Children Author Research Articles

The Nation and the Child: Nation Building in Hebrew Children's Literature, 1930–1970 by Yael Darr

Reviewed by: The Nation and the Child: Nation Building in Hebrew Children's Literature, 1930–1970 by Yael Darr Barbara Thiede (bio) The Nation and the Child: Nation Building in Hebrew Children's Literature, 1930–1970. By Yael Darr. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2018. It is an old but important question: How does children's literature provide a location to teach, form, even indoctrinate children in the values of their culture and nation? Yael Darr's [End Page 236] The Nation and the Child surveys the ways in which leading Israeli children's writers and the editors and publishing houses that supported them did just that. Darr brings considerable expertise to her project. Her first and second books treated aspects of this question, focusing first on children's literature produced in the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish settlement) and second on the political institutions that created a canon for children based on the Labor movement's ideals. The present volume extends Darr's research into the 1950s and 1960s; as she points out, the process of nation building—and the critical importance of children's literature in that project—did not end after the State of Israel was established. Darr's work covers a wide-ranging set of topics. These include the role of educational systems and newly formed state institutions in the production of children's literature, finding political platforms for its dissemination, and designating a "national poet" specifically for children. The Nation and the Child also explores how children's literature served to provide explanatory models for establishing national rituals, traditions, and celebrations. We read about the influence of the Second World War and the Holocaust in the construction of both war narratives for children and models for how survivors could or should be integrated into Israeli culture. Darr addresses all of these questions and more, neatly weaving essential historical data into her narrative. Darr's book details the emergence of Hebrew children's literature well before the creation of the State of Israel. Late in the nineteenth century, Zionist leaders worked to establish Hebrew not simply as the language of sacred texts, but also as a living language of a new nation. Early Hebrew literature was meant to create a "new Jewish child," modern, open to other cultures, but in possession of a national spirit. Once ensconced in the kibbutz movement, Hebrew children's literature became critical to the socialist project: the young heroes whom the books and poems portrayed cast off their parents' diasporic inheritance—including the Yiddish language—and became the agents, emissaries, even missionaries for Zionism. While the kibbutz and the collective are presented in early Hebrew children's literature as the antithesis to presumably thoroughly depressing conditions for children in the Diaspora, "apolitical literature" also emerged for Yishuv children, including nonsense literature, humorous rhyming tales, and lyric poetry. The selection as national poet for children of Hayim Nahman Bialik, a writer who offered children positive portrayals of Jewish life in Europe, proved that hard and fast boundaries between socialist agendas and the larger European Jewish past would be difficult to maintain. The Labor movement eventually claimed Bialik for its own, even when its publications for children distorted his words in order to present him as especially and particularly close to the movement's schools. Darr's book documents the efforts of specific "taste setters" such as modernist and children's author and editor Lea Goldberg, who promoted [End Page 237] and wrote children's literature that could be aesthetically pleasing while simultaneously depicting and challenging kibbutz life. But Darr continues to note the compelling ties that Hebrew children's literature must have to the nation-building project. A centuries-old Jewish holiday such as Shavuot could—with the help of children's authors—be transformed into a secular harvest celebration celebrating the Zionist collective. Folksongs could be created by authors who self-consciously never signed their names to their work, thus creating the illusion of a literary tradition namelessly handed down to the present generation. And so on. As Darr points, out, Hebrew children's literature would eventually have to "make amends" to Yiddish after the Holocaust and abandon the dismissal of the Diaspora that...

