Children Author Research Articles

Keedle, the Great and All You've Ever Wanted to Know About Fascism by Deirdre Conselman and William Conselman Jr., and: Yussuf the Ostrich by Emery Kelen

Reviewed by: Keedle, the Great and All You've Ever Wanted to Know About Fascism by Deirdre Conselman and William Conselman Jr., and: Yussuf the Ostrich by Emery Kelen Jan Susina (bio) Keedle, the Great and All You've Ever Wanted to Know About Fascism. By Deirdre and William Conselman, Jr. Illustrated by Fred L. Fox. Afterword by Jack Zipes. Little Mole and Honey Bear, 2020. Yussuf the Ostrich. By Emery Kelen. Afterword by Jack Zipes. Little Mole and Honey Bear, 2020. "Nazis, I hate these guys." This memorable line spoken by Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) neatly summarizes the message of these two picture books. They are part of the series edited by Jack Zipes that puts into print neglected children's fairy tales with a political message. Given the rise of Fascism in Europe and the United States in recent years, there has been an increased interest in adult and children's books published in the 1930s and 1940s. Consider the renewed popularity in Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935) after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Keedle, originally published in 1940, and Yussuf the Ostrich, originally published in 1943, fit into this publishing trend. Either of these picture books would fit comfortably with the children's material reprinted in Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (2008) edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel; their anthology includes selections from well-known children's authors, including Dr. Seuss, Munro Leaf, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes. [End Page 100] These reprinted picture books remind readers that children's books have always been political, and that this did not begin with contemporary books, such as Michael Ian Black's A Child's First Book of Trump (2016). It is also true that children's books have always had the dual audience of children and adults. Many parodies of well-known children's picture books are intended primarily for adults, such as Faye Kanouse's If You Give a Pig the White House (2019) or John Lithgow's Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown (2020). There are also borderline books: Dr. Seuss's Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! (1972) took on a political meaning in 1976, when Seuss crossed out the name of his protagonist and inserted the name of Richard Nixon in a copy of the picture book. More recently, readers following Dr. Seuss's modification can easily update and insert Donald Trump's name for Seuss's orange-colored protagonist. Sadly, when it comes to political children's books, it seems that everything old is new again. Yussuf the Ostrich was written and illustrated by Emery Kelen, a self-described "violent pacifist" who served in World War I. After the war, he teamed with Alois Derso, and as Derso & Kelen they became famous for their satirical caricatures of politicians. With the rise of Nazism, they fled to the United States in 1938, and continued to publish political illustrations for Esquire, Fortune, and The New York Times Magazine. Kelen branched out on his own and produced two children's books, Yussuf the Ostrich and Dr. Owl (1945), as well as Mr. Nonsense: A Life of Edward Lear (1973) while working at the Public Information Office for the United Nations. Yussuf, unlike other ostriches in North Africa, does not hide his head in the sand about the dangers of the invading Nazi army. After attending school with his child owner, the clever Yussuf volunteers to be a messenger for the US Signal Corps. Captured by the Nazis, Yussuf faces execution, but is saved by the general's pet dachshunds, who secretly hate the Nazis and help him escape. Returning with plans of an attack, Yussuf saves the US Army and becomes a hero. Kelen's use of animals fighting against the Nazis is reminiscent of the propaganda films produced by the Walt Disney studios during World War II. Keedle was written by the son and daughter of William Conselman, who wrote the popular comic strip Ella Cinder (1925–1961), and illustrated by Fred Fox...

Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties by Laurence Talairach

Reviewed by: Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties by Laurence Talairach Clayton Tarr (bio) Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties. By Laurence Talairach. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Laurence Talairach's Curious Beasties is a welcome addition to children's literature studies, especially to the continuing work on the intersections of natural science and children's literature during the long nineteenth century. Talairach traces the influx of [End Page 437] animals, both zoological and paleontological, brought to England from around the world and displayed in museums and menageries. These living, skeletal, and taxidermy specimens not only "illustrated the expansion of knowledge," but also "embodied British power and hegemony" (2). Children became a crucial part of this dual impact of exotic animal collection and display, being encouraged to participate in natural history "in the hope of moulding young minds into future British and imperial citizens" (3). The way that museums "offered visitors an experience of the natural world under control" also inculcates proper and productive children (4). The wonderous animals displayed for eager audiences "could simultaneously transport and instruct" (7), Talairach argues, while also "captur[ing] the elusive reality of imperial Britain" (8). Children's books similarly "conjured up the British empire and its booming capitalist economy through adventures where characters could both feel and see the urge to possess and subjugate these 'curious beasties'" (274). At the same time, however, children's literature sometimes provided "the opportunity to question the ideologies of imperialism" (274). Regardless of the ideological stance, children's literature of the long nineteenth century imaginatively represented "the sense of wonderment produced by museum culture" (10). Structurally, Curious Beasties moves both chronology through the long nineteenth century and from broad movements to discrete readings of nineteenth-century children's authors, including Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Edith Nesbit. I find the latter half of the book more compelling, though the first half is just as engaging and readable. Chapter 2 explores how children's literature of Georgian England uses "curious beasties" to "disseminate knowledge about the natural world" (32). Moving ahead to the Victorian period, chapter 3 further probes the "appropriation of animals" to examine how live animals "actively participated in the development of children's literature" (12, 73). Chapter 4 investigates how children's periodicals encouraged "children's interest in natural history collecting" (126). Talairach also studies the rise of taxidermy, which "represented a period when naturalists willingly explored and promoted the relationship between science and myth, or knowledge and narrative" (173). Chapter 5 examines nonsense literature by Lear and Carroll, which "foregrounded and questioned the issue of species classification" (176). Carroll's "curious beasties," in particular, "probe the era's taxonomic practices" (19). Talairach concludes with a chapter on representations of fossil discoveries in Victorian and Edwardian children's literature, particularly focusing on Nesbit, whose "curious beasties" "convey her stance on imperialism and consumerism and challenge the master narrative of British control over the natural world" (20). The main concern I have with Talairach's book is that I consistently found myself wanting a more expansive vision. Science fiction, in particular, which experienced a concurrent "golden age," seems relevant to the study, especially in regard to the [End Page 438] "human/animal divide" that Talairach frequently mentions. Certainly, H. G. Wells imagined grotesque and subversive menageries, challenging practices such as vivisection, which Talairach chooses not to pursue. Are not many of Carroll's monstrosities in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World examples of particularly disturbing cross-species (if not also subject/object melding) surgical experiments? And what about J. M. Barrie's own island, the Neverland where "beasts" occupy a crucial position in the circle of life and death? I am also left wondering about other forms of children's or adolescent writing in the Victorian period, particularly boys' adventure stories. H. Rider Haggard's novels, for example, often hinge on the role animals play in Britain's imperial project. I am also left a little disappointed that Curious Beasties does not spend more time with Christina Rossetti. A short discussion of "Goblin Market" (1862) appears in chapter one, but it is mostly to...

