Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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Beyond Pippi Longstocking: Intermedial and International Aspects of Astrid Lindgren’s Works. Ed. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz
No full textReview/recension Published: 15 May 2012
Medelklassens buspojkar: en maskulinitetsstudie i Erik Pallins Pojkarna på Klasro
No full textIn my article, “Young rascals of the middle-class–masculinities in Erik Pallins Pojkarna på Klasro”, I argue that Pojkarna på Klasro (1922) in many regards is a typical boy's book, and a good starting-point for mapping out and studying the Swedish branch of the genre, a genre defined by gender. During the 1920s the Swedish author Erik Pallin (1878–1964) wrote five books about the three brothers Erik, Nisse and Anders, which all take place at the family's summerhouse Klasro during school holidays. The stories mainly revolve around typical boyhood adventures and outdoor activities, such as hiking, exploring, swimming, rowing, and fighting other gangs of boys, in this case, preferably boys of the lower classes. Not surprisingly, Pallin's text describes a patriarchal hierarchy, where the boys are adjusted to hegemonic masculinity and driven by homosocial desire, which leads to the excluding of girls; most female characters play subordinated (anonymous) parts and are bound up with the domestic sphere. In terms of power, an intersectional perspective shows that besides gender, age, physical abilities, geographical domicile (in this case Stockholm) and class are important factors when the boys establish their pecking order. An interesting aspect of the fact that the boys belong to the middle-class, is the lack of typical boy's discourse (slang, puns, oaths etc.), which otherwise is common in Swedish boy's books of this era.Keywords: Swedish boy's book, masculinity, Erik Pallin, boyhoo
Barnet som optik mot världen. Om Ann Jäderlunds barnböcker i förhållande till hennes vuxendiktning
No full text’’The child as an optics towards the world. Ann Jäderlund’s poems for children in relation to her poems for adults.’’ In the discussion of the renowned Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund (b. 1955), her two illustrated books of poetry for children have been widely neglected. In this essay, it is argued that these two books, Ivan’s book (Ivans bok, 1987) and Iris’s book (Iris bok, 2002), have a bearing on her poems for adults, and that they should be closely examined by anyone who seeks to understand the poetic practice of Ann Jäderlund. Here, the poetry collection Calendar red. Living of ice (Kalender röd. Levande av is, 2000) is tentatively read in relation to Iris’s book, which was published two years after the former. The essay draws special attention to the literary debut of Ann Jäderlund, Streamer City (Vimpelstaden, 1985), which is a minimalistic and language-reflective poetry collection for adults, published two years before the author’s first children’s book. In Streamer City the subject imitates the perception of a small child, striving to renew or liquify the given concepts, and to create a voice of her own. This perspective is central in Ivan’s book and Iris’s book as well, but from a child’s actual point of view, where the objects are not yet caught in concepts. Here, we analyse poems from the four mentioned poetry collections, focusing on how the subjects describe the world in relation to the normative connection between objects and concepts. We reveal how the poet uses the same images and a similar linguistic theme in these works, especially in Streamer City and Ivan’s book, which creates an interesting bridge between the two poetry collections. We advocate an open perspective concerning target groups, and note how the child’s perspective can be regarded as an optics, through wich we may bring our formation of concepts to light.Keywords: Ann Jäderlund; poetry for children; concept formation; language and perception; child perspective in poetry; language as optics(Published: 15 May 2012)Citation: Barnboken tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, Vol. 35, 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/clr.v35i0.1854
”Hemma längtar jag bort, borta längtar jag hem.” Andra världskrigets finska krigsbarn i svensk barn- och ungdomslitteratur
No full textFinnish child refugees of the Second World War in Swedish literature for children and youth. During and after the Second World War Sweden received around 70 000 Finnish war children. It was by far the biggest of all contingents of refugees during the war. The (often only Finnish speaking) children were placed in Swedish foster homes or in children’s homes. Most of them were sent back to Finland after the war but a big group also stayed with their foster parents. The movements from one home to another (some made this journey on more than one occasion) made many of them feel lonely, deserted and abandoned. In this paper I am going to discuss how the Finnish war children are depicted in Swedish books for children and youth from the war years up until today. After a discussion of the fl uctuations of interest in the Finnish child refugees in Swedish children’s books I will focus on how they have been depicted. What aspects have been focused on and what problems have been selected (or neglected) in different books at different times? I will also show how the treatment of the subject has been governed by a whole set of different factors: the age of the addressees, the choice of genre, the expanding research on the Second World War (and more specifi c the Finnish war children), the public debates on the treatment of (also contemporary) war refugees and not least the changes of the Swedish literature for children and youth, from the 1960s focusing more on social problems and developing towards a greater realismKeywords: Second world war; Finnish children war refugees; Finnish children’s literatur
