Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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”If you thought this story sour, sweeten it with your own telling” – Cross-cultural intertextuality and a feminist poetics of rewriting in Susan Price’s Ghost dance
No full textThe attempts to challenge conventional gendered discourses in children’s fantasy have often resulted in feminist rewritings of earlier stories. Ghost dance (1994) by the English author Susan Price is a novel that refl ects a specifi c feminist poetics of rewriting: metafi ctional passages highlight the constructedness of the narrative and at the end readers are invited to tell their own versions of the story. Moreover, the rewriting freely combines and recontextualises elements from different source texts and reformulates them to create a narrative that challenges conventional discourses of gender. While this poetics has an appeal from a feminist perspective, the play with cross-cultural intertexts and gender becomes more complex when the novel is examined in a postcolonialist framework in relation to ethnicity and the issue of cultural appropriation. Ghost dance is situated in a setting that has a real-world equivalent (Russia), involves characters that are identifi ed with names of realworld ethnic groups (Lapps (Sámi), Russian), and mixes elements from Russian wonder tales, Nordic mythology and an Ojibwe legend. The novel does not aim at historical accuracy in its representations nor is it a direct retelling of any of the pre-texts but combines motifs, themes, names, characters and settings freely from each source. In this textual melting pot, the protagonist Shingebiss is, on one level, a revision of the witch Baba Yaga, but also described as a Lappish shaman with an Ojibwe name. To rewrite gendered discourses, certain elements from the pretexts are chosen and others left out – the question is, then, what effects does this recontextualisation have on the representation of ethnicity? Or, are the feminist rewriting strategies actually a form of cultural appropriation?Keywords: children’s fantasy; gender; ethnicity; cross-cultural intertextuality; Susan Pric
“The pale trees shook, although no wind blew, and it seemed to Tristran that they shook in anger”: “blind space” and ecofeminism in a post-colonial reading of Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s graphic novel Stardust (1998)
No full textThis article calls on two branches of third-wave feminist theory – ecofeminism and post-colonial feminism – to investigate human and nonhuman interrelations in Neil Gaiman’s young adult graphic novel, Stardust, illustrated by Charles Vess. Stardust follows Tristran Thorn on his journey into the land of Faerie in his attempt to capture and bring back a fallen star. Faerie is both a natural and exotic space and Tristran’s journey “to the East” transposes an Orientalist aesthetic onto its wild geography. Tristran, as would-be coloniser, views Faerie as a place of potentially inexhaustible natural resources. The star – as the imperialistic goal – is in fact a woman, which endows the wild space with further Oriental tropes, rendering it sensual, feminine and embodied. Tristran’s imperialistic impulse is thus associated with both a cultural impulse towards the domination of nature and a patriarchal impulse towards the oppression of women. Tristran’s increasing recognition of the star’s right to a fully realised selfhood sits uncomfortably with his initial imperialistic ambitions. As the novel progresses, the East becomes not, as it has been, a natural world ripe for colonial exploration and exploitation, but a place of positive intersubjective relations between humans and non-human nature. Initially both a real and illusory textual space resembling Edward Said’s “imaginative geography,” Faerie ultimately becomes a space to call “home,” in an overt critique of the nineteenth century boy’s adventure story with its implicit glorifi cation of empire. Thus, it is argued, Stardust’s ecofeminist counter-discourse calls for mutual equality in man’s relationship with both women and the environment, positing anthropocentric and androcentric thinking as in need of re-evaluation.Keywords: Neil Gaiman; ecocriticism; ecofeminism; orientalism; imperialism; post-colonialism; nature; indigenous peoples; graphic novel
Forord
No full textDenne publikation er resultatet af et nordisk samarbejde med udgangspunkt i børnebogsinstitutterne i Sverige, Norge, Finland og Danmark. Disse stod i april 2010 bag en fælles nordisk forskerkonference afholdt på Svenska barnboksinstitutet i Stockholm. Publikationen består af en række fagfællebedømte artikler, der er skrevet på baggrund af papers holdt ved konferencen. Publikationen er samtidig et fælles nummer af tidsskrifter, der udgives af institutterne: Det svenske Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning, det norske Barnelitterært forskningstidsskrift og det danske Nedslag i børnelitteraturforskningen.