Interview with David Henry Wilson

Interview with David Henry Wilson Riky Stock (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution My name is Riky Stock, and I am the managing director for NorthSouth Books. Founded in Zurich, Switzerland, our small but internationally recognized house has been successfully publishing high-quality children's picturebooks by authors and illustrators from around the world for sixty years. Translations are an integral part of our publishing program, especially translations from German to English. For the past ten years, we have been working with the German-to-English translator David Henry Wilson. He has translated ninety picturebooks for the publishing house NorthSouth Books over the years, and each season there are several translations by David Henry Wilson on our list. These are his forthcoming translations with NorthSouth Books this year: Spring 2021 Little Polar Bear and the Pandas by Hans de Beer Robert and the World's Best Cake by Anne-Kathrin Behl Summer 2021 The Speckled Feather by Johanna Ries What Happens while You Sleep by Anna Russelmann Fall 2021 Einstein—The Fantastic Journey of a Mouse through Space and Time by Torben Kuhlmann Franz-Ferdinand the Dancing Walrus by Marcus Pfister My Mother's Delightful Deaths by Carla Haslbauer In February, 2021, we conducted an interview with David Henry Wilson. David Henry Wilson (b. 1937) is a children's author, playwright, poet, and translator. As an author, he is known for his Jeremy James series, the Superdog series and The Castle of Inside Out. His books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, German, and French. For many years he lectured at the universities of Bristol (England) and Konstanz (Germany), where he founded and ran the university theater. He is also a translator, and the range of his work covers art history by Werner [End Page 79] Hofmann, travel books by Peter Sager, prose and poetry by Hermann Hesse, children's novels, and picturebooks. Riky Stock (RS): What inspired you to write children's books? David Henry Wilson (DHW): Pure chance! It all started in Germany. The publisher who was handling my plays was asked to commission some English authors to contribute to an anthology of new European stories for children. As I'm (still!) a good European, I wrote The Elephant on Daddy's Car. This became so popular that I was then asked to write a whole book of stories about the main character, Jeremy James, and I had such fun writing them that I went on, and on, and on! And I'd like to mention that Helmut Winter, who approached me in the first place, became a lifelong friend as well as the translator of nearly all my children's books. RS: You mentioned your plays. When and why did you start writing for the theater? DHW: My grandfather ran a concert party during the 1940s, when I was just a small child, and my elder brother and I used to perform sketches or recite funny poems written by my father. I loved the live contact with the audience, and by the time I went to secondary school, I was writing and acting in my own plays. RS: Thank you for the wonderful poem you wrote for us about the little polar bear and the environmental issues he has to face, which we just published in a blog post on our website. When did you turn to writing poetry? What inspired you to do that? DHW: School again. There was a school magazine, which published stories and poems, and we were made to learn poems off by heart for our English lessons. I loved them, and so I had to write my own! I've always had this creative drive. At primary school I was already writing my own stories, including a "novel" which was directly inspired by (cribbed from) Robinson Crusoe! RS: Now, let's talk about David Henry Wilson, the translator. You have been translating books for NorthSouth for many years. When did you first start translating, and what was the first book you translated for NorthSouth? DHW: I'd had to do translation when I was a student, but it became an important part of my life when I was...

