Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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Reidar Aasgaard, Marcia Bunge & Merethe Roos (ed.), Nordic Childhoods 1700–1960: From Folk Beliefs to Pippi Longstocking
No full textReview/Recensio
Play Sculptures and Picturebooks: Utopian Visions of Modern Existence
No full textThis article examines ideas surrounding abstract, modernist art for children during the post-war era by analyzing play sculptures and picturebooks created by Egon Møller-Nielsen, a Danish-Swedish sculptor and artist. His monumental sculptures for children received international attention during the 1950s, and became influential and representative for progressive ideas about art and children in both the United States and in Europe. How, then, is the notion of art articulated and expressed in this context? And how are these ideas connected to the ideological position that children have in the rebuilding of the post-war society in Europe? Egon Møller-Nielsen described his play sculpture as a “lekmaskin” (play machine), paraphrasing Le Corbusier’s famous modernist term for a house, “machine à habiter” (a machine for living in). This kind of use of terminology demonstrates how play sculpture is situated at the core of notions concerning public art, architecture and sculpture in post-war Europe. It also encapsulates ideas of children as the future citizens of the welfare state, and thus, ideas about how these new citizens could be created and formed. Modernist play sculptures and experimental books for children can be seen as a means of equipping children with knowledge of art, thereby creating better adult consumers of art, which identifies children as both an integral part of the utopian vision of modern existence and as future consumers. The play sculpture is thus based on the idea of a new citizen who is also a new kind of art consumer, and can thus be seen as a sculptural embodiment of an idea of the modern child
“I’m Going to be a Businessman”: Learning about Money and Class in Ulf Stark’s Ulf and Percy Trilogy
No full textUlf Stark’s Min vän Percys magiska gymnastikskor (My Friend Percy’s Magical Gym Shoes, 1991), Min vän shejken i Stureby (My Friend Percy and the Sheik, 1995) and Min vän Percy, Buffalo Bill och jag (My Friend Percy and Buffalo Bill, 2004) are entertaining and ironic tales of a boy’s childhood in 1950s Stockholm. The partially autobiographical trilogy on Ulf and his friend Percy takes up common themes in children’s literature such as the conflict between freedom and socialization, the longing for adventure, and the development, through constant interaction with one’s peers in a deeply homosocial world, of a sense of self and of an idea of manhood. The trilogy also reflects the ideological views on childhood and child development within the so-called folkhem, where children are seen as “citizens in the making,” striving for independence and social mobility in a society that tries to combine the common good with individual freedom. Though ostensibly oblivious to class issues, the children in Stark’s novels learn about class differences through dealing with “stuff”: having things or not having them, trying to get the things they want, learning the exchange value of the things they have in order to trade them for other things – these are amongst the main preoccupations of the characters in Stark’s trilogy. This paper intends to investigate how the relationship between Ulf and Percy allows Stark to discuss the often paradoxical economic ideology of the folkhem, and how material objects are used as a narrative strategy to make class differences visible in a world that tries to deny them
Money and the Gift in the Novels of Mildred Taylor and Cynthia Voigt
No full textIn this article, I present a comparison of the representation of the uses of money and gift economies in two landmark series for young readers from the United States: Mildred Taylor’s Logan family novels (1975–2020), centred on an African American family in 1930s Mississippi, and Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman family novels (1981–1989), centred on a white family in 1970s Maryland. Both Taylor and Voigt depict characters navigating the banking system; moreover, both show the ways in which banking is a question not just of economic competence but of social capital and indeed, of social justice. While Taylor presents money as a social tool, used to acquire things of value (rather than having inherent value) and as a means for characters to collaborate or punish one another, Voigt often presents money as a tool for individual self-actualisation. Similarly, in the gift economy, Voigt shows gifts as having economic potency whereas for Taylor these gifts instead act as conduits for social exchange. In both the Logan and Tillerman novels, gifts are used to strengthen social bonds, but can be dangerous too, creating obligations and conditions of repayment that are too onerous for the characters. Often presented as opposites, the differences between monetary and gift economies sometimes seem to collapse in these novels
