads these authors any more? Do books that once may have been children's books cease to be what they once were? Do they become something else? But let me return to another perennial problem in the study of children's books. How do we take seriously books written for an audience of juveniles who have hardly acquired the skills to read anything beyond the most rudimentary stories, written in the most rudimentary language, and dealing with the most rudimentary subjects? If we have a children...

Celebrating Vibrant and Diverse Work Around Global Children's Literature Petros Panaou (bio) and Janelle Mathis (bio) With five peer-reviewed articles, two Children and Their Books contributions, an author interview, four Letters, an International Youth Library Report, eight Postcards, six Books on Books reviews, and Focus IBBY, this is one of the most content-rich issues we have edited so far. Only now, looking at it in its completed form, do we marvel in its riches and admire the vibrant and diverse scholarly, educational, and creative work around global children's literature it captures. The peer-reviewed articles in this open-theme issue are indicative of the diverse richness mentioned above. They explore such diverse topics such as play and adventure in Holocaust children's literature, Ecocriticism and the representation of forests by a beloved Swedish author, authenticity and Colonialism in graphic memoirs, rainbow families in global picturebooks, and a Lebanese illustrator's depiction of Arab youth and societies. In "The Holocaust as Adventure in Uri Orlev's Children's Books," Daniel Feldman argues that, by portraying war as an audacious game and survival as a thrilling adventure, Orlev's juvenile texts about the Holocaust forge a powerful connection between the child victim of the Holocaust and the contemporary reader of children's literature, who unite in imagining the rich, vivid, and sometimes terrifying world of the book as real. In "The Giving Trees," Rachel Sakrisson analyzes three picturebooks by Elsa Beskow, which present an alternative form of environmental activism. Sakrisson argues that Beskow's picturebooks, written prior to the rise of modern conservationism, promote a more accessible forest space than is typically encountered in children's literature. Mark D. McCarthy, in "Othering Authors in the Name of Authenticity," argues that the genre of graphic memoir troublingly lends itself to an affirmation of the West while audiences make this affirmation invisible by naming the authors Other. He asserts that when authors are "inside" another culture and their text aligns with Western values, the West and its worldview are affirmed from outside. And in "Global Rainbow Families," Jamie Campbell Naidoo and Kaitlyn Lynch provide insight into how children's books from specific countries depict physical contact between same-sex couples in picturebook illustrations and how this may influence understanding of LGBTQ families. [End Page 1] Finally, in "Picturing Arab Youth and Societies," Tina Sleiman highlights visual characteristics and elements observed in Ali Chamseddine's work, as well as how the illustrator's upbringing and social context influenced his depiction of Arabic youth and societies. The remaining texts in this issue complete the beautiful mosaic of global children's literature and its important place in the world in the current moment. We hope you enjoy reading all of them and share the marvel, admiration, and inspiration they have instilled in us. [End Page 2] Petros Panaou Petros Panaou is a clinical associate professor at the University of Georgia, Department of Language and Literacy Education, where he teaches children's literature and literacy courses. He chairs the annual Georgia Conference on Children's Literature and has also chaired the academic committee for the 36th IBBY Congress. Petros currently serves on the Newbery Awards committee and has served on USBBY's Outstanding International Books committee. He has authored a book and several articles and book chapters on international children's literature. He has translated two academic volumes and led multiple international grants. His unpublished novel for children and teens To Kinito (The Cellphone) was awarded a CYBBY honor in 2017. Janelle Mathis Janelle Mathis is a professor of literacy and children's literature at the University of North Texas, where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses centered on international children's literature and its applications in research and instruction. She presents regularly at international children's literature conferences, including IBBY Congresses and IRSCL, and has served on award committees, including the Outstanding International Books Award of USBBY. Janelle publishes on children's literature studies, and recently co-edited with Holly Johnson and Kathy Short a book titled Critical Content Analysis of Children's and Young Adult Literature (2017). Copyright © 2020 Bookbird, Inc.