Interview with Hadil Ghoneim, an Author from Egypt

Interview with Hadil Ghoneim, an Author from Egypt Yasmine Motawy (bio) Hadil is a bilingual (Arabic and English) Egyptian author of several books for children and young adults and an active essayist. Her bestselling Sana fi Qena [A Year in Qena] received a great deal of attention, was on the 2016 IBBY Honor List, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children's Literature. She is known for her humorous and realistic middle-reader books that focus on community building. In her early career, Hadil wrote biographies of notable Egyptians for middle readers and in 2006 her biography of Nobel prize–winning author Naguib Mahfouz was selected to be added to all Egyptian public-school libraries. During her time as senior editor at the Cairo-based publishing house Dar El Shorouk, she translated and localized into Arabic many books for children, including the famous book series Geronimo Stilton. Hadil's essays, profiles, and interviews have appeared in numerous Egyptian media outlets. Hadil holds an MA in culture and society from the London School of Economics and a BSc in political science from Cairo University. She is currently based in Michigan with her husband and young daughter. So, Hadil, how did you make your way from studying in the humanities to writing for children? After I finished my MSc in cultural studies at LSE, I was meant to return to my editorial job at Weghat Nazar, a literary review magazine in Egypt. Instead, I found myself happily accepting a position in the children's books department at the magazine's parent company, Dar El Shorouk. It felt like the most natural thing for me, because even as a student, I was always finding ways to steer my work towards the world of children's literature. For example, as a fresh graduate I led a team of volunteers in an oral cultural [End Page 46] heritage project by collecting traditional "house tales" from women all over Egypt. Years later, I chose to write my master's dissertation on the local reception of Disney's Mickey Mouse comic magazines in their Egyptianized version. Writing for children, however, came gradually; I started with translating, localizing, and editing translations of children's books. My first book for children was the Naguib Mahfouz biography. I was comfortable writing a research-based book because I had been specifically trained to write research, and I loved the process of storifying and simplifying. After two years at Dar El Shorouk, I had authored three more picturebooks that were turned into the Green Home Series and covered topics like waste and water management, civic responsibility, and community engagement. It was a fantastic beginning because I was working alongside the art director, the illustrators, and the graphic designers in the "kitchen," so to speak, and the learning and confidence curve was high. How do the other hats you wear impact the "children's author" hat? I get excited by research-based writing projects, and early on in my career I felt that my books had to have a strong informative value. I wanted them to carry all I had found important in studying and writing about politics, dialogue, community, and culture. Today, I feel more focused on my writing as a creative expression of myself that is performed for the child reader. Losing those hats along the way has liberated my writing and made it subtler. The parenthood hat must be informing my work as well, as I am always peeking into the world of children as I watch my daughter grow. Another hat I currently wear is that of "resident alien" in the US, a status that keeps my senses open and my mind active in constantly reflecting on what is universal and what is culture-specific. How has your trajectory changed as a writer in terms of themes, style, or topic? While there was a strong storytelling element in my work from the start, even in the biographies I wrote for middle readers, it was only in 2011 that I broke out of the nonfiction mold, when I wrote A Year in Qena. Even though it was grounded in factual research and touched on the difficult...

Globalization and Italian Children's Publishing

Globalization and Italian Children's Publishing Manuela Salvi (bio) In 2012, only one fourth of the books produced by Mondadori, the largest Italian publishing house, were written by Italian authors. And of all the books in translation, only 3% were from non-English-speaking countries. This meant that, in a typical Italian bookshop, it was easier to find a book translated from English than to find a book by an Italian author. As Amselle highlights, through globalization, American culture has become a sort of agent of universalization, in which our specificities can be reformulated but not necessarily lost. However, I have noticed over the years that the best compliment an Italian children's author can receive today is something like: "Oh, your book is so good, it doesn't even sound as if it's written by an Italian author; it could be English or American!" The writers' reaction to this kind of comment is often hopefulness, because they are generally aware of inhabiting a world within a world, and that consequently their culture depends on a "core" that often ignores its "peripheries." When analyzing the historical development of Italian culture in the last century, it is not hard to find several intersections with American culture. A few examples are the CPI (the Committee of Public Information), which in 1918 flooded Italy with millions of dispatches, postcards, and flags in order to promote the political "friendship" between the two countries; the Marshall Plan; Hollywood; and twenty years of Berlusconi's government, during which Italian television was radically transformed in accord with the American model. Generations of children grew up with American words and values, which were seen as necessary to having a life full of adventures, power, and wealth; they got used to assimilating narratives in which the hero was hardly ever Italian. Even the Italian language has changed under the influence of American globalized culture. In Italy, words from English are slowly being assimilated into everyday speech and then officially become part of the Italian vocabulary. In the last edition of Tullio De Mauro's Italian dictionary, 5,370 out of 316,800 words are English. It doesn't [End Page 53] seem like an impressive number, since it represents only 1.7% of the Italian language, but it is important to note that all these English terms—from computer to stalker, target, meeting, T-shirt, and so on—are among the most commonly used words in everyday life. Furthermore, the official dictionary does not include words commonly used in spoken language and slang that are a fusion between the original English word and an Italian suffix (for example: chat combined with the Italian verb suffix –are makes chattare, meaning to chat online). Many published books by Italian authors now look like American or British editions, since their covers display the title in English. Some examples are The Frozen Boy by Guido Sgardoli, the series Candy Circle by Domenico Baccalario, and Tales from the Darkroom by Alessandro Gatti and Manuela Salvi. This trend seems to demonstrate that some Italian authors are part of that cultural reception highlighted by Rydell and Kroes, in which people not only consume what they like, but also elaborate and reuse this material to reshape narratives that are perceived to be universal. Ultimately, a peripheral group that has been culturally invaded within a globalized system can only express itself through the categories of the group that represents the core. On the other hand, American culture has always been the symbol of modernity, hope, enterprise, and possibility. Such values as going beyond people's differences and dismissing elitism in order to affirm an egalitarian society, in which each individual can find his or her place, are widely accepted as being universal. Moreover, in the global market, being translated and published in other countries has become a sign of success, especially being translated and published in English-speaking countries. As Emily Apter notes, everyone wants a special place in the publishing market. For example, postcolonial authors, minority authors, and Scandinavian writers have gained international visibility. So, it is only natural for several Italian authors to try to write for a global audience, building translatability into their texts...

A rhyming artist

Nick Sharratt is a prolific children's author and illustrator famous for his rhyming text and colourful illustrations. The following activities use his work to develop children's communication and language skills.

АКТУАЛИЗАЦИЯ РОДОВЫХ ЗНАЧЕНИЙ В ДЕТСКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ КОНЦА ХХ НАЧАЛА ХХI В.В.