På vei mot barnelitteraturens grense? Erlend Loes Kurtby (2008)
No full textToward the limit of children’s literature? Erlend Loe’s Kurtby (2008). Fiction for all ages, books that are intended for children and adult readers alike, became an important subgenre in Norwegian literature for young readers during the 1990s. One of the crosswriters who contributed greatly to the erasing of borders between children’s literature and literature for adults, is Erlend Loe, whose breakthrough novel, Naive. Super. (1996) became a cult book. It is a naive, humorous story of a man who won’t grow up. Gradually, Loe’s children’s books about another childlike adult, Kurt the truck driver (1994, 1995, 1998, 2003, 2008), became cult literature as well. The Kurt-books are published as children’s literature, but the audience has somewhat changed from children to adult readers. In this article, I discuss a problem complex of a principle nature about the limits of children’s literature. Is there a limit for what is or could be children’s literature? Erlend Loe’s border crossing novel Kurtby (2008) is used as a relevant case study to investigate the question. In this fi fth book about Kurt and his family, the setting is Sweden, in the small town Kurtby. The novel is a parody of “the Knutby case”, a tragedy that shook both Norway and Sweden in 2004, which includes religious fanaticism, adultery and murder. The publication of Kurtby attracted a great deal of attention, and it has been discussed whether the issues at stake in the Knutby case are really suitable subjects for a children’s book. Does Kurtby move toward the limit of children’s literature? Or, is it a move toward the limit of what can be written about with humor?Keywords: crossover; Erlend Loe; Norwegian Children’s Literature; Fiction for all ages; erased borders; the limit of children’s literature; humou
Children’s literature in a global age: transnational and local identities
No full textThis essay explores the concept of transnationalism, defining this term in relation both to the lived experience of transnational subjects, and to transnational texts for children. It argues that rhetorics of globalization have over-emphasized the impact and significance of global cultural and economic flows, although the production of children’s books is to some extent shaped by the internationalization of publishing houses and markets. The concept of transnationalism provides a way of thinking about how children’s texts address and are informed by diverse, complex influences, sometimes from a variety of cultures and languages. Transnationalism is not a new phenomenon but is visible in colonial texts which are shaped both by the particular, local ideologies of colonial nations, and also by the common concerns and interests of such nations. The essay draws on two contemporary texts to illustrate the workings of transnationalism: the film Howl’s Moving Castle, and Shaun Tan’s picture book The Arrival. It concludes by considering the concept of transnational literacy as a way of approaching scholarship and teaching in children’s literature.Keywords: culture, ethnicity, children’s publishing, postcolonialism, politics, migration, diaspor
”Crossover fiction” and narrative as therapy: George MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart
No full textPrior to the publication – famously assisted by George MacDonald and family - of C. L. Dodgson’s (or ‘Lewis Carroll’s’) Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (1865), there was little market for Kunstmärchen or literary fairy-tales in Victorian England. To get his own fairy-tales published, MacDonald had to insert them in the ‘realistic’ frame of his adult novel Adela Cathcart (1864), in which a series of stories (including fairy-tales) are composed and read to a group whose secret purpose is to cure a young woman suffering from the kind of mysterious non-specific illness typical of young Victorian women. The narrator ‘John Smith’, transparently a MacDonald-persona, says of his first contribution (‘The light princess’) that it is ‘a child’s story – a fairy-tale, namely; though I confess I think it fitter for grown than for young children’. This anticipates MacDonald’s later celebrated which virtually provided the slogan for ‘crossover fiction’, about writing ‘for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five’. This paper will address not only the issues of target audience raised by the framenarrative, but also the issues raised by the three fairy-tales themselves, each of which is arguably related to a specific stage of life (childhood, adolescence and old age)
Det var en gång en flicka som blev våldtagen...
No full textUngdomsromanerna Med Marias ögon av Stefan Casta och Ave Eva av Sulaima Hind handlar båda om sexuella övergrepp, skuld, hämnd och försoning. Wiveca Friman gör en närläsning av berättartekniken i de båda böckerna och ser hur författarna gestaltar olika relationer och hur respektive huvudperson berörs av det trauma en våldtäkt innebär