Focus IBBY

Focus IBBY Liz Page (bio) International Children's Book Day around the World in 2021 International Children's Book Day (ICBD) is celebrated by IBBY members on or around the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen: April 2. Each year a different national section of IBBY has the opportunity to be the international sponsor of ICBD. It decides upon a theme and invites a prominent author from the host country to write a message to the children of the world and a well-known illustrator to design a poster. The 2021 poster and message were sponsored by USBBY; Margarita Engle wrote the delightful poem "The Music of Words," which was accompanied by the stunning artwork of Hans Christian Andersen Award winner (2014) Roger Mello. These materials are used in different ways to promote books and reading. Many IBBY sections promote ICBD through the media and organize activities in schools and public libraries. Often ICBD is linked to celebrations around children's books and other special events that may include encounters with authors and illustrators, writing competitions, or announcements of book awards. Below is a brief glimpse of some of the activities organized by IBBY members to celebrate ICBD 2021. A retrospective of more events celebrating 2021 International Children's Book Day can be seen on the IBBY blog: www.ibby.org/ibby-blog. In Iceland, a new short story by a popular children's book author was broadcast on Iceland's national public service broadcaster, Channel 1. The author read her story herself, and then gave a short interview on the radio. The short story was written for all students in primary school, from six- to sixteen-year-olds. IBBY Iceland has celebrated International Children's Book Day in this way for many years, choosing a new author and a new short story every year. The goal is that everyone in Iceland has a joint listening experience on this special day. People who read or listen to the same story have something in common with each other, which will foster tolerance. By allowing all primary school students in the country to listen to the story at the same time, forty thousand students enter the same world at the same time! After listening to the story, children are often given a fun assignment in connection with the story. IBBY Iceland provides the text of the short story online; these can be viewed on the IBBY Iceland Facebook page. In 2020, the short stories from the last ten years were published in a book. Learn more at www.facebook.com/IBBY.is/posts/3033571243340704. IBBY Nepal chose to distribute children's books to students and school libraries. Members of the section held sessions with teachers about the importance and utilization of children's literature in the classroom. Books were contributed by Room to Read (Nepal Unite). The section also celebrated International Storytelling Day on March 20, with support from the Storytellers' Society and Room to Read, by running a digital discussion [End Page 91] about the importance of storytelling for children's development and imagination. IBBY Dominican Republic supported the production of three books in Spanish and publishing a presentation of them on YouTube. Click for larger view View full resolution IBBY Argentina, working with Desde los Libros, gave a special workshop about ways of matching literature contents and readers through technology. The two-day workshop shared ways of learning through digital content on the media. The workshop addressed mediators, librarians, teachers, and promoters who wish to share their love for books in this "distant world." The Slovenian section of IBBY prepared a reading promotion event on their website: www.ibby.si/index.php/icbd/2021. IBBY Slovenia shared a video made for the occasion with a group of children and their teacher on the theme of Hans Christian Andersen. IBBY Malaysia organized various activities, which included a talk on the "Rhythm of Words" that was a joint activity with IBBY Malaysia and the Department of Early Childhood Studies, Faculty of Education, and Social Sciences University Selangor (UNISEL). A reading and storytelling session was held at the Genius Aulad Preschool in Nilai by Teacher Sha, as well as a storytelling session at Gallery...

Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan et al.

Reviewed by: Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan et al. Eszter Szép (bio) Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite . Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist. Manchester University Press, 2020. 272 pp, $120 Marie Duval (1847–1890) is known in comics studies circles as the artist behind the Ally Sloper strips, Ally Sloper being the first recurring character in comics. The character was invented by Charles Ross, editor of the British periodical Judy, in 1867, and Duval drew Ally Sloper strips from 1869. Interestingly, the character is central to only 15% of Duval's creative output. Sloper's peak period came after Duval stopped drawing the strip: in 1884 the character was given its own comic, Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, and was successfully commercialized. Published in the Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century series of Manchester University Press, Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist offers a detailed, contextualized rethinking of Duval's position as a cartoonist, female visual journalist, children's book author, and actress in the second part of the nineteenth century. The three authors, Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite, have previously launched the Marie Duval Archive (marieduval.org) and have published a richly illustrated popular book on Duval. Now they elaborate aspects of Duval's career in the context of Victorian cultural practices and look for connections—this way Duval's work is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century perceptions of gender, class, work, art, publishing technologies, and theatrical practices. This approach to Duval's oeuvre is complex and multidisciplinary, and the clear structure of the book helps the reader navigate this network of knowledge. To illustrate the book's approach to Duval, let me quote how the authors themselves define their project in the introduction: The book identifies Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner in a historic urban media environment, in which new professional definitions were being created for the first time, in terms of the gendering of professions, professional training and consensus, and the theorising of the roles of visual cultures, and in which new congruence between different types of media culture emerged, including performance, illustration, narrative drawing, periodicals and novels. (6) The book starts out with positioning Judy, or the London Serio-comic Journal in the nineteenth-century satire boom as a conservative journal addressing a middle-class, lower-middle-class, and working-class readership. We learn about Duval's unique approach to cartooning, which is illustrated by comparing how Judy's star cartoonist, William Boucher, and Marie Duval responded to the same issues in their work. Both of them drew the Franco-Prussian War week after week in 1870, and the section of the book where Boucher's and Duval's works are put next to each other clearly shows how witty, daring, and critical Duval's art was. We can also see that she had zero artistic training and did not follow any academic schools of drawing. Boucher's status is indicated by the number of double-page [End Page 228] spreads he was given the opportunity to fill with his drawings (Boucher: many; Duval: zero). He worked in a detailed and realistic style, favored visual metaphors and symbols (e.g., of peace, of countries) to express his commentary, focusing mainly on tragedy and death. In contrast, Duval chooses satire and takes a very cowardly Sloper to the front to report on the events for Judy and follows his adventures as he does everything to avoid the fight. This fearless nature of Duval's work gains even more in significance as the chapters map out Duval's position in Victorian entertainment culture. As a woman employee, she was masculinized; as an actress (performing mainly trouser roles) she was sexualized. This experience, according to Grennan, enabled Duval to bring the social transgression represented by the stage to the practice of her drawings. "The thrilling experience of being a woman employed to be feminine on stage was transposed to the thrilling experience of being a woman working at inhabiting the role of a man, as a visual journalist" (43). This position, as well as the masculine humor of her strips and the representation of woman employees, was an important part of...

