Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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Introduction to theme: Swedish Translations Of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne And Emily Books
No full textIntroductio
What Can Danish Multicultural Children’s Literature and African American Children’s Literature Learn from Each Other? : Literary Histories in Dialogue
No full textIn its pedagogical context, multicultural literature is defined as an instrument for multicultural education that seeks to include and raise the voices of historically silenced and invisible minorities in the school curriculum.The contemporary American definition of multicultural literature emphasizes #OwnVoices and elevates authentic stories from insider perspectives, while in Denmark, no clear line is drawn between the author’s background and the literary content when categorizing multicultural literature that depicts minorities’ experiences. In this article, an African American scholar and a Danish scholar will put Danish and African American children’s literary histories in dialogue with one another and ask what Danish multicultural literature can learn from existing definitions within American multicultural and African American children’s literature, formulated by Rudine Sims Bishop, Mingshui Cai, and Michelle H. Martin. They will also address what literary movements and practices might be adapted to facilitate a more welcoming space for minority stories in Danish literature. In the United States, lively conversations are occurring about insiders vs. outsiders, #OwnVoices, and stereotypes; what are the implications for Danish children’s literature? The writers will analyze recently published works from each country that depicts the lives of minoritized people such as Özlem Cekic and Dorte Karrebæk’s Ayse får en lillebror (2018) and Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James’s Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut (2017). This comparative analysis will highlight how marginalized and silenced voices bring new perspectives and fresh ideas into the cultural conversations of each country that would otherwise go unrepresented in children’s literature.  
Vidnesbyrdlitteraturens stille stemmer: Flygtningekrise i dansk børnelitteratur efter 2015
No full textThe Silent Voices of Witness Literature. Refugee Crisis in Danish Children’s Literature since 2015
In 2015, Europe experienced the most massive refugee crisis since World War II. This crisis has been reflected in different kinds of art from poetry to picturebooks. In Denmark as well as in other countries, a number of children’s books has been published about the war in Syria and Syrian and other war refugees. These books have a common ground in sharing knowledge about violence, escape and death. Although fleeing is a known topic and the death of a child character is not an unusual event in children’s books (Clement and Jamali), it may be difficult or even controversial to address traumatizing war experiences and death in works for relatively young readers. Very few refugee children are able to tell their stories themselves since they are eithertoo small, displaced in language, traumatized or even dead (Nel). These children’s stories tend to be represented by others (authors and illustrators) who strive to imagine and bear witness to their situation in an artificial language. In this article, three Danish children’s books by widely acknowledged authors and illustrators are chosen as examples of fictional interpretations of refugee children’s experiences. The texts are diverse in genres and target groups and the stories are told with different levels of realism and fantasy, but they are allconnected to the same theme and context. What and how do these contemporary authors and illustrators tell us about refugees and their experiences, and how are they able to represent or bear witness to the experiences of the child victims who are silenced? The theoretical background of this study is Giorgio Agamben’s theory about witness literature and lacunas in language (Agamben; Engdahl ”Philomelas tunge”). 
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
No full textReview/Recensio
Review Essay/Samlingsrecension: The Fairy Tale World and The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures
No full textReview essay/Samlingsrecension
Narrative Strategies Giving Voice to the Silenced Subject: The Horse in Fiction for Children
No full textThis article uses an ecocritical, posthumanist animal studies approach to fiction about horses for children and young adults in order to show how different narrative strategies co-exist within a framework of silence versus voice and Othering versus anthropomorphizing. The examples are taken from two Swedish series of books: the stories of Vitnos (1971–1980) by Marie Louise Rudolfsson, and those about Klara (1999–2008) by Pia Hagmar. The study shows that regardless of the narrative form chosen, be it placing the horse as a first-person narrator or introducing a human narrator and focalizer, the result is quite similar. The horse is alternately anthropomorphized and depicted as Other, many times through the technique of allomorphism, placing the horse above the human being. 
Corina Löwe & Åsa Nilsson Skåve (red.), Didaktiska perspektiv på hållbarhetsteman i barn- och ungdomslitteratur
No full textReview/Recensio
Ingrid Lindell & Anders Öhman (red), För berättelsens skull: Modeller för litteraturundervisningen
No full textReview/Recensio
The Silencing of Children’s Literature: The Case of Daniil Kharms and the Little Old Lady
No full textThe silencing of childhood continues in discrimination against children’s literature today. Yet children’s literature should be taken seriously not only for its own sake. Children’s literature can and should illuminate our understanding of literature for adults, while literature for adults can and should illuminate our understanding of children’s literature. Failure to recognize this mutualism risks silencing children’s literature and ghettoizing children’s literature research while impoverishing literary studies. To show the value of examining literature for all audiences together, this article examines the example of silenced Russian writer Daniil (Yuvachev) Kharms, a late avant-garde and absurdist writer who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s before his premature death as a result of repression by the Soviet regime. Like that of others who wrote for both adults and children, Kharms’s example illustrates the arbitrariness of subdividing the literary production of one individual into two mutually exclusive categories. In the case of Daniil Kharms, and others, literary scholarship benefits from examining an author’s oeuvre collectively and disregarding the bifurcation of audiences of which literary studies may at times be guilty. To show this, the present article focuses on the example of the little old lady, a marginal figure who recurs in Kharms’s writings regardless of audience, including in the children’s picturebook O tom kak starushka chernila pokupala (How a Little Old Lady Went Shopping for Ink, 1929) and the absurdist novella for adults “Starukha” (The Old Woman, 1939). Examining the old lady as an anachronistic wizened old muse and embodiment of writing itself across these boundaries in Kharms’s authorship illuminates the theme of silencing across both realms of the author’s oeuvre, since this figure, who stands for Kharms’s silenced authorship itself, embodies Kharms’s own marginalization, silencing, and censorship. Ultimately this article argues for the reunification of divided audiences to repair the fissure dividing the fields of children’s literature and literature for adults.