Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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Svordomar och lärdomar: Vikten av svordomar i Ulf Starks Rymlingarna och Oskar Kroons Överallt och ingenstans
No full textSwearing and Learning: The Importance of Swear Words in Ulf Stark’s Rymlingarna and Oskar Kroon’s Överallt och ingenstans
This study investigates the uses and functions of swear words in children’s literature, analyzing Ulf Stark’s Rymlingarna (The Runaways, 2018) and Oskar Kroon’s Överallt och ingenstans (Everywhere and Nowhere, 2020). In both novels there are characters swearing recurringly, even though swear words are usually not frequently used in literature for young children. A starting point for the article is that the swear words seem to be important in the stories, that the function is not only to underline emotions, or create realism, but also to contribute to the themes of the books. First, the functions of swearing in language and literature are presented, and similarities with functions of humor are pointed out. The study shows that the use of swear words affects both what is being told, and how; they contribute simultaneously to the aesthetics and pedagogy of the novels. Through swear words, characters and close relationships are portrayed. Norms are challenged, and swearing is sometimes part of gaining agency and creating a room of one’s own for the characters. This also means that swearing affects subjectivity and how different characters come to understand themselves and others in the world. Finally, the swear words can be seen as connected to the theme, which in both novels discusses how we can continue to live, through grief and loss of loved ones
I Like a Girl Who Can Eat: Female Hunger, Food, and Desire in Maggie Stiefvater’s Wolves of Mercy Falls Series
No full textIn mainstream discourse on the genre, the contemporary young adult (YA) supernatural romance is frequently dismissed as one-dimensional and low quality; literature that reproduces traditional and conservative ideologies of gender and sexuality for an undiscerning adolescent female audience. In this article I contest this dismissal, arguing that the genre contains complex and contradictory representations of femininity and female sexuality, and that these representations expose and rehearse ambivalence surrounding adolescent girls and girlhood in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on the growing disciplines of both romance and YA studies, I conduct this contestation through close reading and analysis of Maggie Stiefvater’s Wolves of Mercy Falls series, which consists of Shiver (2009), Linger (2010), Forever (2011), and Sinner (2014). Ambivalence and complexity are discussed in the series through representations of female gustatory and sexual hunger as well as food and feasting and the presence of the supernatural through representations of female lycanthropy. Through the symbolic associations of food with sexuality and sexual activity, scenes of female gustatory hunger and feasting within the corpus attempt to negotiate the engrained diet culture and repression of adolescent female sexual desire within the late 2000s and early 2010s in the anglophone world. Female hunger and appetite are at once encouraged and praised (within human characters) and presented as dangerous and in need of restriction (within female lycanthropes). This emphasises the still-rigid boundaries and fears surrounding feminine excess. In this article, I not only analyse the ambivalence and anxiety that surround adolescent girls during this period, but also emphasise the importance of popular literature as a site in which these attitudes and anxieties can be explored, resisted, and reproduced
Malin Alkestrand, Mothers and Murderers: Adults’ Oppression of Children and Adolescents in Young Adult Dystopian Literature
No full textReview/Recensio
Reimagining Blighty: Historic Aesthetics and Pedagogy in Emma Carroll’s Letters from the Lighthouse and Lucy Strange’s Our Castle by the Sea
No full textThis article examines the relationship between aesthetics and pedagogy in two recent historical novels for children about the British Home Front during the Second World War: Letters from the Lighthouse (2017) by Emma Carroll and Our Castle by the Sea (2019) by Lucy Strange. It argues that the representation of civilian life during the war in both novels is conditioned by recent socio-political events in Britain, namely, the recurrent appropriation of the wartime past in support of nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric. The texts discussed in this article seek to counter this narrative, foregrounding immigration as a vital part of Britain’s wartime past. Drawing upon historical fiction studies and cultural analysis, the article begins with an exploration of the aesthetic treatment of wartime Britain in the texts more broadly, arguing that Letters from the Lighthouse participates in and subverts idealised visions of the Home Front, while Our Castle by the Sea rejects nostalgia entirely. I conclude my discussion with an examination of the use of the wartime spy story as an aesthetic template for exploring concepts of xenophobia and prejudice in the two novels. Ultimately, this article contends that literary aesthetics perform a pedagogic function in both texts, presenting the contribution of immigrants and refugees as crucial to the story of the Britain Home Front
Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Alane Wilson (red.), Beyond The Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction
No full textReview/Recensio
“I must have been changed several times since then”: Exploring Camille Rose Garcia’s (Re)-interpretation of Alice through the Disney Lens
