Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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Fortellerstrategier og leserhenvendelser i nordisk barnekrim: LasseMaja og Detektivbyrå nr. 2
No full textTitle: Narrative Strategies and Reader Address in Nordic Children's Crime Fiction: LasseMaja and Detektivbyrå nr. 2This article draws on Gerard Genette’s concept of paratext, Mikhail Bakhtin’s discourse on carnival, Ingeborg Mjør’s work on the truth value of iconotexts and Tzvetan Todorov’s typology of detective fiction to analyze the narrative form, character gallery, visual style and paratextual communication of two popular Scandinavian crime fiction series for young readers: Martin Widmark and Helena Willis’ Swedish LasseMaja series and Jørn Lier Horst and Jørgen Sandnes’ Norwegian series about Detektivbyrå nr. 2. The article argues that although both series follow the classical form of the “whodunit”, their address to the child reader markedly differs. While Widmark and Willis’ series establishes a carnevalesque subversion of the child-adult power hierarchy, Horst and Sandnes’ series draws on the rhetoric of non-fiction to establish a more didactic and educational frame of reading that works to maintain adults as powerful due to their “real world” knowledge and know-how
Clémentine Beauvais, The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature
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En forfatterskole for børn: Fritidslivets bud på et praksisfællesskab
No full textTitle: An Author School for Children: Spare Time Writing and Communities of Practice Children’s interest in writing fiction in their spare time is an increasing phenomenon and children’s texts and writing practices get attention from established literary institutions as libraries and publishing houses. In recent years, many children have participated in organized writing courses and the so called author schools are very popular. This article is about an author school which takes place in a public library in Copenhagen. The author school is looked upon as a new literary institution with guidelines and concepts which both correspond and conflict with the concepts and ideas of the public library. The article is based on documentary analysis, observation studies and interviews with 14 young participants from the author school. They meet once a week with the ambition of writing fiction and they are taught by professional authors who position them as equal writers. The theoretical background of the analysis is Etienne Wenger’s theory about learning in a community of practice. According to Wenger, collaboration, engagement and motivation are important elements in a community of practice, and these elements are identified and critically discussed in this concrete setting. In the last part of the article, it is discussed how the practice in the author school could be related to other reading and writing practices in children’s lives
Victoria Flanagan, Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The Posthuman Subject
No full textReview/Recensio
“To write for children, and to write well”: Protestant Mission Presses and the Development of Children’s Literature in Late-nineteenth and Early-twentieth century China
No full textThis article uses a new historicist approach to examine the complex relationships between translators, writers, and missionary publishers in China, and their financial supporters in the United States and Britain to demonstrate how they influenced the development of Chinese children’s literature. It focuses on the case of the American Presbyterian Mission Press, Chinese Religious Tract Society, and Christian Literature Society for China, publishers of many texts for children. The article argues that the Western mission presses shaped Chinese children’s literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by introducing new narratives through translation, highlighting the importance of including visual images in children’s texts by importing electrotypes and lithographic prints from the United States and Britain, and training Chinese students in new engraving and printing techniques which allowed them to establish their own publishing houses
Karen Sands-O'Connor och Marietta A. Frank (red.), Internationalism in Children's Series
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Maria Jönsson, Behovet av närhet blir med åren betydligt större än nödvändigheten att bevara sin värdighet: Om genus, trots och åldrande i Kerstin Thorvalls författarskap
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”Din frihet är nära kopplad till min egen”: En feministisk psykoanalytisk läsning av emancipations- och modersmotiv i Maud Reuterswärds Elisabet-trilogi
No full textTitle: "Your Freedom is Closely Connected to my Own": A Feminist Psychoanalytical Reading of the Motifs of Emancipation and Motherhood in Maud Reuterswärd's Elisabet TrilogyOne of the most complex forms of relationship in fiction for young adults seems to be the one between mothers and daughters. The Swedish author Maud Reuterswärd (1920-1980) has written several books for young adults in which a relational crisis between a mother and her daughter is the central theme. Throughout Reuterswärd’s trilogy about Elisabet Hof, the mother plays a key role. The trilogy features an emotionally instable and mentally absent mother whose depression eventually leads to her attempting to commit suicide. Through a psychoanalytical lens, this paper highlights and discusses how the mother-daughter relationship in Reuterswärd’s trilogy is mediated through dialogue, point of view and tone. The mother’s voice and the verbal communication between mother and daughter is focused by using Luce Irigaray’s theoretical approach of the maternal function in psychoanalysis and culture. In addition the paper attempts to widen the critical perspectives and provide alternative ways of understanding the mother in Reuterswärd’s trilogy
Keeping “the Spirit of the Text”: A Publishing and Translation History Case Study of Nils-Olof Franzén’s Detective Series Agaton Sax
No full textThis article reconstructs a publishing history of 20th century Nordic-British translated children’s literature, that of the Agaton Sax detective series published by André Deutsch, London, 1965–1978. The methodology of Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies forms the theoretical framework in order to identify preliminary translation norms. Bibliographical data, editorial files and personal contact with the editor and illustrator provide the prerequisite material needed for revealing how a British publisher found and translated the series. This article demonstrates how an innovative (and expensive) publishing model created the most successful Nordic detective series for children in British English. Factors found to be crucial to the success of this series in the United Kingdom are the “series factor” and its good fit with Deutsch’s existing children’s list as well as the adopted translation strategy of balancing the “spirit of the text” with the needs of a British readership. Key preliminary norms identified include self-translation by the author of most of the series and the unusual supplementary role of editor Pamela Royds as a second translator. Equally significant is the extensive self-adaptation and writing in English of the eighth and ninth titles of the series respectively by the author. Bibliographical research has not revealed any other instances of self-translation, self-adaptation, new writing and use of second translators within this corpus and it is likely that this publishing model is rare if not unique within modern translated children’s literature in the UK