Les personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse (Mythical Characters in Children's Literature) ed. by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise

Abstract

Reviewed by: Les personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse (Mythical Characters in Children's Literature) ed. by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise Anne Cirella-Urrutia (bio) Les personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse (Mythical Characters in Children's Literature). Edited by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015. In this collection of seventeen essays gathered from a symposium on children's literature held at the University of Maine in Le Mans, France (12–14 June 2013), Prince and Servoise fuse two problematic categories of literary theory: the concept study of characterization on the one hand, and the concept study of mythology on the other. How does children's literature "mythify" itself and create myths? How does it recycle mythical figures drawn from the Bible, from Greek and Roman literature, or from comic or literary fictions originally intended for adults? May characters for children be mythical, and, if so, what characteristics differentiate them from classical mythical figures? How does children's literature (including comics) recapture mythical heroes and heroines aesthetically? Do these works simply entertain, or do they reinforce the characters' unchanging archetypical nature? In constructing such a type of children's literature, how do we measure the evolution of mythology in various media for children and young adults? Finally, as part of this generic reconfiguration, how do children benefit from becoming acquainted with such mythical figures and stories, and what are the writers' intentions in rewriting them? Véronique Gély, a specialist in mythology, welcomes this continuation of a debate that she initially launched in 2011 in a symposium held in Paris titled "La Mythologie à l'usage des enfants" (Mythology for use by children), and contends that this book expands the concept study of mythology in literature. She praises the project, examining how contributors refashion familiar and less familiar myths and mythical characters in the light of many pressing issues (political, editorial, and aesthetic) within the genre. Part 1 addresses the problem of characterization with the renewal of characters drawn from Greek mythology into modern narratives. Which elements do children's authors retain, discard, or alter from original myths, and for what effects? The four essays in this section examine the role that authors play in transmitting these mythical heroes and heroines to young people as cultural patrimony. They also assess the significance of the use of mythology as one source of fictional and artistic innovation. Nadège Coutaz compares two best sellers that revive Sophocles's tragic heroine Antigone in Jacques Cassabois's fantasy novel for adolescents Antigone 256 (2007) and Martine Delerm's picture book Antigone peut-être (2007). Antigone is refashioned into multiple images of the child/adolescent figure. The "miniaturization" of Antigone from an adult figure into many images of a rebellious teen who rejects her [End Page 262] prospective marriage attests to these works' editorial success and to the changing status of both girls and adolescents. Sylvie Dardaillon examines Yvan Pommaux's graphic novels and the figure of Ulysses in Œdipe: l'enfant trouvé (2010), Ulysse aux mille ruses (2011), and Troie: la guerre toujours recommencée (2012), in which a father takes on the roles of both narrator and storyteller. Analyzing Pommaux's detailed research and illustration style, she highlights his unique "mytho-graphic" approach, his editorial success, and his pedagogical intentions. Hélène Cassereau-Stoyanov studies Ulysses and other Homeric characters from The Odyssey in Sylvaine Jaoui's adolescent novel Fort comme Ulysse (2011). The poem's ethic reflects onto the life of young Eliott, who gradually becomes blind yet strives to gain independence from his parents and from the students who bully him. The section closes with Agathe Salha's reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851), in which myths are refashioned as new sources of fantasy and wonder for children and embedded within national American landscapes as part of their "naturalization" (65). Part 2 explores the ways in which children's authors revisit biblical myths for the edification of plots and characterization. The actualizations of such mythical characters reveal the values of the time in which they were born. Carlo Collodi's Le avventure...