Video blog as a new channel of socialization of children: the question of the interpretation of the concept

The aim of the article is to address the socialization processes of modern children and adolescents, in the context of the characteristics of the information society and the constant presence of the Internet in their lives. A new but emerging phenomenon is emerging, video blogging, which is part of Internet socialization. The main characteristic of this phenomenon is the potential opportunity that children and adolescents have to create an independent video blogging process, which affects the socialization process in general. The empirical data were collected using quantitative and qualitative sociological methods: survey and interview with children. The combination of these methods provides more complete information to understand the problem. The main result of this study is the evidence that around 30% of children and adolescents are not only viewers of videoblogs, they not only consume the information disseminated by this part of the global network, but also become independent authors of videoblogs. The study results reflect the fact that many children's authors try to imitate their favorite video bloggers. Young Internet users perceive the process of creating a video blog as a certain type of creativity.

Reflecting Realities in Twenty-First-Century Irish Children's and Young Adult Literature

This article explores the evolution of Irish youth literature over the last four decades and these texts' engagement with cultural, political, and social transformations in Irish society. The adult desire to protect young people's ‘innocence’ from topics and experiences deemed dark or deviant tended to dominate late twentieth-century Irish youth literature. However, the turn of the millennium witnessed a growing capacity and willingness for Irish children's and young-adult authors to problematize hegemonic power systems, address social injustices, and present unsentimental, empowering narratives of youth agency. Post-Celtic Tiger youth writing by Irish women has advocated for the complexity of Irish girlhoods while Irish Gothic literature for teenagers has disrupted complacent narratives of Irish society in its anatomy of systemic violence, trauma, and adolescent girls' embodiment. Although queer identities and sexualities have been increasingly recognised and represented, Irish youth literature has yet to confront histories and practices of White privilege in past and present Irish culture and to inclusively represent the diverse, intersectional realities, identities, and experiences of twenty-first-century Irish youth.

OTTOKAR DOMMA: A SATIRIST, BUT FOR OR AGAINST GDR SOCIALISM?

AbstractOttokar Domma was regarded as a children's author during the lifetime of the GDR, and continues to be seen as such today. This article argues that, while Domma's stories about the mischievous schoolboy Ottokar did appeal to GDR children, they should also be acknowledged as satirical. It further argues that this satire can be read in two ways, as regime‐supporting or regime‐critical. It first re‐locates the stories in their original context of publication in a regime‐supporting satirical magazine and shows that Ottokar's use of language, in particular, served the officially defined purposes of satire by alerting adult readers to their careless misunderstandings of socialism's priorities. It then interrogates Domma's self‐portrayal, the use of parallel literary forms for satirical purposes, and the stories’ themes to argue that the stories can alternatively, or additionally, be read as regime‐critical satire. It proposes that Domma was a far more ambiguous and multi‐faceted figure in the GDR literary and satirical landscape than was recognised during the lifetime of the GDR or has been recognised since. His ambivalent position is fruitful in prompting us to review and expand our understanding of the production and circulation of both official and unofficial satire in the GDR.

The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons

Reviewed by: The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons Claudia Nelson (bio) The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons. Abrams, 2019. Edith Nesbit may well have led the most engrossing life of any children's writer. There's something to fascinate everyone here. Nesbit's domestic conduct overturns the stereotypes of Victorian middle-class propriety; after marrying her first husband, Hubert Bland, two months before the birth of their first child, she passed off as hers two of his children by her friend and companion Alice Hoatson, who became an indispensable part of the Bland-Nesbit household even as Nesbit herself indulged in a lengthy series of romantic friendships—or perhaps romances—with male protégés. Nesbit's intellectual deportment is equally eye-catching, given her passionate commitment to ideologies ranging from socialism (the nonviolent brand espoused by the Fabians, of whom Nesbit was a founding member) to [End Page 179] the belief that Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's plays. And, of course, she published poems, plays, nonfiction, horror stories, New Woman fiction, and—particularly beloved and influential—children's literature. Small wonder, then, that since her death in 1924, Nesbit has attracted multiple biographers. The first of these, Doris Langley Moore, had the advantage of direct contact with Nesbit intimates including Hoatson and Nesbit's adopted daughter, Rosamund. First published in 1933, Moore's E. Nesbit: A Biography was revised and reissued in 1968 after the deaths of its subject's immediate family members made possible greater candor; this account of Nesbit's life thus has a particularly good claim to authenticity and necessarily functions as an important source for any subsequent biographer. Moore's most significant successor in this role, Julia Briggs, published A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit in 1987. Briggs, a distinguished academic whose subjects also included Virginia Woolf, produced both in and beyond her Nesbit biography what remain some of the most brilliant and insightful readings of the author's children's fiction available; her work is indispensable to any scholar interested in Nesbit's writing for the young. Other biographies, ranging from Noel Streatfeild's quirky Magic and the Magician: E. Nesbit and Her Children's Books (1958) to Elisabeth Galvin's The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit (2018), thus have serious competition in vying for the attention of the Nesbit devotee. Nesbit's most recent biographer, Eleanor Fitzsimons, is a journalist specializing in historical and women's issues; she is also the author of Wilde's Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women He Knew (2015). The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit reflects its author's strong interest in historical detail, which appears to overshadow her interest in literary content. What is most admirable about this new biography is Fitzsimons's extensive research. Not only has she tracked down some hard-to-find throwaway publications from Nesbit's years as a hack writer, she also takes the trouble to provide the reader with thumbnail sketches of an immense cast of supporting characters. To take an example at random, we are informed that "[Nesbit's niece] Dorothea and Richard's youngest daughter, Pamela, a poet, died in mysterious circumstances when she apparently fell from a cliff on March 27, 1935. She was twenty years old. Diana, their eldest daughter, also died young. Richard married for a second time in November 1935, but his wife Edith Harriet Weston, an American, died less than four months later. He left for America in 1940 but returned to Capri in 1947 and died there on December 22" (223). This passage, which appears in a footnote, is an aside in the book, but it nonetheless suggests both what is pleasurable and what is tedious in this biography. Fitzsimons's willingness to educate herself and her readers helps bring Nesbit's world to life, but simultaneously there is a remarkable dearth of interpretation. Rarely do we hear why tangential material (in this case, events occurring a decade or two after Nesbit...

