Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
Not a member yet
527 research outputs found
Sort by
Pia Vuorio, Problemföräldrar kan ni vara själva! Föräldrar och familjedynamik i svensk ungdomsbok 1968–1979
No full textReview/Recensio
Underhållning på rätt sätt: Bokserien Stjärnböckerna och Svensk läraretidnings förlag som litterära vägledare
No full textTheme: The Children’s Library Saga and the Swedish Teachers’ Magazine’s Publishing House. Logo: The Swedish Institute for Children's Books
Entertainment the Right Way: The Book Series Stjärnböckerna and Svensk läraretidnings förlag as Literary Guides
Stjärnböckerna is a book series for teenagers that was published by Svensk läraretidnings förlag 1937–1950. This article investigates the launch of the book series in 1937, the content of the first four books, their reception and the marketing of the book series, with the aim to gain a deeper understanding of how the publisher performed literary value. The study draws on theories about literary value and on Laura J. Miller’s concept reluctant capitalists, in order to understand the idealistic stance that the publishing house took towards their enterprise. The book series was launched as entertainment reading and as a counterweight to other literature that, at the time, was conceived of as being of bad quality and misleading for young readers. The debates specifically targeted crime magazines and romance stories from tabloids for, among other things, containing exaggerated violence and immoral values. The article shows that the ambition was to distribute the publishing house’s definition of literary value to readers, adult caretakers as well as critics by combining seemingly contradictory value regimes: one that underscores literature as entertainment, and one that aims to provide quality literature by creating a distance to contemporary popular entertainment. In the process of expressing its stance in the debate about so called bad literature for young readers, the publishing house reinforced its own brand as a trustworthy literary gatekeeper
Nina Goga, Lykke Guanio-Uluru och Beatrice G. Reed, Planter i skandinavisk barne- og ungdomslitteratur: Bildebøker, klimafiksjon og sakprosa
No full textReview/Recensio
Statligt sanktionerad flerspråkighet för bebisar och deras vuxna: Litterär flerspråkighet i finländska babylådeböcker
No full text Theme: Multilingualism and Children's Literature. Ill. Henry Lyman Saÿen - Child Reading (1915–1918). Smithsonian American Art Museum, object number 1968.19.11.
State-Sanctioned Multilingualism for Babies and Their Adults: Literary Multilingualism in Finnish Baby Box Books
The baby books that, since the 1980s, are included in the Finnish state’s maternity packages distributed to every new-born child and their caregivers, are multilingual at heart. On pages of durable cardboard, a multilingual iconotext is realised as the two national languages Finnish and Swedish coexist with pictures on the spread. Lately, separate editions in the Sámi languages are also available. So far, there has been little literary research on these unique baby books. Hence, we seek to combine picturebook research with research in literary multilingualism to explore how these books handle multilingualism in relation to the materiality and multimodality of the picturebook medium. Our interest has been fuelled by the baby box books being a stately sanctioned and tailored book product that reaches about 30,000 Finnish families every year. In our article, we argue that a visual literary multilingualism is an essential trait of these books, and we suggest a typology for how multilingualism is realised within their multimodal format. Paying special attention to how the books deal with power hierarchies among the featured languages, we show that they employ a range of strategies to neutralise such hierarchies with greater or lesser success. Hence, we end up concluding that the books in the maternity package harbour a utopian and unproblematised view of multilingualism at odds with current societal debates
Intertwined Messages: Aesthetic and Didactic Aspects of Dual-Language Sámi Picturebooks
No full text Theme: Multilingualism and Children's Literature. Ill. Henry Lyman Saÿen - Child Reading (1915–1918). Smithsonian American Art Museum, object number 1968.19.11.
This article focuses on aesthetic and didactic aspects of literary multilingualism and the interaction between these aspects in two contemporary dual-language picturebooks with Sámi motifs and characters. Lilli, áddjá, ja guovssahas/Lilli, farfar och norrskenet (Lilly, Grandpa and the Northern Lights, 2020), written by Elin Marakatt and illustrated by Anita Midbjer, and Gájuoh muv! Gïjrra Almien jah Enoken luvnnie/Rädda mig: Vår hos Almmie och Enok (Save me: Spring at Almmie and Enok’s, 2021), written by Sophia Rehnfjell and illustrated by Inga-Wiktoria Påve, are intended for 3–7-year-olds and combine a Sámi language and Swedish. The analyses show the aesthetic and didactic interplay between verbal and visual elements. The insertion of North Sámi words in an otherwise Swedish text can highlight culture, traditional beliefs, and history, and the Ume Sámi glossaries can be used to talk about the illustrations and learn words pertaining to reindeer husbandry and life in Sápmi. The vocabulary has a didactic function, while the literary text and the illustrations tell stories about the Sámi peoples, thus being both aesthetic and didactic. Literary multilingualism is teamed with didactics and Sámi aesthetics to support language acquisition, to depict and to make visible Sámi culture and Sámi peoples to in-group as well as out-group readers
Heterografi och högläsning: Om olika alfabet och deras funktioner i svenska bilderböcker
No full textTheme: Multilingualism and Children's Literature. Ill. Henry Lyman Saÿen - Child Reading (1915–1918). Smithsonian American Art Museum, object number 1968.19.11.