No full textPlagued in Wonderland by questions of self-uncertainty, Alice endures a journey of nonsensical adventures only to wake up and discover it was all a dream. However, the Caterpillar’s enigmatic question – “who are you?” – prevails, and this article asks the same question of Camille Rose Garcia’s illustrated Alice – who is she? This article explores the character of Alice in Garcia’s Wonderland and investigates the impact of Walt Disney’s 1951 animated film on her illustrative styling. The Disney metapicture is an important lens here as the uncanny resemblance to the 1951 Alice looms in Garcia’s depiction of Carroll’s protagonist. Thus, I perform a close reading of a selection of illustrations from her 2010 published edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland through a Disney lens. The idea of a “gothic Alice” is quite significant in relation to girlhood studies as it (re)-positions the notion of normative femininity and allows for expanded interpretations of what it means to identify as “girl.” In this case, Garcia’s Alice repositions the protagonist away from the image of the Victorian child (John Tenniel’s image in the first edition) and the docile, doe-eyed young girl of Disney’s construction. Instead, she represents the “other.” Overall, Garcia’s version of Alice stems from the haunting presence of Disney’s 1951 animated dreamchild. Through allusion and metapicture, Garcia creates a wasteland that adds to the contemporary (re)-interpretation of Alice
Introduction: Conceptions of Girlhood Now and Then: “Girls’ Literature” and Beyond
No full textIntroduction: Conceptions of Girlhood Now and Then: “Girls’ Literature” and Beyon
Ulf Starks pojkland: En litterär exkursion i Stureby
No full textThe Boys’ Nation According to Ulf Stark: A Literary Excursion in Stureby
A great part of Ulf Stark’s literary œuvre takes place in Stureby, a suburb south of Stockholm, and more specifically Stureby in the 1950s, the place and era of the author’s own boyhood. Although the environment we enter via Stark’s authorship is to be regarded as his imaginary universe, an investigation such as this shows that there are several links and correspondences between the literary setting and the real suburb. In order to investigate some of these connections, this study invokes two theoretical fields. The first one is literary geography, more precisely Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad, concerning three both different and interacting ways of understanding a room: the perceived, the conceptualized, and the social. Furthermore this survey takes into account different historical documents concerning Stureby, and also a form of literary excursion, a pondering walking tour around Stureby of today, with Stark’s narrative in mind. The second theoretical field is boyhood studies and in particular the idea of a boys’ own “nation”, a distinct cultural world with its own rituals and own symbols and values: a social space where the boys play outside the rules of the adult world. The book chosen for this investigation is Stark’s Min vän Percys magiska gymnastikskor (My Friend Percy’s Magical Gym Shoes, 1991). The study shows that specific places in Stureby, such as the suburban road, the tunnel, the kiosk, and the subway bridge are invaded and appropriated by the boys, and turned into arenas of different boy culture rituals and adventures. This, in turn, means that the geographical places described in Stark’s work influence the style of the work – for example its narrative action, its vocabulary, the narrative devices, and the compositional form
Connecting Childhood Studies, Age Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies: John Wall’s Concept of Childism and Anne Fine’s The Granny Project
No full textDiverging definitions and uses of concepts such as “ageism,” “aetonormativity,” “adultism,” and “childism” point at the relative separateness of the fields of childhood studies, age studies, and children’s literature studies, while also highlighting their shared interest in questions of age, prejudice, and agency. This article uses John Wall’s concept of “childism” to highlight the potential of bringing these fields into conversation to explore intergenerational relationships. Using Anne Fine’s The Granny Project (1983) as a case study, it shows, moreover, that children’s books themselves can help foster the paradigm shift that Wall envisages with childism. Fine’s novel about four children’s resistance to their parents’ plans to move their grandmother out of their home thematises processes of othering, ageist prejudices, human rights, and intergenerational dialogue and care. While provocative scenes and gaps in the story may pose hurdles to children’s engagement and even risk reinforcing ageist stereotypes, the novel testifies to a belief in young readers’ agency and the potential for intergenerational understanding that Wall puts central in his concept of childism
Fabelns väg till barnlitteraturen: Från Camerarius till Hey
No full textFable’s Route to Children’s Literature: From Camerarius to Hey
With the emergence of children’s literature in the modern sense in the eighteenth century, new genres of literature especially intended for young readers came into being. In addition, several well established genres, one of which was the Aesopic fable, were adapted and redirected to augment the growing children’s library. Focussing partly on a Scandinavian context, this article outlines fable’s evolution from a genre used in the teaching of classical languages in schools to a literary kind deliberately designed for young readers in their mother tongue. Specifically, it identifies Jean de La Fontaine’s and Antoine Houdart de La Motte’s making of a poetically advanced fable aimed at a readership of adults as a major impetus for the transition; the targeting of a particular age group was thus far unknown in the history of the genre, and it inspired educatively engaged authors to adopt the countermove of constructing a fable specifically addressed to children. The process of generic transformation was accompanied by debates on fable’s suitability as children’s literature, in which arguments put forward in Émile, ou de l’Éducation (1762) played an important role. Somewhat paradoxically, though, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critical opinion of the genre stimulated the invention of a fable distinctly formulated for young readers, reaching one of its high points in Johann Wilhelm Hey’s Fünfzig Fabeln für Kinder (1833)