Из писем М.А. Бекетовой к Е.Ф. Книпович (1922–1926)

The main theme in the letters of the translator and children's author M.A. Beketova, A.A. Blok’s aunt, to the poet's friend, the literary critic E.F. Knipovich, is the fate of Blok's legacy, its publication, information about evenings and meetings in the poet’s memory, about his relatives, friends, researchers of his works, as well as about M. Beketova’s work on biographical books about Blok and the publication of his correspondence. In the letters there are significant details related to the activities of the Moscow Association for the Study of A. Blok’s Works of the GAKhN, with meetings of the Petrograd Free Philosophical Association (Volfila), reports about the Shakhmatovo estate, references on L.D. Blok’s role in the publication of Blok's heritage, on the beginning of preserving the memory of the poet, museumification of his iconography, personal belongings, manuscripts. The letters give a vivid picture of the “struggle for Blok” in the 1920s waged by his friends and relatives, as well as writers and critics who understood the true scale of the poet's figure. The letters are preserved in a private collection (Moscow).

Bart Moeyaert as Writer, Author, Performer, and Public Figure: "That's Also What Literature Can Be"

Bart Moeyaert as Writer, Author, Performer, and Public Figure:"That's Also What Literature Can Be" Vanessa Joosen (bio) Though only in his mid-fifties, Bart Moeyaert began his writing career over forty years ago, when at age thirteen, he addressed a diary to an imaginary friend called Judith. Caught and ridiculed by one of his brothers, Moeyaert turned the diary into his first novel, which he published at nineteen. In the course of almost four decades as a published author, Moeyaert's views and writing practices have inevitably evolved. These developments can be attributed to personal experiences from living through adolescence, young adulthood, and middle age, which include his increased independence from his family, influential encounters, and the development of his career as an author and teacher. As a writer, he had the chance to experiment with new genres, topics, and writing styles, gradually growing into Belgium's most acclaimed children's author and gaining international fame. In this article, I will highlight four crucial experiences that transformed Bart Moeyaert's views on children's literature and had an impact on his subsequent books: the influence of Aidan Chambers and his distinction between author and writer; the experience of writing primers with specific, target-audience restraints; the pleasure of performing for a dual audience; and his mandate as Antwerp's city poet, which provoked a reflection on the writer as a public figure. What these experiences have in common is that they produced a tension between Moeyaert's personal and artistic desires on the one hand and considerations for his readership and broader social needs on the other. As such, this article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Moeyaert's developing poetics and diverse oeuvre, and to consider how an author's growing age and concomitant experiences can influence their views and work. Click for larger view View full resolution Author or Writer? Moeyaert wrote his first novels, Duet met valse noten (Duet with False Notes; 1983) and Terug naar af (Back to Square One; 1986), in his teens and early twenties—a time when he was still close in age to the audience of the [End Page 38] books. The novels are both set in school and draw on Moeyaert's intimate knowledge of adolescence. Terug naar af even features an alter ego with the same initials (Matthias Brandt) who, like the author himself, is made to repeat his final year in secondary school. Despite this obvious autobiographical input, Moeyaert wanted the story to be more, and when the book met with some criticism, he felt frustrated that many readers did not pick up on the symbolism in the story: "Apparently it is not expected of an adolescent novel that you would construct another level under the narrative" (qtd. in Lambrechts).1 The desire to construct this additional layer coincided with an incisive experience that Moeyaert often foregrounds in his development as an author: his reading of Aidan Chambers's Dance on My Grave. In 1987, Moeyaert dedicated the thesis of his degree in education to Chambers's works and visited him to discuss views on literature. In an interview a decade later, Moeyaert contrasted Chambers's views with those of his publisher at Altiora/Averbode (Verbeken). His publisher spurred him to keep his young audience in mind when writing—Moeyaert's youth had, after all, been a key factor in the success of his best-selling debut. Chambers made a distinction, inspired by Roland Barthes, between "authors" and "writers" (Chambers 14). Whereas writers are led by their audience, authors are led by their own artistic views and their stories' needs. This is reflected in Dance on My Grave, which Moeyaert describes as "[a] beautiful story about a friendship, if not to say, love, between two boys. But also a formal masterpiece full of flashbacks, repetitions, changes in narrative perspective, and so forth. A magnificent literary kaleidoscope that taught me: ah, that's also what literature can be" (qtd. in Verbeken).2 Moeyaert developed the novels Suzanne Dantine (1989) and Kus me (Kiss Me; 1991) along the lines that Chambers taught him. "Forget about the earlier books," he would say about Suzanne Dantine in 1991. "With...