The article deals with peculiarities of the functioning of generic meanings in children's poetry of the late XX beginning of the XXI century. Expressiveness, semantic actualization and neutralization of the gender category in children’s poetry are researched. Juxtaposition gender grammes and the actualization of the meaning of sex in animate nouns in the works of children's authors are described. The cases of the use of masculine and feminine grammes for the formation of binary sign complexes, as well as the use of universal gender complexes in the plural form for the generalization and transmission of ‘children’ are considered. Examples of the use of generic opposites for the actualization of a certain part of the grammatical field and the formation of the structure and plot of the poem are described. The use of paired by the same-rooted animated nouns in the meaning of “family”, “couple” is analyzed. Examples of the use of productive word-building tools for creating occasional author formations are described. We studied the mechanisms of violation of predictability for creating a comic effect. Examples of juxtaposition of the three genders for transferring of the value of completeness and inclusiveness are considered The use of gender pairs to create a model of figurative parallelism is described. The mechanisms of the functioning of the gender paradigm in the structure of children's poetic text are studied. Key words: gender meaning, expressiveness, actualization, neutralization, gender paradigm, gender complex, binary sign complex

Authors meet children to share a love of stories

Children's book publisher Little Tiger has launched a brand new series of monthly events designed to spotlight the very best children's authors and inspire a passion for reading in four to 12-year-olds. Karen Hart reports.

Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research ed. by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte

Reviewed by: Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research ed. by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte Minjie Chen (bio) Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research. Edited by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research is a valuable addition to scholarship on the origin and development of Irish children's literature. The twelve essays in the volume grew out of the National Collection of Children's Books (NCCB) project, which culminated in an online union catalog and database of over 250,000 children's books from five libraries in Dublin, dating from the sixteenth century up to 2014. The book's title is suggestive of methodological contributions, but the real focus and strength of this essay collection is that it builds an understanding of the history of children's texts, reading, and education upon a rich heritage of primary materials held in Dublin. The disjuncture between the aspiration of the title words and the essence of the volume is betrayed by the latitude of "approach," used in the introduction section to variously refer to method (how) and foci of inquiry (what) of the studies. The collection engages with children's literature through the lenses of history, education, and literature. A major part of the book traces the origin and evolution of Irish children's literature, highlighting early texts, key publishers, and significant authors and works from the end of the seventeenth century through the twentieth. Máire Kennedy captures evidence of Irish children as readers and target consumers of instructional and educational books during the eighteenth century. She discusses children's exposure to hornbooks and chapbooks; notes the rise of illustrated books; demonstrates her skillful use of a variety of sources such as booksellers' advertisements, publishers' ledgers and subscription lists, guides and advice on reading, and adults' accounts of childhood reading; and helps us imagine young people's access to and interaction with books as child-oriented literature gradually increased. Anne Markey's study is bracketed by two dates: 1696, when the earliest Irish-published textbook specifically aimed at young readers was issued (as discovered by the NCCB bibliographical project), and 1810, the year before the foundation of the Kildare Place Society in Dublin. Kennedy's findings notwithstanding, Markey points out the paucity of children's books in early eighteenth-century Ireland. Using British children's literature as a benchmark, she describes the Irish children's book market as dominated by instructional texts as well as by imported, translated, and reprinted works from England and France. She identifies key publishers and pioneer writers whose works, though modest in quantity, marked the birth of indigenous Irish children's literature and made important contributions to the development of English children's literature. Aileen Douglas's analysis focuses on the works of Maria Edgeworth, the most influential Irish children's author to have emerged by the end of the eighteenth century. Douglas sheds light on the dual nature [End Page 496] of Edgeworth's didacticism and argues that her Early Lessons series presents an innovative literary representation of children's selfhood. In her role as novelist/educationalist, Edgeworth not only imparts factual information and moral teachings but also demonstrates how child protagonists are able to learn and to improve through the process of "gradual instruction," a manifestation of her educational principles. Susan M. Parkes picks up in 1811 where Markey leaves off; she devotes her essay to the significant role of the Kildare Place Society (KPS) in producing widely disseminated reading materials for Irish children and in promoting mass education. Parkes attributes the success of the Society, which admired the Quakers, to the neutrality of its publications in terms of Irish identity and religious persuasion. Several major authors and canonical works from the nineteenth century onward receive close reading, paratextual analysis, and sociopolitical critiques in this volume, yielding insightful (re)interpretations. Ciara Ní Bhroin studies Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, the first collection of oral tales to have been published in Britain or Ireland. She examines how the collection underwent drastic transformations against the backdrop of cultural and political shifts in Ireland, beginning as an...