Å gi sin daler med glede: Barn som forbrukere i Ungdommens Ven (1770)
No full textTitle: To Give One’s Money Willingly. Children as Consumers in Ungdommens Ven (1770)This article examines the staging of children as consumers in the first Danish children’s magazine Ungdommens Ven (1770). By investigating texts that portray children and their use of pocket money, with an emphasis on texts in which this use is directly linked to the purchasing of the magazine itself, the article argues that the staging of children as consumers may be seen in the context of children’s increasingly important role in the book market and print culture during the second half of the 18th century. Through a discussion of how children appear as readers, consumers, and subscribers in the magazine, the article demonstrates how Ungdommens Ven is educative in at least two interwoven ways. First, by instructing the readers in how to spend one’s money wisely, and second, by inculcating the knowledge of how to be magazine readers as well as purchasers, initiating children into the economic aspects of the specific publication and into consumer culture more generally. Taking one of the early children’s magazines in Denmark as its point of departure, the article identifies some significant changes in print and consumer culture before the emergence of a mass market, accentuating the role of children and their magazines in these developments
Ingrid E. Castro & Jessica Clark (eds.), Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children And Youth on Page, Screen, and In Between
No full textReview/Recensio
The Child-Artist Loop in Avant-Garde Art and Picture Book Creation: Ileana Holmboe’s Urskov-Æventyr (1944)
No full textThe article discusses the mutual interaction and inspiration between avant-garde art and children as producers of texts and images in the 1920s through the 1940s. The key example is the Danish picturebook Urskov-Æventyr (Jungle adventure, 1944), written and illustrated by the seven-year-old girl Ileana Holmboe. Holmboe won the first prize in a children’s competition for making the best picturebook, and the book was published shortly after. The theoretical framework is the idea of children as co-producers of texts and the so-called “kinship-model” proposed by Marah Gubar (Artful Dodgers; “Risky Business”) which was further developed by Victoria Ford Smith. The analysis of Urskov-Æventyr focuses on the agency of the child narrator and the child reader, especially on how the narrator becomes a kind of stage director in relation to the narrative, and on the co-production between child author and adults engaged in the process. Furthermore, the article describes a loop in the production of avant-garde art and children, where avant-garde artists seek inspiration in children’s drawings and their “spontaneous” and “natural” modes of expression, while Ileana Holmboe also seems to have been inspired by avant-garde author Jens August Schade and avant-garde author and painter Hans Scherfig’s piciturebook Urskoven (The jungle, 1937). The article concludes that children’s literature studies would benefit from paying more attention to the co-production and interaction between adults and children in relation to children’s literature in general, and especially in relation to picturebooks in this period
From Green Gables to Grönkulla: The Metamorphoses of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables in its Various Swedish Translations
No full textThis paper examines Swedish translations of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), a novel that has maintained the status of a children’s classic in the Scandinavian countries for more than a century. I explore the background conditions of this long-lasting reception by analyzing significant differences between source and target text within this series of translations. All the translations have been adapted to the context of their target culture in general and shaped to address an audience of young female readers in particular. Many of the interventions correspond to general patterns in translations for children and reflect contemporary assumptions about the needs of young readers: they emphasize domestication over foreignization and add clarifying comments and explanations to cultural elements unfamiliar to Swedish readers. Some minor inconsistencies point to turbulences within the translation process and highlight the low esteem for children’s fiction within the literary system. Other, more consistent changes can be attributed to programmatic decisions that affect the very premises of Anne of Green Gables. The handling of intertextual references and some major abridgements reveal a tendency to disambiguate the protagonist’s cross-over status between girlhood and adulthood, and clarify her often blurry position between the realms of imagination and reality. This results in the seemingly paradoxical result that the success of Anne of Green Gables in Sweden is founded on decisions that have narrowed down its literary scope