Introduction

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood In this issue of The Lion and Unicorn, we spend time with literature set in China, India, alternative versions of the United States, Australia, and the Nordic countries of Scandinavia. Lisa Chu Shen's "Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers" examines the works of two popular male Chinese authors, Cao Wenxuan and Zhao Lihong, to illustrate the transforming treatment of male characters in Chinese children's literature. Influenced by both economic, political, and cultural changes over the past several decades, Chinese children's books (like children's literature everywhere) are grappling with gender portrayal (notably stereotyping). Prior to the arrival of Western influences, the Chinese concept of masculinity exalted the wen (that is, the mind and intellect) over the wu (physical strength and prowess). But this began to shift toward the Western model of the domineering, macho male, a culturally antithetical view. And then, with the rise of Maoism in the twentieth century, Chinese manhood underwent a "second emasculation," when the government advocated the underplaying of gender distinctions, the consequences of which were dubbed, interestingly, yinsheng yangchuai ("the rise of women and the decline of men"). As Chen notes, "In contemporary Chinese popular fiction for children, the figure of the boy is invested with competing adult desires and anxieties around the changing notions of masculinity." Focusing on the works of two of China's most celebrated children's authors, Chen illustrates the transforming treatment of male characters in Chinese children's literature. Specifically, the author argues that "examining how masculinity is constructed in contemporary Chinese fiction for young readers reveals the continuous struggle between tradition and modernity, a topic of paramount importance in studies of Chinese literature and culture." We might add that this struggle is not peculiar to China, and that societies around the world are grappling with this, genuinely transformative, social phenomenon. Of Chinese children's literature, Chen sees hope in that, [End Page v] "[e]ncouragingly, alongside hegemonic masculinity that is widely perceived to be the ideal path toward manhood, into which male children are expected to grow, there have emerged nuanced and layered depictions of boyhood." Sharon Murphy's essay "'I think I shall die soon, Boosy': Child Illness and Morality in The History of Little Henry and His Bearer" analyzes a widely disseminated story by Evangelical writer Mary Martha Sherwood, based on her experiences as an English officer's wife serving the East India Company in early nineteenth-century India. Sherwood lost two children to tropical illnesses while in India and adopted several orphaned children in addition to caring for her own. In Murphy's reading of Little Henry and His Bearer, she connects the staggering infant mortality rate among English children in India—more than twice the rate of children in England—with stated and unspoken conflicts about the role of the English in India. Murphy provides a detailed context for those conflicts to illustrate the deep contradictions in England's Christian missionary projects, which could not mitigate the great costs to mothers and children of the "British appetite for India." Sam Morris, in "'Anything be better than this': Utopian Impulses in The Hunger Games Series and Orleans," pairs the well-known dystopian trilogy by Suzanne Collins with an unsparing and timely dystopia by Sherri L. Smith, set in a future New Orleans that has been expelled from the Outer States of America because of an intransigent and deadly disease, Delta Fever. Morris examines these dystopias and how they speak to the adolescent chronotopes of possibility and hope through the lens of Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope, which stresses the unfinished and unfinishable quality of all utopian aspiration as the "Not-Yet." In both works the adolescent protagonists push toward utopian ideals, despite failure and even retrenchment. It is the "Not-yet" of hope that propels each to move away from the concept of utopia as a place and toward a utopian frame of mind that can disrupt complacency and acquiescence. In "Forging Truth from Facts: Trauma, Historicity and Australian Children's Picture Books," Martin Kerby and Margaret Baguley remind us how children's books about traumatic...

Child's Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan ed. by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall

Reviewed by: Child's Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan ed. by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall Mark Jones (bio) Child's Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan. Edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall. University of California Press, Oakland CA, 2017. x, 302 pages. $39.95, paper. Open Access. The essays in this edited volume present a series of snapshots of Japanese childhood, from the worlds of acolytes in medieval monasteries to aspiring young soccer players during the "lost decades." Not all contributions deal [End Page 544] directly with child's play, as the title seems to suggest, but all do attempt to reinvigorate a floundering field—the history of childhood in Japan. French Annales historian Phillipe Ariès birthed the field known as the history of childhood. Ariès's classic text L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime was published in 1960 and translated into English in 1962 with the title Centuries of Childhood. Ariès's central conceit was captured in the phrase "the discovery of childhood." This phrase posited that at a particular point in the past—the seventeenth century, in Europe's case—the child came to be seen as a being different in nature and need from the adult. The book and the phrase quickly inspired European and American historians. Their goal was less to recreate a child's-eye view of the world and more to explore the adult actors who distinguished the child from the adult, created a public understanding of the child's nature, and built the child's world. These historians adopted the methodology known as social constructionism, and they intertwined the history of the adults who constructed modern childhood, from child psychologists and highly educated mothers to children's authors and toymakers, with a series of important historical transformations in the family, education, consumer culture, science, mass media, class formation, and state building. Despite its prominence in American and European historiography dating back to the 1970s, the history of childhood only appeared in Englishlanguage scholarship on Japan starting in the late 1990s. The monographs of Kathleen Uno (1999), David Ambaras (2005), and Mark Jones (2010) hewed closely to the methodological approach of social constructionism, and together they illuminated the adult interests at work in the development of child day-care centers (Uno), the policing of juvenile delinquency (Ambaras), and the birth of a middle-class version of childhood (Jones).1 After the publication of these three monographs, the following decade witnessed only sporadic interest in children's history. The field appeared to be fading until this volume appeared. Frühstück and Walthall have gathered a group of scholars interested in deepening our knowledge of the construction of Japanese childhood and also taking up thorny and unresolved issues in the field of children's history. A number of solid essays in this volume follow the established methodology of social constructionism, focusing on the adult construction of the child's image and world. Jinnō Yuki examines the material and philosophical struggles of two Taisho-era interior designers, Kogure Joichi and Moritani [End Page 545] Nobuo, to design a child's room in the home that centered on the needs of the child as opposed to those of the adult. In a point that echoes a similar observation by historian Gary Cross in the case of American childhood toys, Jinnō asserts that the ideology of child-centeredness was pivotal in giving birth to a child-centered industry that catered exclusively to children and, thus, contributed to the gradual process of expelling adults from the child's material, spatial, and social world. Harald Salomon's essay on the golden age of childhood film in wartime Japan explores how popular films and their directors shaped the public understanding of the child's nature. Films such as Tsubota Jōji's 1937 Kaze no naka no kodomotachi (Children in the wind) promoted a psychologically nuanced, realistic portrait of the child, whose essence was associated with resilience and cheerfulness as much as fragility and struggle. Salomon concludes that these sunny films, and their corresponding vision of childhood, were...