Gunnarsson, Annica: Synligt/osynligt. Reception av det visuella i bilderböckerna om Alfons Åberg
No full textReview/recension Published: 15 May 201
Recensioner
No full textFrigjord oskuld: heterosexuellt mognadsimperativ i svensk ungdomsroman / Mia FranckRecensent: Kristina Fjelkestam Inga gåbortsföremål: lekfull litteratur och vidgad kulturdebatt i 1960- och 70-talens Sverige / Lena KårelandRecensent: Sara Kärrhol
'Glokal' litteraturhistoria – på väg mot en omvärdering av finlandssvensk barnlitteratur
No full textThis article considers the conditions and possibilities of writing a methodologically innovative glocal history of post-war Swedish-language children’s literature in Finland. Since previous studies of this literature are, as of today, fragmented and scattered in various publications, a comprehensive and more nuanced picture of the time period is sorely needed. Yet, how is such a project to be carried out in light of recent revisionist debates on the possibility of writing national literary histories? The article proposes that the answer lies in applying transnational, intersectional and visual perspectives onto the material. A working hypothesis is that parallel representations of Finno-Swedishnesses, influenced by shifting notions of the child and childhood and by the liminality of Finno-Swedish culture, permeate the literature under study. Transnational and intersectional perspectives can, therefore, shed new light on representations of ideological and societal tendencies, such as power negotiations between generations, multilingualism, gender, and class distinctions. A fully integrated visual perspective acknowledging paratextual and material aspects of children’s literature would further deepen the discussion. Acknowledging transnational tendencies, an intersectional and visual national children’s literature history could thus interrogate established “truths” about Finno-Swedish children’s literature and thereby open up new ways of viewing this liminal literature.Keywords: Literary history, nationality, transnationality, Finno-Swedish children’s literature, intersectionality, visuality
Barnlitteraturforskningens arkeologi
No full textCriticism of children’s literature is not, although it too often may seem so, a phenomenon of the later half of the 20th century. The contradiction between didactics and aesthetics, for many established as an axiom in modern children’s literature research, has been contra productive when it comes to differences between older and modern literature. While older has become representative for the didactic, the simple and the single-minded, modern has become representative for the aesthetic, the complex and the multifold (the ambiguous). Beginning with an analysis of the very early research in the field of children’s literature, the article points at several inconsistencies in the principles of later research. A presentation of international studies of importance for later surveys and historical works, among them the American scholar William Sloane and his comparative studies of children’s literature in the 17th and 20th centuries, is conducted in order to contextualise links between different kind of historical perspectives on literature, art and childhood. The bottom-line is what primarily counts in the history of research. Paradigms in some works easily get the status of established truths and are passed on without discussion, while others simply vanish from the bibliographies without comments. On basis of an extensive material of texts, theories and pictures (comparisons with pictorial art are taken in) the article analyses from a constructional perspective long lived assumptions and paradigms and argues for a new methodology – the archaeology of children’s literature research - that includes both the research itself and the researcher. Examples from recent research (Penny Brown, Beverly Lyon Clark, Marah Gubar) clearly show that contextualising literature within history, criticism and debate may result in new and corrective approaches. Motifs, passions and goals of the researcher are all part of the research. Self-reflection is the central keyword.Keywords: criticism of children’s literature, history of children’s literature, childhood, didactics, aesthetics, research, paradigm, context, self-reflection
Från flygkamrater till rymdrevolutionärer. Om Sven Wernströms tidigaste science fiction
No full textThe Swedish author Sven Wernström (b. 1925), mostly known for his political children’s and young adult fiction, is also one of the most prolific and widely read Swedish writers of science fiction (sf). His first attempts in the genre consisted of stray sf elements in some of his aviation novels on ‘‘Flygkamraterna’’ (‘‘The Flight Comrades’’, 1947-1957), and the fullblown sf novel Flygkamraterna korsar rymden (‘‘The Flight Comrades Cross Space’’, 1949), which depicts a trip to Mars and an encounter with an alien civilisation literally divided into different strata in their underground society. This study examines the transition from Wernström’s first aviation novels to his first sf novel, and studies the extent to which Wernström’s early science fiction makes use of the specific conventions of the genre. After a very brief survey of the history of sf in Sweden up until the 1950s, this study deals with the two novels Flygkamraterna (‘‘The Flight Comrades’’, 1947) and Flygkamraterna korsar rymden when it comes to their view on science and technology, their uses of technological speculation and futurological extrapolation, estrangement, and evocation of the sublime. It is commonly believed that Wernström’s writing didn’t really become political until the 1960s. One of the main conclusions of this study, however, is that already in his earliest science fiction from the late 1940s, Wernström makes ample use of the genre’s potential to conduct indirect social commentary.Keywords: Sven Wernström; Science Fiction; Aviation Novels; Interplanetary Travel; Mars; Alien Life Forms(Published: 28 November 2012)Citation: Barnboken - tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, Vol. 35, 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/clr.v35i0.1996