Iona

Iona Kenneth Steven (bio) Leave Craignure and the woods around Duart Castleand hug the shore before you climb the lion-coloured hills:Glen Gorm, from which the people once were burned.Up higher and still higher, until the lochs lie far belowin clear, long stretches. Then begin the descentand if you're lucky the whole bald head of Ben Morehas broken out of cloud and stares west, a weathered sphinx.A telephone box, a single house, and miles of salt marshfor the constant hope of otters. Then on, to Pennyghael,and the thin single road that winds like a piece of threadover to the cliffs of Carsaig. But keep on heading west,until Bunessan and the harbour and the clustered houses.You're almost there. An inland loch, impossibly blue,and now the breeze blows every way at once–the land lies low, left with a few wind-twisted trees,and see, ahead, there, on the edge of the sky;the abbey nestled by the sea–guarding, keeping, waiting. [End Page 264] Kenneth Steven Kenneth Steven is a poet, novelist and children's author from Scotland. He is most inspired by the Celtic Christian story, and from childhood days the island of Iona has been his spiritual home. Kenneth leads many retreats both as a writer and as a follower of that Celtic path. His most recent poetry collections are Letting in the Light (SPCK) and Deirdre of the Sorrows (Birlinn). www.kennethsteven.co.uk. Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Creating Nations from Silent Books

Creating Nations from Silent Books Debbie Thomas (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Refugee: a word that speaks of leaving and losing, fear and flight. But it is also an arriving word, deriving from the Latin refugium, "a place to flee back to." With media images of refugees escaping untold terrors, any attempt to find hope in the word runs the risk of belittling their ordeal. Conversely, to dwell solely on the trauma is to risk portraying refugees as powerless victims. A workshop for primary school children, designed and run by IBBY Ireland, has helped to balance the narrative by imagining a future where the victim becomes the victor, where the once disempowered get to rule on their future, literally. If that sounds a little heavy for Irish eight to twelve-year-olds, the Nation Creation workshop has also proved huge fun, allowing participants to journey imaginatively from the horror of forced migration to the delight of dreaming up their ideal country. Nation Creation has accompanied IBBY's Silent [End Page 76] Books Exhibition on its tour of Irish libraries. The workshop adds another brick to the "bridge of children's books" envisioned by IBBY's founder, Jella Lepman. The Silent Books have been building that bridge in spatial and psychological ways since they were first collected from around the world in 2013. Geographically, one set of the books lives permanently on a "bridge" to Europe—the island of Lampedusa — which serves as a transit point for migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Imaginatively, the wordless picturebooks offer a bridge across which refugees can escape horrific memories into pages full of beauty, color, and comfort. And an empathetic bridge forms when the story behind the travelling set of Silent Books is told, connecting children all over the world to the experiences of those forced to flee their countries. "The exhibition was an absolute gift," says Marian Keyes, programmer of events and exhibitions at the dlr LexIcon library near Dublin and a former committee member of IBBY Ireland. "It appealed to all ages from babies to primary and secondary school pupils, artists and illustrators, storytellers, authors, and of course the public." The Silent Books formed the springboard for the Nation Creation workshop, facilitated by illustrator and children's author Tatyana Feeney and myself, also a children's writer, both committee members of IBBY Ireland. We introduced the exhibition by asking participants to think of a group of people that might particularly benefit from wordless picturebooks. Answers included pre-reading toddlers, adults who cannot read, and people who speak different languages, such as refugees. Children looked at a map showing Lampedusa and heard about the library set up by IBBY. After browsing the books, they discussed how these stories beyond words could comfort, entertain, educate, and inspire refugees. This led to a consideration of the feelings that might accompany forced migration—from terror, loneliness, and anger to the more positive possibilities of relief, gratitude at escape, and hope of a better future. In groups, participants then dreamed up their own ideal country as an island state, complete with laws, flags, and other markers of national identity. With Tatyana's help, they began by drawing a map of the island on a large sheet of paper. "That allowed them to visualize the worlds they were creating," she says. "Having a physical space to work with led quickly to other ideas." These ranged from the predictable "islands made of chocolate" to wildly inventive new languages, anthems, and names. There was Nuevo Saol ("new" in Spanish and "life" in Irish) and Yorland, a country that welcomed everyone. The island of Atlasia "supports the rest of the world like the giant Atlas," according to its founders, and Cisilěně, in the Mediterranean, was colonized by Celts from Sicily. The children then worked in groups to design flags on paper and cut them out of felt, sticking bright pieces on a rectangular background. "This was a great way to encapsulate a national identity," says Tatyana. "The flags focused the students' thoughts about how they wanted to represent their new land. Some were very specific, such as pineapples and unicorns, while others were more...

