Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
Not a member yet
527 research outputs found
Sort by
Roxanne Harde & Lydia Kokkola (red.), The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture
No full textReview/Recensio
Per Israelson, Ecologies of The Imagination: Theorizing The Participatory Aesthetics of The Fantastic
No full textReview/Recensio
Pippi och utopin: En omslagsbild i den västtyska studentrevoltens kölvatten
No full textTitle: Pippi and Utopia. A Cover Illustration in the Wake of the West German Student RevolutionThe cover of the West German collection of Pippi Longstocking stories Pippi Langstrumpf (1967) shows a girl standing upside down. The image was drafted by the renowned illustrator Rolf Rettich. This exclusive edition, featuring an additional 200 illustrations by Rettich inside the book, was released in connection with Astrid Lindgren's 60th birthday. The edition positioned Lindgren as an author of ambitious children's literature and established Oetinger’s standing as a successful publisher. Rettich’s cover image is my starting point for discussing the idea of the liberating capacity of the Pippi stories. In the light of the political turmoil of this period, Pippi was both hailed as a representative of fantastic literature and criticized for being pseudo-revolutionary, ensnaring children in daydreaming about a good world, when instead they should learn how to deal with everyday life from realistic literature. In order to analyze the visual rhetoric in its historical context, I choose an approach that in my case unfolds the well-known Pippi figure as a generative ”utopian principle”
Slåss mot alla orättvisor: Katarina Taikon och föreställningen om barnets rättigheter runt 1968
No full textTitle: Fighting All Injustice. Katarina Taikon and the Concept of Children’sRights Around ’68During the 1960s the Swedish Romani author Katarina Taikon’s had become one of the most respected human rights activist in Sweden, fighting for the dignity, social conditions, and health equity of the Romani People. At the end of the decade she began writing books for children, hoping to change the prevailing attitudes and prejudices against the Romani people. In this article, I claim that her writing for children needs to be understood in connection to its immediate political and cultural context. Placing the overlooked children’s book Niki (1970) in center of attention, I argue that it questions the discrimination of the Romani people, but also rephrases the relationship between adults and children. Following this, Niki not only addresses minor shortcomings of an existing political system, it also targets the social order in a more essential way. Even though the narrative of the book takes place during the Second World War, it reveals the class struggle, interrogates traditional child/adult relationships, and attacks established power structures in ways that interact with the existing counterculture around 1968
Peter Langemeyer & Karen Patrick Knutsen (red.), Narratology Plus/Narratologie Plus
No full textReview/Recensio
Exporting the Nordic Children’s ’68: The global publishing scandal of The Little Red Schoolbook
No full textThe Little Red Schoolbook (1969) was one of the most well-travelled media products for children from ’68 aimed at children, and it was certainly the most notorious. Over the course of a few years (1970–2) it was translated and published in Belgium, Finland, France, Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, it also circulated freely in Austria and Luxembourg, and reached beyond Europe to countries including Australia, Japan and Mexico. It led to an obscenity trial in Great Britain, nearly toppled the Australian government, and caused a global publishing scandal. This essay therefore looks at the Scandinavian children’s ’68 in its international context, via a transnational, comparative analysis of the reception of the LRSB, in order to examine how ‘68 counterculture and ideas of childhood clashed and converged in the West around 1970. It asks: what can the publishing history of the LRSB tell us about the distinctive features of children’s media in Scandinavia at this time
Bildens status i läsarkommentarer på nätet: Narrativ interaktion i Jakob Wegelius Legenden om Sally Jones och Mördarens apa
No full textTitle: The Status of the Picture in Readers’ Comments Online. Narrative Interaction in Jakob Wegelius’ The Legend of Sally Jones and The Murderer’s ApeThe award-winning novels Legenden om Sally Jones (2008; The Legend of Sally Jones, 2018) and Mördarens apa (2014; The Murderer’s Ape, 2017) written and illustrated by Jakob Wegelius present a thought-provoking interplay between verbal and visual narration. However, an online data collection of blog posts and online reviews reveals that readers discuss the verbal narration and intersectional themes in these novels, but often overlook the pictures.This study contributes to the discussion of narrative interaction by juxtaposing analyses of pictures in the novels and online comments by readers on these literary works. The material thus consists of comments by non-professional writers, and the degree and type of attention paid to narrative interaction in these comments is foregrounded. In order to examine the word/image interaction in Wegelius’ novels, Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott’s typology for interaction is used on a selection of images and, when possible, on readers’ responses to these novels.The results show that in the material, the verbal narration is privileged. Less than a third of the online material explicitly comments on the visual narration. Even fewer readers comment on the relationship between the verbal and the visual narration. The study presents potential explanations to the relative absence of comments on the visual narration in these literary works. A likely explanation is that the readers perceive the symmetrical and enhancing relation between the verbal and the visual narration, and, thus, the readers consider the visual narration redundant or an add-on. Therefore, the article highlights the continuous need for explicit training in visual literacy, as the interaction between words and images has a bearing on the narration
“Absent Illustrations” in The Listener: Visual Narration Across Tove Jansson’s Authorship
No full textAbstract: Tove Jansson is known the world over for her Moomin books – especially for her illustrations of their characters. Recently, her books for adults, to which Jansson dedicated her writing efforts almost exclusively after publication of the final Moomin novel in 1970, have also garnered international praise and attention. Although Jansson has clearly “left” Moominvalley in these later works, themes, imagery, and even characters from the late Moomin books carry over into her texts for adults. For Tove Holländer, this carryover begs the question of the “absent illustration” (“frånvarande illustrationen”) in Jansson’s first collection of short stories for adults, Lyssnerskan [The Listener], first published in 1971. The notion of the “absent illustration” raises compelling questions in relationship to Jansson’s authorship: On what basis can we argue that illustrations are absent from a text? How can or should we imagine these “absent” images? Using Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext, I argue that “absent illustrations” in The Listener illuminate the tension between word and image that characterizes Jansson’s body of work. Genette’s theory is useful for Jansson scholarship as it allows one to see the parts of Jansson’s production not just as thematically and aesthetically related, but as potentially constitutive of one another’s meaning and reception