WHILE THEY BOTH CENTRALLY CONCERN CHILD CHARACTERS children's literature and child pornography appear to have nothing to do with each other. Children's literature is writing intended for an audience of children. Child pornography, obviously, is not. That it stages activities involving for an implied audience of adults is a main reason why child pornography is scandalous, and why we have laws circumscribing it. For a lot of adults, the idea that might be the audience for pornography is almost as horrifying as the idea that pornography can be about children. But let me assume for a moment that the provisions of the criminal code might affect children's literature. In economic terms, its implied audience of is something of an illusion. As well as being the people who write children's literature, adults like you and me are also the ones who edit it, publish it, review it, sell it, and buy it. In she process, these adults are often readers of children's literature. Jack Zipes declares, My guess is that the largest reading audience of children's books in the United States and England is constituted by those students at the college and university level who take courses in children's literature along with teachers, librarians, and writers, who eagerly and discriminatingly read vast numbers of books for children (54). As a form of writing that, like child pornography, stages childhood experience for a significantly adult audience, might children's literature, too, be at least potentially pornographic? Might texts of children's literature then come under the purview of the criminal code? The idea that it might is likely to strike most adults as outrageous--perhaps even unthinkable. Children's literature began when adults started to believe that needed to be kept from certain kinds of knowledge--to know less. Since then, childhood has been primarily understood as a matter of being less: less knowledgeable, less experienced, less reasonable, less responsible, less capable--and certainly, less sexual. As a result of this focus on childhood as lacking, children's literature is centrally a literature that lacks. It characteristically lacks darkness, violence, moral ambiguity, big words, hard ideas. Most of all, it lacks sex. Sex is what innocence is most essentially innocent about. Children's literature pornographic? Yeah, sure, and there really were weapons of mass destruction. The unquestioning certainty with which most people connect children's literature with asexuality becomes obvious on occasions when specific texts challenge the connection. Back in the nineteen-seventies, some librarians were reported to be so offended by Maurice Sendak's depiction in his picture book In The Night Kitchen of young Mickey's full frontal nudity, truimphantly displayed as he shouts Cock a doodle doo (emphasis mine), that they covered the offending bits with felt marker diapers, lest the sight of a penis shock and distress young viewers as much as they themselves seemed to be shocked (Huck 42). More recently, I read another picture book, Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland's King and Kin to a University of Winnipeg class of children's literature students. The book describes how a queen's efforts to find a suitable princess for her son to marry fail, until one of the candidates shows up on the arm of her brother, the prince immediately falls in love, and the two princes marry and become king and king. Many of my students were shocked that a children's picture book was acknowledging the possibility of homosexual marriage, because, some said, the audience the book was clearly intended for was too young to need to know about sex. The diaper-drawing librarians' response to Sendak's pictorial acknowledgment that boys actually have penises and my students' response to the fictional representation of young males feeling physically attracted to each other are much like the way the Criminal Code understands pornography--any publication a dominant characteristic of which is the undue exploitation of sex (16318]). …

The article is devoted to the history of Siberian regional children's book publishing. The author has collected theoretic-practical opinions of historians, bibliologists, publishers and booksellers, librarians and bibliographers, psychologists and sociologists, which purpose is to generalize and reveal regularities of books' flow for children. V. G. Belinsky, L. N. Tolstoy, F. G. Tol’, N. V. Chekhov developed the first concepts of children's book. N. K. Krupskaya, V. A. Sukhomlinsky studied the «core» of the children book repertoire. V. G. Sopikov, B. S. Bondarsky reviewed children's literature of the 19th century in their bibliographic works. The author allocated some organizational components using formal-logical, comparative-historical and structural-typological methods. The first block is related to studying such definitions as «children's book», «children's literature», «editions for children», «a circle of childhood reading», «the repertoire of children's books», their typological signs. The presented concepts are investigated according to tasks, which children's editions solve. S. G. Antonova and S. A. Karaichentseva touched issues of children's literature typology in their publications. The second block of literature reveals the children's book development in Russia in various periods of its formation. I. E. Barenbaum, A. A. Grechikhin, A. A. Belovitskaya studied general fundamentals of the book's history, while A. Ivich, L. Kohn, I. Lupanova considered the history of children’s books. The third block is devoted to printing and art features of the children's book design, activity of universal and specialized publishing houses to distribute literature for children. The fourth block explains such category as «reader - library», considers techniques of work with children's book, offers methodical recommendations for teachers and tutors. Readers’ activity is examined as well. The author analyzes interests, factors, incentives and aims influencing childhood reading. Dissertation researches disclose the regional specifics of children's book publishing in 1980-2013, confirm the considered subject relevance. The historical, comparative, formal and logical analysis carried out by the author will be useful both the specialists in publishing and editorial affairs, researchers studying the history and development of the children's book, historians, and teachers in the educational process of such courses as «Publishing and Editing», «Children's Literature», «Book Science». The author concludes that the children's book has been studied in different periods of its development in the context of numerous aspects, directions and components, which makes it possible to reveal the special patterns of its existence.

