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Literature – Multilingual on Principle?! The Political Potential of Literary Multilingualism Today, using the Example of Barbi Marković’s Superheldinnen. Research on literary multilingualism is increasingly based on the assumption that literature per se is multilingual. This is true for concepts such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘polyphony’, in which multilingualism occurs in the form of social, regional and historical variants within one major language. Similarly, it applies to Rainier Grutman’s concept of hétérolinguisme, which expands Bakhtin’s notion and includes actual language changes. Recently, Till Dembeck has even called for a philology of multilingualism that would accommodate literary multilingualism in literary criticism. Using Barbi Marković’s novel Superheldinnen (2016) as an example, I discuss this recent development in multilingual literary studies and analyse concepts, forms and function of literary multilingualism. In so doing, I underline the transcending character of literary multilingualism that expresses itself on various levels: linguistically, formally, medially and with respect to culture. Thus, I aim to illustrate the enormous political potential of literary multilingualism. In fact, multilingualism in literature, as opposed to literature in times of a “monolingual paradigm” (Yasemin Yildiz), poses a political challenge on various levels. Concepts, such as national literature, literary field, but also literary studies and their institutions (i.e. language departments) reach their limits if literature is understood as being multilingual. In the second part of this article, I discuss the difficulties that come with literary prizes, literary studies and the access to the literary field. These often express themselves as concrete problems for individuals who, for instance, have difficulties accessing the literary field.

Theme: Multilingualism and Children's Literature. Ill. Henry Lyman Saÿen - Child Reading (1915–1918). Smithsonian American Art Museum, object number 1968.19.11. State-Sanctioned Multilingualism for Babies and Their Adults: Literary Multilingualism in Finnish Baby Box Books The baby books that, since the 1980s, are included in the Finnish state’s maternity packages distributed to every new-born child and their caregivers, are multilingual at heart. On pages of durable cardboard, a multilingual iconotext is realised as the two national languages Finnish and Swedish coexist with pictures on the spread. Lately, separate editions in the Sámi languages are also available. So far, there has been little literary research on these unique baby books. Hence, we seek to combine picturebook research with research in literary multilingualism to explore how these books handle multilingualism in relation to the materiality and multimodality of the picturebook medium. Our interest has been fuelled by the baby box books being a stately sanctioned and tailored book product that reaches about 30,000 Finnish families every year. In our article, we argue that a visual literary multilingualism is an essential trait of these books, and we suggest a typology for how multilingualism is realised within their multimodal format. Paying special attention to how the books deal with power hierarchies among the featured languages, we show that they employ a range of strategies to neutralise such hierarchies with greater or lesser success. Hence, we end up concluding that the books in the maternity package harbour a utopian and unproblematised view of multilingualism at odds with current societal debates.

Breathlessly Awaiting the Next Installment: Revealing the Complexity of Young Adult Literature Amanda K. Allen (bio) Reading the Adolescent Romance: Sweet Valley High and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel, by Amy S. Pattee. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011. The Young Adult Novel, edited by David Cappella. Spec. issue of Studies in the Novel 42.1 and 42.2 (Spring and Summer 2010). In 1996, Michael Cart noted that “even to try to define the phrase ‘young adult (or adolescent) literature’ can be migraine inducing” (8; emphasis in original). Although the academic field has expanded in the ensuing years since Cart published these words, attempts to define this literature remain inevitably fraught. Amy Pattee’s Sweet Valley High companion to Janice Radway’s groundbreaking 1984 study, Reading the Romance, and David Cappella’s special Studies in the Novel double issue on young adult literature do not provide a definition per se, but rather gesture toward new ways of contemplating young adult literature. While New Critical analyses continue to dominate these texts, the range of topics, theories, and methodologies suggests that current criticism of young adult literature is consciously seeking new paths of analysis. The effect of reading these texts together is thus one of hopeful optimism; if we continue to explore new ways of interpreting young adult literature, we may find an even greater diversity of subjects, methodological issues, and social implications, all of which work together to, as Cappella suggests, “reveal the genre’s complexity” (9). That complexity is quickly apparent in Pattee’s study. The strength of her argument lies in her careful weaving together and contextualization of historical and ideological backgrounds with textual analysis and readers’ reactions. Chapters one and two, which focus respectively on a historical background to the Sweet Valley High series in relation to the evolution of young adult fiction, and on the political and ideological contextualization surrounding the series’ publication during the “moral panic” of the Reagan era, are to my mind the most provocative elements of Reading the Adolescent Romance, and I will return to them shortly. The remaining chapters collectively support many of the ideas proposed in the first section by focusing on textual analysis of the series [End Page 260] (chapter three) in relation to its readership (chapter four), its spin-off, SVH: Senior Year (chapter five), and its legacy (chapter six). These four latter portions articulate a carefully constructed feminist overview of the series’ use of adult and young adult romance conventions, while also focusing on its initial readers’ remembered experiences and interpretations as well as those of online “anti-fans.” Together, the six chapters demonstrate not only the importance of a critical investigation of Sweet Valley High, but the necessity for it. Chapter one, “Now Entering Sweet Valley, California: The Evolution of Young Adult Literature and the ‘Sweet Valley High’ Series,” provides the historical background to the emergence of these novels. Although Pattee’s analysis may feel a bit glossed at times—and perhaps necessarily so—she does an admirable job of articulating myriad changes in both the content and the marketing of young adult literature from the 1940s through the 1980s. First came the mid-century “junior novels,” those heavily gendered texts of dating and popularity (for girls) or sports and teen racing culture (for boys). Since Pattee alludes throughout her text to the similarities between the new teen romance novels of the 1980s and the junior novels of the 1940s (including Maureen Daly’s wellspring text, Seventeenth Summer), I would be interested in a further exploration of the connections between these texts, particularly in terms of those written by such authors as Betty Cavanna, Rosamond du Jardin, and Janet Lambert, whose texts—like Pascal’s—continue to be often criticized as “inferior” literature because of their Saturday Evening Post world of white faces and white picket fences surrounding small-town, middle-class lives where the worst thing that could happen would be a misunderstanding that threatened to leave someone dateless for the junior prom. (Cart 21) Pattee’s brief concentration on Daly, John Tunis, and Henry Felson is entirely appropriate, however, since these three authors ushered in not only the junior novel genre, but, with their...