Rules

Rules Claudia Nelson Children's literature is notoriously a literature that lays out rules for the reader's inspection: moral rules, social rules, rules for reading, rules for being a child. Adults tend to disapprove of works that seem to get moral rules wrong; as George MacDonald explains in "The Fantastic Imagination," his introduction to The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales (1890), "In the moral world" an author may "employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent." Yet children's books that urge blind obedience to social rules—that mistake the social and contingent for the moral and timeless, if you will—are likely to attract disapproval as well, on the grounds that they are tiresomely didactic, fail to understand child characters or child readers, and/or perpetuate outmoded and perhaps oppressive mores. Similarly, children's books that take creative and rule-bending approaches to reading often garner critical praise, but so do those that show insight about the rules governing childhood without seeking to change those rules. Meanwhile, child readers' responses to these rule-bound texts may be entirely different from adults'. Faced with these contradictory expectations, what is a poor author to do? As the articles in this issue of ChLAQ suggest, where rules are concerned, children's authors have found many ways of having their cake and eating it too. Strategies on display in this issue include attacking certain social or literary conventions while sedulously conforming to others; appearing to abide by rules while actually breaking them; and making distinctions between adult rules and child rules, while privileging the latter through narratorial address. In each case, navigating the full extent of a given text's approach to rules turns out to require a layered approach to reading, wherein what may be evident about rule-breaking or rule-keeping at first glance is not the same as what may be evident when one looks deeper. The primary texts explored in this issue span a relatively narrow period chronologically, from 1904 to 1967. Perhaps not coincidentally, these years witnessed tremendous social change, an upending of expectations and rules arguably as rapid and sweeping as that in any sixty-three-year span in history. [End Page 123] We begin in 1904 with Erica Kanesaka Kalnay's consideration of "Worlds of Realism and Romance: Ironic Play and the Child Reader in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Two Bad Mice." Using Potter's picture book as an example of "ironic play," or "the dissonance between realism and romance in children's literature," Kalnay suggests that texts such as Two Bad Mice encourage a rethinking of what we might assume to be the rules governing the book/reader relationship. Rather, by acknowledging their own contradictions and rule-breaking, works that engage in ironic play challenge the conception of the child reader often assumed to be dominant in Golden Age children's literature, as an uncomplicatedly passive consumer of meanings made by adults. Kalnay contends that in its focus on the title characters' invasion of a dollhouse, a home at once imaginary and materially real, Two Bad Mice offers insight into forms of immersive play that include but are not limited to reading fiction. In "Co-Narrating like a Child: Adding the 'Blots' and 'Interesting Bits' to Peter Pan," Carrie Sickmann Han examines multiple versions of J. M. Barrie's iconic tale in order to show how, in her view, Barrie works "to promote collaborative and creative reading practices for adults." As in Kalnay's discussion of Potter's picture book, this article rejects the vision of the passive child reader reified by canonical critical works such as Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction. Moreover, Sickmann Han continues, "Barrie collapses the divide between reading and storytelling" for adult readers as well as for children. If, geographically speaking, boundaries are the most common type of rule, Peter Pan launches assaults not only...

Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

Reviewed by: Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Anne V. Cirella-Urrutia (bio) Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes. By Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. This volume addresses the purposes and diversity of maps in children's literature and how the analysis of maps as a specific kind of illustration is intimately connected with picture theory, picture book research, and cognitive studies. The thirteen essays draw on different theoretical frameworks including geography and developmental psychology, maps and geographic literacy, ecocriticism, historiography, materialist cartographies, social anthropology, island studies, genre studies, and nonsense geography. Hence the editors engage the reader with an interdisciplinary methodology representing a wide spectrum of diverse genres with a selection of children's works from Germany, Italy, England, Norway, Denmark, the United States, and Russia. Part 1, "About Mapping: Learning to Orientate Oneself," examines how maps and mapping in children's literature contribute to children's abilities to orient themselves in various spaces and how they learn from maps. Lynn Liben discusses the use of maps during reading and their impact on the cognitive and emotional consequences of the independent or shared reading experience. Nikola von Merveldt looks at the importance of maps in late eighteenth-century Germany. Considering the pedagogy of cartophobia initiated by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she studies the philanthropic movement in Joachim Heinrich Campes's geographical writings. Travel literature was regarded as the only appropriate kind of literature for philanthropic children to grow on. Janet Grafton uses ecocriticism and critical nostalgia to show how personal geography and physical geography inform each other in L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill (1937) and Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood Betsy (1916). In both narratives, the setting is not merely a backdrop, but rather a place for the female protagonists to engage with the land and to build their skills, thus attesting to each author's intrinsic sense of cartography. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer's cognitive methodology centers on the use of "metaphorical maps" (the Gall map tradition) in Sara Fanelli's My Map Book (1995) and Peter Sís's The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (2007). Most important to both authors is the function of these maps of places that are shaped like humans or animals, and the type of picture books that implement them. Part 2, "Literary Shaping of Real Cityscapes," deals with the idea of how maps contribute to the portrayal of real cityscapes in picture books and children's novels. Corina Löwe analyzes Andreas Steinhöfel's Rico, Oskar und die Tierferschatten (The Spaghetti Detectives, 2008), in [End Page 223] which young readers may follow the protagonist's route in an urban space. Anna Katrina Gutierrez examines the intertextual links with music, poetry, and literature established by a map of New York City in two young adult novels co-authored by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006) and Dash and Lili's Book of Dares (2010). Anna Juan Cantavella elaborates on Jacques Mullender's "degree zero of cartography" (129) in the act of walking as "map-building" of Prague and New York (139) in two picture books by Czech-born American children's author Sís: The Three Golden Keys (1994) and Madlenka (2000). Marnie Campagnaro concludes this section with a close reading of Bruno Munari's innovative picture book Nella Nebbia de Milano (The Circus in the Mist, 1968). She provides an overview of Munari's creativity and emphasizes the relationship linking a landscape to the child's sensory receptiveness that is created by Munari's use of pierced and perforated paper to suggest the fog. Part 3, "Fictional Seascapes and Landscapes," sheds light on maps that depict fantasy seascapes and landscapes and stresses two seminal aspects of children's literature: the impact of genre and the significance of underlying ideological issues on the understanding of maps and related spaces. Olga Holownia traces common features of nonsense geography in representations of seascapes and soundscapes in Walter Moers's The 13½ Lives of...

Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series by Erika Haber

Reviewed by: Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series by Erika Haber James H. McGavran III (bio) Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series. By Erika Haber. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Erika Haber's study, a recent addition to the University Press of Mississippi's Children's Literature Association series, presents a fascinating and largely unexplored case of Cold War intertextuality. In 1939, just after Stalin's Great Terror subsided, an unknown Soviet mathematician, teacher, and aspiring children's author named Aleksandr Volkov (1891–1977) managed, through one of those publishing miracles that seem strangely common in the history of Russian literature, to bring out a free adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Volkov called his book Wizard of the Emerald City, and despite a fine-print line on the copyright page identifying it as a reworking of the American story, most readers took it to be Volkov's original work (which in some ways it was, given the liberties that he took with Baum's text). He went on, in the 1960s and '70s, to write five original sequels to his initial adaptation. Volkov's Magic Land series, as it is now known, was as beloved throughout the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc as the Oz series was in the West, but during the Soviet period, at least, their readerships remained predictably separate; even now, as Haber notes, the generations of Russian children raised on Volkov's books "know little about the Soviet author and even less about L. Frank Baum" (4). Haber's study, for its part, does much more than introduce Volkov and his work to Western scholars not yet familiar with this author: it provides biographies of both authors, historical context regarding children's literature in the US and the Soviet Union, and a comparative analysis of the two series in terms of plot, characterization, and style. Haber draws convincing parallels between the life experiences and careers of Baum and Volkov, two unlikely giants of children's literature whose books still enjoy far more name recognition than their creators have found as authors, and she also examines their complex creative legacies. [End Page 491] Haber prefaces her book with a personal account of the coincidences that spurred and sustained her interest in the project. A professor of Russian at Syracuse University, she lives just ten miles from Baum's hometown and stumbled in 2009 upon the Baum family plot in a local cemetery. Her work on Volkov, in contrast, took her across the world to Tomsk, in Siberia, where she forged ties with a group of scholars who maintain a museum and university archive dedicated to the author. Haber's introduction lays the groundwork for her book by establishing the comparable popularity of the two series and the extent to which each became a cultural phenomenon on its own side of the Iron Curtain. As Haber acknowledges, large print runs in the Soviet Union didn't necessarily indicate popular demand, nor was demand itself a criterion in publishing decisions, which were instead based on political priorities and timing (7–8). She aptly argues, however, that timing and extraliterary concerns were equally important to Baum, who was under pressure, for example, to bring out a new Oz book in time for Christmas almost every year (8). Both authors, in fact, felt compelled at various points to continue their series, though they would have preferred to turn to other projects. Haber's first two chapters present biographical essays on Baum and Volkov. Her research into both authors is impressive, and her accounts of their eventful lives are full of details both entertaining and telling (Haber's writing is eminently readable throughout). There are no biographical monographs on Volkov, so Haber constructed her narrative from primary-source research at Tomsk State Pedagogical University (36). In the case of Baum, she focuses perhaps a bit too much on metabiography, belaboring the paucity of reliable, scholarly work on his life and the attempts of his son Frank Joslyn Baum to mythologize parts of his father's biography. Nevertheless, the parallels that Haber draws...