Reviewed by: Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature Susan R. Gannon (bio) Robert Bator , ed. Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature. Chicago: American Library Association, 1983. Children's literature studies have all too often "run aground on the sandbar of apologetics," says Robert Bator. "The critics continually have had to maintain the necessity for and the propriety of the criticism before gaining clear passage to the actual territory." Still, some of the questions which have pre-occupied the critics seem important: What is children's literature? How has it been perceived in the past? How should it be approached now? In this new anthology, Bator offers a selection of essays from past and present which attempt, in various ways, to answer these questions. Bator has deliberately chosen "assertive and analytical articles" representing a wide range of opinions. Some have clearly been chosen not for their intrinsic merit, but rather because they represent some position he wished to include. The selections, therefore, "not equal in length," "nor equally valued," "range from the commonplace to the unique." But all the pieces subscribe to the view that "children's literature can and should be subject to serious critical scrutiny," and the result is a very useful book, which both documents the recent past of children's literature criticism and suggests directions for its future. In the first part of the book, Bator has collected essays centering on the definition of children's literature, its status, and the range of critical approaches to it. The second part presents discussions of the various genres of children's literature in order to "map the territory" in some detail. Brief introductions to each section and sub-section allow Bator the opportunity to offer a kind of running commentary on critical priorities and strategies and to set each piece in a critical context. Defining children's literature is not as easy as it looks. Bator reprints Clifton Fadiman's comprehensive "Case for a Children's Literature" which focuses on significant characteristics of children's books and "demonstrates that literature's lineage and its contributions," as well as John Rowe Townsend's brief and more pragmatic definition of children's books as those consigned to the children's shelves by a consensus of adults and children. Though it would seem likely that the testimony of children's writers should help us to define and delimit children's literature, Bator notes the surprising number of children's writers who "profess not to write consciously for children." He suggests that the low status of children's literature is an important reason why so many authors are reluctant to see themselves as writing for a child audience. But he believes a refusal to admit that children's books are different from adult books is a serious mistake, one which makes real criticism of juvenile books impossible. Bator urges greater critical attention to those aspects of children's literature which are unique to it. If children's books are to be understood properly as "'a collaboration by the words that stand on the page and the eyes that read them'" critics will have to consider carefully the nature of the literary constraints authors assume in writing for children. Bator calls for the kind of careful critical work which might "lead to a much-needed theory of composition for the juvenile book." Bator's survey of critical approaches to children's literature "spans almost two centuries of critical scrutiny" and touches on a variety of issues, but the selections accurately reflect his view that children's literature criticism has been self-consciously pre-occupied with problems of definition and status. Bator gives what at first glance seems more space than it deserves to a tiresome disagreement between Lillian Gerhardt and Ethel Heins about the relationship between children's literature and "mainstream" adult literature. But this exchange epitomizes the sort of dead-end discussion which long absorbed the energies of intelligent critics. The memorable address to the Children's Literature Association in which Susan Cooper lamented the nature and quality of recent criticism is reprinted here, as is Lois Kuznets' ringing and eloquent reply. (Anyone who reads at all widely in children's...