This Forum, appearing in each issue of the Journal of Literary Multilingualism , aims to continue the conversation started in the very first issue, where we collected articles that assessed and debated the field of Literary Multilingualism Studies. The Forum is a space for shorter, more informal reflections on the field and its future: position papers, dialogues between scholars, roundtable discussions, responses to articles within the journal, and responses to recent multilingualism conferences or events. We welcome proposals for contributions, particularly from marginalized perspectives or on neglected aspects of literary multilingualism. Please contact us directly to discuss ideas. In this Forum, Moradewun Adejunmobi challenges the oft-assumed link between literary multilingualism on the one hand, and a sociopolitical preference for linguistic diversity on the other. Taking three Yoruba writers as a case study, she demonstrates that some writers present a monolingual challenge to the multilingual postcolonial world to which they are responding. We would like to take Adejunmobi’s approach as the occasion to invite contributions on potential other challenges to the notion of a postmonolingual paradigm. — Juliette Taylor-Batty and Till Dembeck, Forum Moderators

Neuroscience and Young Adult Fiction: A Recipe for Trouble?

Reviewed by: Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature ed. by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel Sara K. Day (bio) Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature, edited by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel. Routledge 2017. Twenty-two years ago, Roberta Seelinger Trites's Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels (1997) actively reframed the manner in which scholars approached both traditional and contemporary texts for young audiences, encouraging readers to consider the possibilities of inclusivity. While Trites's book was certainly not the first scholarly work to engage with gender and sexuality in children's literature, it signaled a growing interest in these topics. Last year, Trites's Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature (2018) revisited the earlier volume's claims in order to more fully engage with questions of intersectionality, ecocriticism, and other concerns relating to the study of gender and sexuality in young people's literature and media. In the years that passed between Trites's two texts, these topics have been the subjects of a number of other monographs, essay collections, and special [End Page 210] issues, indicating a widespread and varied investment in exploring representations of gender and sexuality, especially with an eye to how they evolve and intersect with other identity markers. Contributions such as Christine Wilkie-Stibbs's The Feminine Subject in Children's Literature (2002), Annette Wannamaker's Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child (2008), and Lance Weldy and Thomas Crisp's 2012 special issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly on sexualities in children's literature, to offer only a very small sampling, have all centered gender and sexuality in their approaches to literature and media for young audiences. Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel's collection Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature thus enters a lively, frequently evolving conversation, offering nineteen essays about a number of mostly recent texts that are read through a variety of disciplinary and theoretical lenses. It's surprising, then, that the editors introduce the collection with little recognition of the existing scholarship; aside from a fairly extensive discussion of Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth B. Kidd's Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature, the editors mention other key works of children's and young adult literature scholarship in passing only or not at all. It's unfortunate that the collection's introduction and the brief overviews that precede each section don't do more to locate this collection within the current critical conversation on gender and sexuality in children's and young adult literature; the editors have missed an opportunity to more effectively articulate what is fresh and needed about the essays they have gathered. The collection is organized into five sections, beginning with "Gender(ing) Communities." This grouping of four essays focuses primarily on representations of adolescent womanhood, beginning with Terry Suico's "History Repeating Itself: The Portrayal of Female Characters in Young Adult Literature at the Beginning of the Millennium," which focuses on the portrayals of teen girls in three popular series from the early 2000s: Ann Brashares's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girls; and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. This opening chapter does the useful work of establishing the growing popularity of young adult literature more generally, though its interrogations of the novels themselves are relatively unsurprising. The following two essays, Victoria Flanagan's "Girls Online: Representations of Adolescent Female Sexuality in the Digital Age" and Amy Cummins's "Academic Agency in YA Novels by Mexican American Women Authors," likewise [End Page 211] investigate representations of adolescent womanhood, each offering a clear focus and useful insights. The final chapter in this section, Angel Daniel Matos's standout "Queer Consciousness/Community in David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing: 'One the Other Never Leaving,'" focuses on representations of young men, who receive notably less attention than young women in the volume as a whole. Section 2, "Developing Gender(ed) Identities," loosely organizes its four essays around "the relationship between...

