Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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Goldie Roth unchained: risk and its management in Lian Tanner’s Museum of Thieves
No full textIn her children’s action adventure novel Museum of Thieves, Lian Tanner overtly critiques adult risk-aversion and the over-protection of children. The protagonist is Goldie, an unruly child who escapes the oppressive regime of the City of Jewel where children up to the age of 12 are chained, for their own safety, to adult companions. Goldie escapes Jewel’s power structures and enters a mysterious museum housing the city’s unwanted wildness and danger. In its opening chapter Museum of Thieves establishes a subversive schema that problematises concepts of safety and order and glorifies chaos and risk, but this paper argues that as the novel progresses the author finds the schema increasingly difficult to control. It is tempting to read the museum as a “time out” zone such as CS Lewis’s Narnia, L Frank Baum’s Oz, and Maurice Sendak’s “place where the wild things are”: a space in which child characters can gain self-knowledge and skills before returning to an adult-dominated order. However, because of the degree to which Jewel and its structures are pathologised, Tanner finds she cannot bring Goldie back from “time out”. But rather than being a transgressive text, Museum of Thieves ends in a much less subversive place than it sets out to reach; the museum is revealed as a tightly controlled space and Goldie is well-protected, both within the diegesis by the museum’s special features, and beyond the diegesis by the author and the author’s cognisance of contemporary publishing industry expectations about the depiction of risk in children’s fiction. Keywords: bubble-wrap; order; chaos; unruly; safety; risk; “time out”; Australian children’s fictio
”Og så stansa jeg litt, og så tenkte jeg”. Fascinasjon og tenkning i møte med moderne maskiner i Alf Prøysens ”Mot nye tider”
No full textThe Norwegian author Alf Prøysen made use of a number of different media technologies in the production and distribution of his literature for children. But more than that, in some of these stories he also reflected upon modern technology in general. This is the case in his collection of short stories for children, Da jeg var liten (When I was a Child). Here Prøysen emphasises how child protagonists perceive modern technology such as cars, airplanes, and tractors, in a rural setting in the 1920s, with both fascination and anxiety. Still, at the end of the story the protagonist, Alf, exceeds both of these responses when he reflects on the “real” meaning of technology, and comes to the conclusion that nature can create miracles and do things that modern technology cannot. The article discusses how Prøysen’s presentation of modern technologies in Da jeg var liten can be regarded as literary techno-critique, arguing that the protagonist’s change of perception can be interpreted as a shift from what Martin Heidegger more in general has called ”calculative thinking” to that of ”meditative thinking”.Keywords: Alf Prøysen; techno-critique; children’s literature; Martin Heidegger; technolog
“Hell, what a chance to have a go at the classics”: Tove Jansson’s take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hunting of the Snark, and The Hobbit
No full textAbstract: Tove Jansson is above all known as the creator of the Moomin world which includes novels, short stories, picture-books and comic strips. Between 1958 and 1966, however, she produced over a hundred illustrations offering a novel and idiosyncratic take on three English classics. With one exception, for over four decades these editions were not reprinted outside of Sweden and Finland. This article examines selected aspects of Jansson’s visual translations with references to the original illustrations and her own works. It proposes to consider these commissions as following some of the ideas expressed in her 1961 essay “Den lömska barnboksförfattaren” (“The Deceitful Children’s Author”), especially with regard to elements of “horror” and “the disguised”. Furthermore, by treating these illustrations as one consistently developed project, this article traces the strategies the artist used for her declared dissociation from the Moomin style.Keywords: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Hunting of the Snark; The Hobbit; illustrations; classics; nonsense literature; fantasy; visual translation
Zoe Jaques, Eugene Giddens Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: A Publishing History
No full textRevie
Make Yourself At Home! Adolescents in Search of the Queer Spaces of Home
No full textHome is often assumed to be a safe place, a place to which children can return after their adventures Away. For many gay and lesbian teens, both fictional and in real life, however, the space they share with their family of origin is not a place where they can feel at home. The heterosexual family home is often so hostile to queerly desiring teens that they are forced to leave in search of a place where they can feel at home. The queer spaces they enter in their search are usually considered risky spaces – public spaces, urban spaces, the bar and the street – unhomely spaces. In these temporary, in-between spaces, the queerly desiring teens in the novels examined in this paper form new family structures. Although all the Anglophone novels discussed in this article end on moments of up-lift and hope for the future, the association of the queerly desiring youngster with risky spaces suggests that the queer teens are themselves unheimlich (uncanny).Keywords: lesbian; gay; YA fiction; homelessness; queer geography;uncann
Unruly Girls and Unruly Language: Typography and Play in David Almond’s My Name is Mina.
No full textAbstract: Over the last sixteen years Almond has experimented with ways of depicting an unruly wildernesses into which his protagonists adventure in search of space and time to come to terms with aspects of themselves and their world that they find difficult to control. This essay focuses on My Name is Mina (2010), the prequel to Almond’s groundbreaking debut Skellig (1998), in which Mina, Michael’s female accomplice in Skellig, is given a voice. The story takes the form of a journal supplemented by a first-person narrative in which Mina tries to understand and express the ways in which she finds herself unable to fit in. Her struggles with her unruly nature and where it might take her are evidenced in the variety of styles and formatting used throughout the novel to create striking double-page spreads. In these the semantic and iconic aspects of written language are used to invite an ambiguous and at times tense relationship between the reader and the female protagonist. This essay will draw on elements of multimodal analysis, feminine writing and the feminist künstlerroman to explore ways in which unruly girls and unruly language create paradoxes that encourage critical and creative engagements with the text and its protagonist. Keywords: multimodal fiction; David Almond; feminine writing; feministkünstlerroman; hybrid novel; typography; unrulines
Alf Prøysens fortellinger om teskjekjerringa som en ”uferdig estetikk”
No full textAlf Prøysen’s Mrs Pepperpot stories compose a large and manifold material covering a plethora of editions, media, languages, and illustrations. Focusing on how Prøysen presented the stories in Norway in an interplay between various media and editions from the midst of the 1950s, this article discusses Prøysen’s work in light of Peter Lunenfeld’s notion of “unfinished business”. Originally developed to grapple with computer technology in the era of digital culture, the notion of the “unfinished” also seems as an appropriate perspective on Prøysen’s artistic strategy when developing and presenting his Mrs Pepperpot. The article argues that Prøysen’s constant reworkings of the stories for new media and editions may have played an important part in developing the Mrs Pepperpot stories as they allowed Prøysen to explore and experiment with his little old lady through sound, text, and illustration.Keywords: Alf Prøysen; Mrs Pepperpot; children’s literature; Peter Lunenfeld; unfinished Alf Prøysen; Mrs Pepperpot; children’s literature; Peter Lunenfeld; unfinishe
Eva Söderberg, Mia Österlund och Bodil Formark (red.) Flicktion Perspektiv på flickan i fiktionen
No full textReview/Recensio
Salisbury, Martin & Styles, Morag: Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling
No full textReview/recensionPublished: 21 May 201