Forging Truth from Facts: Trauma, Historicity and Australian Children's Picture Books

Forging Truth from Facts:Trauma, Historicity and Australian Children's Picture Books Martin Kerby (bio) and Margaret Baguley (bio) Though they can find themselves constrained by the imagined "demands of children's literature as sanitary, benign, and didactic" (Tribunella 102), children's picture book authors and illustrators regularly attempt to engage with "unimaginable, unspeakable, and un-representable horror" (Trezise 43). Whether it be in the form of genocide, war, persecution or displacement, they tend not to shy away from the atrocities of history when searching for subject matter. However, the balancing of the sanitary with the unimaginable demands a compromise. Authors and illustrators invariably soften, perhaps even distort the horror in their efforts to be morally instructive. In their creation of a "parable of war" (MacCallum-Stewart 177) they explore the underlying humanist principles of the stories they tell, rather than historical perspectives. This approach transforms historical particularities into "universals of human experience" (Stephens 238). Trauma is sometimes directly confronted, but this is the exception rather than the rule (Kertzer, "Anxiety" 208). Kidd contends that at "least some of the children's literature of atrocity turns away from rather than confronts the difficulties of its subject matter, opting for simplistic narratives of character empowerment adapted from self-help literature" (185). For in any battle between hope and trauma, or at least the ones played out in children's literature, the former usually emerges triumphant. As a result, books such as the three analyzed in this article are often very successful in exploring broader issues of personal morality, but they make for dubious history. The critical and commercial success of works that adopt this approach suggests that the book buying public share this preference for morality tales over historical accuracy. This article will explore how three teams of Australian authors and illustrators position the plight of prisoners of war (POWs) (The Happiness Box: A Wartime Book of Hope, 2018), Indigenous servicemen (Alfred's War, 2018), and refugees (Ziba Came on a Boat, 2007) as a series of individual [End Page 281] traumas grounded in specific historical events. Only the first is ostensibly a work of nonfiction, though the latter two make an explicit claim to be truthful to the experience of a marginalized group. In particular, this article will focus on how the authors and illustrators, all of them skilled practitioners, have used historical events and individual trauma as a didactic opportunity. Specific historical details become a secondary consideration to generating an empathetic response from the reader. The books therefore become a barometer of contemporary attitudes and values. Trauma may find a place in the story but like the actual historical event, it is shaped, manipulated, and distorted to serve a didactic purpose. In the Australian marketplace, the exploration of historical trauma has been aided by a cultural context that characterizes history as a "wound or scar that leaves a trace on a nation's soul" (Twomey, "Anzac Day" par. 17). Yet as historians are only too aware, whether events "find their place finally in a story that is tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic . . . depends upon [their] decision to configure them according to the imperatives of one plot structure or mythos rather than another" (White 83). Children's literature is therefore always ideological, for it makes an important contribution to the formation and maintenance of a "national soul" (Hazard 111). In the case of war in the Australian context, this ideology is inherently conservative and pervasively hopeful: Though war is positioned as a national and personal trauma, it is also revered as a creative force that has shaped our personal and national identity. It is this distinction that allows the authors and illustrators to produce work that is overtly anti-militaristic, indeed almost pacifist in its intent, yet studiously avoids any criticism of the soldiers themselves. War might be futile, but the sacrifice of Australian soldiers is not. (Kerby et al., "Australians" 310) Yet any discussion of the place of trauma in Australian history must confront the widespread acceptance of war as the bedrock of national achievement and identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Anzac story was in a "state of terminal decline, anachronistic, patriarchal, militaristic and irrelevant" (Beaumont, "Second...

A mediação na Educação Infantil: possibilidade de aprendizagem

A educação Infantil favorece contexto de aprendizagem para a criança quando possibilita um processo de mediação. A mediação na educação é a intervenção que estabelece relações intermediárias para a aprendizagem. O trabalho trata-se de um ensaio bibliográfico que discute na obra de Lev Vygotski o processo de mediação na educação e em autores da infância a possibilidade de aprendizagem por meio da mediação na educação infantil. O texto discute um percurso de mediação que possibilita uma multiplicidade de ações para a compreensão da aprendizagem que parte do interesse da criança. A criança no processo de mediação é envolvida por relações indiretas, ou seja, uma ação mediada pelo meio para realizar alguma atividade. A discussão aponta que o ambiente para a criança na educação infantil tem múltiplas aprendizagem a partir de situações mediadas por signos, instrumentos e sujeitos mais experientes, no qual possibilita a construção do conhecimento na ampliação das experiências tornando as crianças sujeitos ativos de sua aprendizagem.