Teenage Wasteland: Defeating the Machine in Daniel Pinkwater’s Chicago Michelle Robinson (bio) “The question was plainly stated. Is there any chance that you possess a salvageable brain, or have your parents just parked you here because they know or sense that you can’t get kicked out of Wheaton? In other words, is there a glimmer of light upstairs, or are you just a fuck-up?” “I’m not sure.” “Acceptable answer. You may continue to sit with us.” —Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin In 1998 Daniel Pinkwater, an extraordinary and prolific illustrator and writer of children’s fiction, published a novel for young adults after a hiatus of thirteen years. The Education of Robert Nifkin follows the trends set by Pinkwater’s most popular young adult fiction from the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars and The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. Like these, it is a story of a portly teenage outcast who extracts himself from an inept public school system and forms a cadre of culturally irreverent friends. But Nifkin also breaks new ground. Unlike most of Pinkwater’s other novels for middle readers and young adults, Nifkin is not set in the surreal geography of Hoboken, New Jersey or the apocryphal town of Baconburg. This novel is firmly situated in Chicago of the 1950s. And in contrast to Pinkwater’s usual coupling of magical realism and science fiction with the bildungsroman, Nifkin does not introduce werewolves or aliens, interplanetary realms, or talking lizards. Instead, The Education of Robert Nifkin seems to draw on a much murkier source: Pinkwater’s own adolescence. [End Page 48] In Uncle Boris in the Yukon, a quasi-autobiographical text, Pinkwater sails past his teenage years in Chicago with the expertise of a master cover-up artist: Now I heroically, and generously, skip my whole adolescence and early adulthood and introduce myself a healthy idiot in my mid-twenties. I pause a moment to savor the gratification of readers who have just realized they won’t be subjected to my early disappointments and insights and sexual coming-of-age. Moment over. Thank you. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me. (61) The Education of Robert Nifkin effectively reinstates the horrors and tribulations of adolescence expurgated from Pinkwater’s autobiographical work. And for Pinkwater, what might have been a therapeutic exercise in exorcising the demons of adolescence is in fact a much more ambitious enterprise. His rhetorical bravado, his ventures into 1950s cliché, his parodies of adults and adolescents alike, and even the facetious titling of his book—not to mention its construction as a faux college-entrance essay—situate his work as the stuff that plays with the tradition of American autobiography. Most importantly, Nifkin’s geographical and historical groundings render the pivotal struggles of Pinkwater’s adolescent characters more concretely than ever before, since the novel delineates social and economic ideologies encountered by the adolescent in a historically resonant way. Yet for all its historical realism, Pinkwater’s novel is about escaping history, breaking away from the constraints and pressures of 1950s culture. Thrust into a veritable teenage wasteland of quasi-military despotism and anti-Communist harassment at Riverview Public High School, the protagonist Robert Nifkin becomes an escape artist, freed from the demands of adolescent paradigms. The Education of Robert Nifkin is, therefore, the story of a self recording its process of self-making, and it takes a form well suited to this task: the college entrance essay. And while it is clear from the outset that The Education of Robert Nifkin has something to say about education, Pinkwater never treats education as merely a cognitive process, or an accumulation of academic knowledge. Instead, the protagonist’s experiences move beyond the confines of the classroom and into the Chicago streets. The philosopher Kenneth Burke inquired, “Could the most complex and sophisticated works of art legitimately be considered somewhat as ‘proverbs writ large’?” (Philosophy 256). Burke seriously contemplated the possibility that important works of literature could offer to their readers strategies for survival in the most realistic sense, and that such works could...