Lois Lenski, Storycatcher by Bobbie Malone

Reviewed by: Lois Lenski, Storycatcher by Bobbie Malone Rebecca L. Godwin Lois Lenski, Storycatcher. By Bobbie Malone. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. x, 323. $26.95, ISBN 978–0-8061–5386-5.) Five decades of America's twentieth century come alive in this readable, meticulously researched, and well-documented first full-length biography of Newbery Award–winning children's author-illustrator Lois Lenski. Historian and educator Bobbie Malone traces the evolution of Lenski's work and ties her determination to create her art to the economic and social realities that surrounded women and educational movements, especially between the 1920s and the 1960s. Malone's narrative proves that Lenski, a talented and energetic documentarian of American life who was part of the 1920s surge in children's book publishing, aimed to promote empathy and a sense of social justice in young readers. Malone follows Lenski from her 1893 birth in Ohio to her death in 1974, framing the author's achievements in the context of women's expected place in American society. After earning an education degree, Lenski refused a teaching [End Page 204] job and instead went to New York City in 1915, where she lived at a Young Women's Christian Association branch for women interested in the arts. In 1921, at the age of twenty-seven, she married her mentor, muralist and illustrator Arthur Sinclair Covey, whose first wife had died soon after giving birth to their second child. Throughout the book, Malone describes Lenski's fulfilling life wherein she quietly contested her domestic roles and worked tirelessly to realize her professional dreams. As her husband's painting commissions dissipated during the Great Depression, Lenski became the primary breadwinner, but she never claimed that title herself. In her autobiography and in her letters to friends, Lenski shared that her husband expressed no interest in her books. Yet she pressed on and managed her own professional affairs, earned money from magazines with perfect-mother-myth satirical essays after she bore a son at age thirty-five, networked for field research, and published and illustrated one hundred books. Lenski's fine illustrations for her own and other writers' children's books added to her success, but it was her respectful portrayals of diverse ethnic groups and working-class families—including migrant laborers, sharecroppers, and coal miners—that broke new ground. Determined to provide a realistic view of America, Lenski wrote Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison (1941), an acclaimed historical novel for middle-grade readers that gave an "alternative perspective of Anglo-American Manifest Destiny" with its sympathetic portrayal of Native culture (p. 130). The book started Lenski on the path to writing her American Regional series and Roundabout America series. She wrote while living among everyday people around the country and learning local cultural traditions, work rituals, and dialects, catching stories that became, for instance, Bayou Suzette (1943), Strawberry Girl (1945), and Corn-Farm Boy (1954). Lenski's collaboration with teachers and schoolchildren developed into "'invitational writing'" as she responded to people's requests to "write about them and their region" (p. 166). Lenski conducted extensive research and sometimes included too much historical detail for her editor's taste. Nevertheless, she created books that teachers used in social studies curricula in upper elementary grades to help readers understand the importance of place in people's lives. Malone gives a balanced view of Lenski's work, citing negative reviews and sharing honest assessments of Lenski's unsuccessful books. Malone talked to librarians, educators, children's literature scholars, Lenski's family members, and people who were involved with Lenski's field research as children. She read the papers that Lenski left to more than two dozen libraries and archival repositories around the United States. By analyzing Lenski's influences and by including photographs and illustrations, Malone's chronological study presents Lenski as a forward-thinking American artist in her time. Historians as well as scholars and enthusiasts of children's literature will find this book insightful, and biographers and children's book authors can learn much from the writing and research methods of both Malone and her subject, whose inclusive ideas about democracy influenced generations. [End Page 205...

News & Announcements

Greetings Everyone! There are only a few news items for the fall issue: International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Announces List of 100 Children’s Books in Arabic "Here is a selection of 100 children’s books in Arabic published in various countries of the Arab world. This selection reflects the dynamism of a sector that has truly taken off in the past twenty years, with the publication of a wide range of titles whose quality is often recognised by international awards."Finalists Announced for the 2017 Canadian Children’s Book Centre AwardsThe CCBC has announced the finalists in for their annual book awards. This includes the $30,000 TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. See the CCBC website for a full list of finalists."So you want to get Published?" SeminarThe Canadian Children's Book Centre is hosting a seminar for aspiring children's book authors on November 4, 2017 at 10:00 AM at the Northern District Library in Toronto, ON. Details are found on the CCBC website.Vancouver Children's Literature Roundtable (VCLR) The VCLR, announced the 2017 Information Book Award Shortlist. The shortlist can be found on the VCLR webiste. The winner will be announced in November 2017.Wishing you bright fall days!Hanne Pearce - Communications Editor

Revisiting, Transforming and Transferring Robinson Crusoe and John Silver into Another Literature

The Catalan children's author Josep Vallverdú published two crossover stories based on Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. Les raons de Divendres (Friday's Reasons) (2003) gives an account of the episode of Crusoe and Friday told from the point of view of the servant, whereas El testament de John Silver (John Silver's Will) (2007) deals with the adventures of the pirate after searching for the treasure in the Caribbean. This paper demonstrates how Vallverdú uses his experience as a writer and translator to transform two canonical novels, through transposition into a contemporary context, in a way that facilitates an interaction between Catalan literature and English literature. In keeping with this exploration of literary tradition, the two sequels are also analysed as twenty-first century expressions of a Western literary tradition that abounds in adventure stories set at sea.

Different Measures of Print Exposure Predict Different Aspects of Vocabulary

AbstractThe authors examined whether different measures of print exposure assess the same underlying concept and how these different measures relate to vocabulary breadth and depth. One hundred forty‐seven students attending the third year of kindergarten in Jining, China, were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary breadth and depth, and their knowledge of book titles. Parents also participated in the study by filling out a questionnaire on the frequency of shared book reading and the number of children's books at home, recording their daily parent–child reading activities (diary), and completing the children's title and author recognition checklists. Results of exploratory factor analysis indicated that the measures of print exposure were loading on three interrelated factors. The items measuring the frequency of shared book reading at home along with diary formed one factor, the children's title recognition checklist and number of children's books at home formed a second factor, and children's knowledge of book titles formed a third factor. In addition, the results of hierarchical regression analyses indicated that whereas all factors accounted for unique variance (3–6%) in vocabulary breadth, only children's knowledge of book titles predicted vocabulary depth, after controlling for children's age, parents’ education and income, and children's nonverbal IQ. Taken together, these findings suggest that different measures of print exposure may capture different aspects of print exposure and that these aspects may exert a different role in vocabulary breadth and depth.