Heterographics and Reading Aloud: On Different Alphabets and Their Functions in Swedish Picturebooks
Multilingual literature that uses more than one alphabet or script system can be labelled as heterographic. The purpose of this article is to explore uses of heterographics as a literary device in a selection of Swedish picturebooks, published between 2013 and 2023. The intention is to exemplify different types of embedded heterographics. How are they shaped? Which functions do they fulfill? What impact may they have on the reading aloud of a picturebook? Guided by multimodal perspectives, as applied within literary multilingualism studies, intermedial studies, and picturebook research, reading aloud is regarded as a shared event. Both reader and listener are active and co-creative, as the visual-spatial dimension of the iconotext is realized in an auditory-temporal way. The article opens with a discussion of heterographics in relation to the page turn direction of picturebooks. Then four books in Swedish, which integrate Persian or Arabic script as well as an example of pseudo-script, are examined. It is demonstrated how heterographics may be inserted in the picturebooks’ verbal or visual texts, where they can take on aesthetic, thematic, and performative functions. In this way, they exhibit their beauty, contribute to strengthening themes of friendship and hope, or make readers experience similar feelings of threat or joy as the picturebooks’ characters, encountering scripts they do not know
Mer enn helt og bestevenn? : Hundens rolle i relasjon med barn i barnelitteratur om andre verdenskrig
No full textTheme: Dog
More than a Hero and a Best Friend? The Dog’s Role in a Relationship with a Child in Children’s Literature on the Second World War
The aim of this article is to analyze representations of dogs in relationships with children in children’s literature set during the Second World War. Placing the article in a posthumanism tradition, we use literary comparison and modality analysis to reveal underlying anthropocentric ideology in a genre of literature that tends to convey moral and ethical values related to human rights and value. Drawing upon theory about companion animals and war memorial literature, we find that the dogs from the selected material of Italian and Swedish children’s books tend to be either heroes, loving companions or initiators for the children’s development, or several of these roles at once. Our analysis also indicates that war as a backdrop makes these roles possible – and impacts them in specific ways. The dog might be seen as a hero to the protagonist child in the story, as a national hero important to the war effort, or both. Since the parents of the child often are unable to fulfil their roles as caregivers and protectors due to the war, the dog seems to be the natural substitute. The dogs are also in different ways helping the child protagonists cope with the traumatic experiences related to war. Our closing discussion highlights how these roles in many ways continue to maintain an anthropocentric world view, but we suggest other ways that war memorial literature for children, through the use of certain literary devices, can be used to support the readers’ critical thinking about species’ relationships and about how not only humans are affected by war
Sound Memes on BookTok: Understanding Affect in the Platformised Reviewing of Young Adult Books on TikTok
No full textTheme: Children's Literature Reviews - How, Where and Who? Ill. Jenny Nyström from Barnkammarens bok, 1882.
This article addresses the changing landscape of book reviewing within the field of young adult (YA) literature, particularly in the context of emerging and increasingly ubiquitous digital platforms and platformisation. Starting from the recognition that BookTok – the popular book-related subculture of the even more popular digital video-sharing platform TikTok – is becoming one of the most significant forces within the realm of YA literature at the levels of marketing, sale, and readership, we argue that there is a need to investigate how the affordances of TikTok as a platform are transforming YA literature reviews, particularly given the emerging popularity of YA literature reviews by young people and for young people on TikTok. We argue that hitherto unrecognised and seemingly unimportant modes of meaning-making have become central to the reviewing of YA literature on BookTok, focusing specifically on the way sound is used on and afforded by the platform. Building on the evolving literature on internet memes and specifically sound memes, as well as on Swedish-Finnish scholar Maarit Jaakkola’s work exploring how digital platforms are challenging monopolies which have traditionally characterised literary criticism, this article undertakes an analysis of three BookTok videos and the sounds they employ. The aim in this is to establish how the mimetic and affective properties of sound allows young users to express highly nuanced feelings relating to the books they review, ultimately pushing at the boundaries of what constitute valid and valuable practices for reviewing YA literature