The trajectory of girlhood encompasses various experiences, and these might include practicing sports. The examination of girlhood in relation to the participation in sports in literary discourse allows for a better understanding of what it has meant and currently means to be a girl. This article investigates the ways in which contemporary girl-centric French young adult (YA) novels represent practising sports as a girl in relation to gender inequality. Through close textual analysis of three recent YA novels – La fille d’avril by Annelise Heurtier, Championnes by Mathilde Tournier, and Le syndrome du spaghetti by Marie Vareille – and drawing upon the concept of gender-based socialisation as a discursive cultural and social practice with an impact on sports participation, I investigate the limitations the three teenage protagonists face and how they transgress the social and cultural norms imposed upon them by a patriarchal Western society. In all three novels, the protagonists are portrayed as heroines who experience gender inequality in different ways while practicing sports. Although only one novel has gender inequality and women’s rights as its main theme, all three can be read and interpreted through a feminist lens. By relating their experiences to numerous constructs associated with a patriarchal society at the level of social, cultural, and linguistic practices, the young protagonists – and young readers – are given the opportunity to challenge gendered norms and the monolithic order of a patriarchal society.

Literary multilingualism and the transnational turn are currently hot topics in literary studies. They are best studied in the multilingual and widely networked Romanian literatures. The contributions collected here illustrate the numerous and close connections of Romanian literatures on various levels: - regionally to the languages, literatures and cultures of the Balkan region - in the European region to western and southern Romania, and - across continents, i.e. in a global context. The specific contribution that Romanian studies can make today – within Romance studies as well as in the context of current debates in literary studies – becomes apparent.

This chapter provides a background on the emergence and evolution of transgender young adult (YA) literature, a genre that was virtually non-existent until the early 2000s. Although YA literature became recognized as a distinct category by the late 1960s, it was not until the 2000s that transgender characters began to be explicitly represented in YA books. Since then, transgender YA literature has expanded significantly, reflecting diverse trends, ideologies, and shifted cultural attitudes. The chapter emphasizes how this genre's growth parallels broader societal discussions on diversity and representation, as seen through movements like Black Lives Matter and trans rights activism. It underscores transgender YA literature's role as both a reflection and driver of changing views on gender identity in contemporary society.

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...

In the first issue of the Journal of Literary Multilingualism, we collected together a range of scholars assessing and debating the field of Literary Multilingualism Studies, but we also realised that a single issue could only scratch the surface of this dynamic and growing field of study. Moreover, we were aware of some absences and blind spots and of the need to be constantly revising, questioning and examining the field. This forum, appearing in each issue of the journal, aims to continue the conversation started in Issue 1: it is a space for shorter, more informal reflections on the field and its future, in forms that might include position papers, dialogues between scholars, roundtable discussions, responses to articles within the journal, and responses to recent multilingualism conferences or events. We welcome proposals for Forum contributions, particularly from marginalised perspectives or on neglected aspects of literary multilingualism. Please contact us directly to discuss ideas. For this first forum, we asked David Gramling, who has recently spoken about ‘breaking up’ with multilingualism, how his attitude to the field has changed in recent years, and why. We also asked him to think of the direction Literary Multilingualism Studies should take in the future, in terms of its objects, its theories, and the genres it treats.

Literary multilingualism is an expanding field of research, carrying the potential to uproot long-established practices and disciplinary norms within literary studies. The traditional nation-state-...

This book explores how Swedish literature reflects the linguistic and cultural transformation of a postmigrant society. Through a close analysis of four debut works by Alejandro Leiva Wenger, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Marjaneh Bakhtiari and Hassan Loo Sattarvandi, the volume investigates the creative interplay between multilingualism and identity. Bridging sociolinguistics and literary studies, the volume offers a pioneering perspective on the aesthetic and social functions of language in contemporary Sweden.

In Netherlandic Studies, the so-called institutional approach of literature and close-reading of (literary) texts generally are considered to belong to different paradigms. This article explores the way the analysis of texts can be used in institutional-oriented research. After a brief survey of the institutional framework, mainly based on the work of Gisèle Sapiro and the outcomes of the research program ‘The Impact of Conceptions of Literature in the Literary Field’, in which developments on the bookmarket are considered to be elementary for the study of literary history, guidelines are formulated for the applicability of textual analysis to the study of institutions and literary history. To this end, a distinction is made between analysis of non-literary texts (essays, criticism, manifests and the like) and analysis of literary texts, while issues like the acquirement of symbolic capital and (self-)positioning (posture) including all kinds of discursive and esthetical options made by the author are put forward as possible points of relevance to a student of literary history.