Subversive as Hell: Political Satire in the Work of Dr. Seuss

This paper is an analysis of the political satire and historical forces at play in the work of children's author Dr. Seuss.

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

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...

Putting on the Dog: Canine Characterization in Fiction and Nonfiction

Putting on the Dog:Canine Characterization in Fiction and Nonfiction Kate McIntyre (bio) Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Atheneum, 2000, 144 pp., $7.99 (paper). My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley. NYRB Classics, 1999, 208 pp., $14 (paper). Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis. Coach House Books, 2015, 176 pp., $17.95 (paper). Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello. Sarabande, 2017, 200 pp., $19.95 (hardcover). I'm writing a collaborative novel in which dogs become hyperintelligent and reset the existing mammalian pecking order, good-naturedly overtaking and enslaving humans. I know dogs but haven't lived with one since I was young, so it seemed important to review the literature. I wanted the dog characters I created to be vivid and accurate in their dogginess. Because the dogs in my novel are filled with determination and pluck, bursting with ideas about how to reshape the world to suit them, I wanted to read books with similarly self-possessed canines at their center. What I found was that books with dogs as main characters are, in fact, not necessarily books about dogs but books about humans' relationship to dogs. Sometimes dog characters are used as lenses to bring new clarity to the human characters; other times the dogs are objects for humans to fight over; yet other times dogs function primarily as symbols—of loyalty, of humbleness, of steadfastness, of violence. Dogs can also serve as lower-stakes stand-ins for people. You want a really dramatic moment in [End Page 197] your book, one that will show that you mean business but not take away any of the important characters? Kill the dog. You want to demonstrate just how irredeemably evil a character is? Have him kill the dog. Mostly, dog stories are about a human looking at a dog rather than a shared gaze or a dog looking back at a human. A dog's relationship to the world is profoundly different from a person's, starting with its lower vantage point and continuing through its sensory capabilities, lack of opposable thumbs, strong sense of power structures, and relatively low intelligence. Dogs live with us and seem to enjoy doing so, but it's hard to know exactly what their embodied experience feels like. I read for answers. I was nervous to undertake this project because I'm tender-hearted toward animals, and if there's one thing I know about dog books, it's that you can never count on a dog to live. There's a whole subgenre of educational dying-dog novels for children, which strikes me as a great cruelty. I can't remember the characters or situations in novels I read just last year, but Where the Red Fern Grows, the story of a little boy and of his two beloved redbone coonhounds that come to grief at the claws of a mountain lion (Dan the coonhound gets the worst of it; the boy's mother carefully washes his exposed intestines with soapy water and uses a sewing needle to stitch up his abdomen, though of course sepsis takes him shortly afterward and Ann the coonhound dies of grief on his grave) will follow me as long as I have a memory. More dead dogs: Old Yeller, Sounder, Marly, Cujo, the Hound of the Baskervilles. To save you, dear readers, from a similar unpleasant experience, I have offered a helpful note at the end of each section about whether or not the dog dies and, if it does, how that makes me feel. The books reviewed here, two works of fiction and two of nonfiction, push past the dead dog as heart-tugging plot element, offering nuanced explorations of the human-canine bond. ________ Shiloh, published in 1991, was children's author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's sixty-fifth book and her most acclaimed. It won the Newbery Medal from the American Library Association, and it's easy to see why, for the wonderfully rich storytelling voice, rendered in dialect, of the young protagonist, Marty. The novel is set in poor, rural West Virginia, and the lives of the people it depicts are not easy. Marty and his family worry about having enough...

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jack London. Edited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Jeanne Campbell Rees-man. New York: Modern Language Association, 2015. Although Jack London is not known primarily as a children's author, he regularly published short stories in children's magazines, and a few of his works are often classified as children's books, including The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Several of the contributors to this volume provide insights into teaching these two novels as well as some of London's other works that appeal to child readers. Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald. By Edward Prime-Stevenson. Edited by Eric L. Tribunella. Richmond, VA: Valancourt, 2016. In this critical edition, Eric L. Tribunella provides a scholarly introduction, explanatory notes, and five appendices. As Tribunella explains in his introduction, the original publication of Left to Themselves in 1891 marked the beginning of gay literature for young adults. Roald Dahl's Marvellous Medicine. By Tom Solomon. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Tom Solomon is a physician and a professor of neurological science. He and Roald Dahl met in 1990 when Dahl was one of his patients at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. The two became friends and often discussed their shared interest in medical science. In this memoir, Solomon recounts his relationship with Dahl and discusses the latter's fascination with the medical world. South African Young Adult Literature in English, 2000-2014. By Sandra Stadler. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. Sandra Stadler places South African young adult literature within the country's contemporary cultural, social, and political context. She explores how issues related to race, gender, and class are reflected in South African novels for adolescent readers. [End Page 345] Copyright © 2017 Children's Literature Association