Magic, Matriarchs, and Manuscripts: The Alice Hoffman Papers

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of the Alice Hoffman Papers held at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. Alice Hoffman (b. 1952) is a best-selling American novelist, short-fiction writer, children's book author, and essayist. The Hoffman Papers contain personal and literary papers including literary manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and other materials—physical and digital—associated with the work, life, and creative process of this prolific, successful, and celebrated author. Among the materials from the collection highlighted are the extensive typescript drafts, proofs, handwritten notes, and marked-up copy of Hoffman's published and unpublished work, and material associated with the business side of being a best-selling author. The article also highlights letters in the collection written to Hoffman from longtime friend and editor Faith Sale, influential editor and critic Ted Solotaroff, fellow writers John Irving and Penelope Lively, and a substantial correspondence between Hoffman and her mentor and professor at Stanford, Albert Guerard, and his wife, the author and critic Maclin Bocock Guerard.

Trajectories in Argentine Children's Literature: Constancio C. Vigil and Horacio Quiroga

Children's author and publishing entrepreneur Constancio C. Vigil was a Uruguayan who spent most of his working life in Argentina. He was best known for his children's magazine Billiken (1919 to present). Vigil's contemporary and compatriot Horacio Quiroga also made the move across the River Plate and went on to have a transformative impact on Argentine literary culture, in part through his Jungle Tales for Children (1924). Both Quiroga and Vigil aspired to have their works for children accepted as school reading books, recognising the role of school authorities in the formation of the national canon. Vigil and Quiroga's trajectories of inclusion and exclusion, and their extraordinary contribution to the Argentine and Latin American cultural landscape in the first half of the twentieth century, provide a window onto the curation of an Argentine national children's literature at the same time as challenging the very nature of such a category.

From the Editors

From the Editors

Access to Children's Literature

Reading is important because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything. (dePaola, 2010) These words from well-known children's author Tomie dePaola are important. Having access to books, and knowing how to read those books, opens up a world of possibilities for children. Unfortunately, not all children around the world have access to books, and access to books varies greatly according to the neighborhoods in which children live. There is a disparity in access to print for those children who live in poverty (Neuman & Moland, 2019), with high-poverty neighborhoods primarily composed of minority groups having the least access to books (Bischoff & Reardon, 2014), which limits their opportunities in school and beyond. Likewise, across our world, access to books matters. Children's books also provide important moral messages in educating young readers: to be kind to others, to value friendship, and to help others, to name a few. In The Inside Track for this issue, Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, a scholar at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, discusses why access to books matters in Taiwan and across the globe. She considers the implications that an emphasis on children's access to books has on their lives and on the formation of global citizenship. Wu introduces the Editorial Task Force for Children's Books and discusses its mission and the implications of its launch in the 1960s, and she explains that examining the history of this campaign in Taiwan can help teachers consider why access to books matters for students in today's world. We hope readers will find something new in this issue's five feature articles. First, Pletcher, Hudson, John, and Scott describe how to balance the hybrid role of the literacy coach and reading interventionist. Hoch, McCarty, Gurvitz, and Sitkoski examine guided inquiry in the digital age and explain how it requires instructional moves that differ from traditional methods. Rawlins and Invernizzi reconceptualize sight words and note the importance of building early reading vocabulary, and Coakley-Fields describes how a fourth-grade teacher cultivated an inclusive classroom while weaving fiction discussions into classroom instruction. Last, McVicker studies the preferences of readers, whether they prefer to be plugged or unplugged. There are also five teaching tips in this issue. Kibler and Chapman provide tips on using culturally relevant texts to improve reading outcomes. Mikita, Rodgers, Berenbon, and Winkler show the importance of targeted prompts when used with scaffolding word solving during guided reading. Beach and Bolden note how word painting supports vocabulary development. Nash, Panther, and Elson provide a description of student-created book basket labels as a culturally sustaining literacy practice in the classroom, and Thomas shows the importance of building literacy environments to motivate African American boys to read by providing texts in which they can see reflections of themselves in print. This issue's Voices From the Classroom essay was written by Rebecca Benjamin, a literacy specialist in the Schenectady City School District, New York. She discusses simple steps toward enhancing engagement in the classroom using poetry. In the two departments in this issue, Literacy Across Disciplines and Digital Literacy, Fisher and Frey offer a description of literacy stations and how they can be used in content area learning, and Gallagher, Di Cesare, and Rowsell provide an intriguing description of their work with newcomer families, the families’ digital lives, and digital literacy. Returning to the words of dePaola, “Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.” Access to books is the first step in combating illiteracy worldwide, but we must also remember the disparity in communities that live in poverty and that access to books is a greater challenge for children in poverty than for their middle class peers.

“I'm Always Kind of Double‐Checking”: Exploring the Information‐Seeking Identities of Expert Generalists

AbstractDespite a heightened focus on information literacy, students and adults alike struggle to assess online information. In this article, the authors argue that the K–12 information literacy curriculum needs to focus on supporting students to develop identities as expert information seekers to address complex and mutable modern literacy needs. The authors explore commonalities and themes within three different expert information‐seeking professions: academic librarians, journalists, and nonfiction children's book authors. From semistructured interviews emerged distinct themes of doing, knowing, and being that expert information seekers employed when encountering information. The authors believe that these identity practices could form the basis of an information‐seeking curriculum that can help address the challenges of the current online information environment.