Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature articles from December 2006

Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature archives from December 2006

Editorial.(Editorial)
December 1, 2006... In this issue of Papers we publish essays based on a selection of conference papers at the Seventh International Conference of the Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research (ACLAR) held in Melbourne on 13-14 July, 2006. The...

'Cutting it' in new times: the future of children's literature?
December 1, 2006... In 1998, I attended my first ACLAR conference at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga (NSW). John Stephens gave the keynote address and his paper was principally concerned with what children's literature scholars were interested in--namely,...

Under the wire: detainee activism in Australian children's literature.(Essay)
December 1, 2006... [T]he responsibility that owes nothing to my freedom is my responsibility for the freedom of others. There where I could have remained spectator, I am responsible, that is to say again, speaking. (Levinas 2003, p. 55) One of...

Intra-active: the child/animal in children's SF.(science fictions)(Essay)
December 1, 2006... In 1979 Ruth Hubbard asserted that 'science is the most respected legitimator of new realities' (Hubbard et al 1979, p.8-9). Science, however, is quite clearly political, particularly the speed, competition, capital and power which underpins...

Capitalism run wild: Zizou Corder's Lion Boy and Victor Kelleher's Dog Boy.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... While capitalism has long made highly efficient ideological use of Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' principle to justify ruthless business practices, this appropriation of animal metaphor has taken on new and considerably more problematic...

Moonlit revelations: the discourse of the end in Gina B. Nahai's Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Young adult fiction often engages with what Derrida terms a discourse of the end, a paradoxical notion that is evident--yet hidden--in such fictions. For Derrida, a discourse of the end is the haunted existence that surrounds extreme events,...

From Eden to suburbia: perspectives on the natural world in children's literature.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Books with a focus on the natural world are written for young readers with a variety of purposes, but broadly speaking constitute a spectrum measured by the degree of emphasis and/or explicitness falling on information or advocacy. At any point...

A sporting chance: class in Markus Zusak's the Messenger and Fighting Ruben Wolfe.
December 1, 2006... The final decades of the twentieth century saw a shift in popular attitudes to class. Class location came to be viewed as a product of individual merit and self-responsibility, obscuring the role played by social structure and power. As a...

'They don't know us, what we are': an analysis of two young adult texts with Arab-Western protagonists.
December 1, 2006... Since 9/11, when Arabs in the West found themselves under suspicion, the way Arabs could be portrayed in Young Adult fiction has become complicated. This paper will look at two examples of this fiction to explore the difficult position...

'Does my bomb Look Big in This?' Representing Muslim girls in recent Australian cultural texts.(Television program review)
December 1, 2006... Since 9/11 there has been a spate of cultural texts for young people which attempt to move away from the sensationalised connotation and reductive stereotyping of the Muslim as the homogenised, dehumanised, violent and/or exoticised...

Defining Magical Realism in children's literature: voices in contemporary fugue, texts that speak from the margins.
December 1, 2006... During the latter half of the twentieth century authors of children's fictions have explored boundary transgressions between fantastic and mimetic genres. While contemporary narrative texts continue this heritage, magical realist texts are...

Anime Haibane Renmei (charcoal feather federation): an enclave for the hurt, alienated souls.(intertextuality explained)(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Anime is an audiovisual, symphonic narrative form characterised by diversity, fluidity, hybridity and intertexuality. The abundant borrowing of images is a common practice in both manga and anime, and is considered as homage to the pretext...

Stop all the clocks: time in postmodern picture books.(Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism by Ursula Heise)(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Time, according to Ursula Heise (Heise 1997, p.48), is one of the most fundamental parameters through which narrative is organised and understood and the mode by which we mediate and negotiate human temporality. This human experience of time...

We enter a time of calamity: informed and 'informated' youth inside and outside young adult fiction.
December 1, 2006... Young people's interactions with new media and communication technologies are currently popular subjects of debate and analysis in academia, the media and young adult science fiction. But while academic research increasingly highlights the...

An awfully big adventure: killing death in war stories for children.
December 1, 2006... In her useful summary of the growth of discourses dealing with issues of death and dying Kerry Mallan offers a list of 'causes of death [which] covers all possibilities: disease, accident, suicide, murder, execution, old age, childbirth, birth...

Great mind matures slowly, but has no equal in its time: Journey to the West as a genuine fairytale novel.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Books Past, Books Now (1) In order to gain deeper understanding of the laws governing the movement of present-day fairytale narration, this paper investigates the property of the fairytale novel of the Chinese classical work Journey to the...

Influences of translated children's texts upon Chinese children's literature.
December 1, 2006... Introduction The year 1898 witnessed the beginning of western children's works being translated into Chinese by Chinese people. Some of Aesop's Fables were translated and published in a newspaper entitled Wuxi Baihua Bao. (1) In the same...

A chosen sacrifice: the doomed destiny of the Child Messiah in late twentieth-century children's fantasy.
December 1, 2006... The story is familiar. A child is born. It is identified by a mark, prophecy, auspicious birth, or wise soothsayer. A lightning bolt on a forehead. The world rejoices at the birth of the Child Messiah, and hope for the future is restored....

Are you talking to me? Hailing the reader in Indigenous children's literature.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Indigenous-authored children's books are frequently subjected to a non-Indigenous gaze in both their production (editing, design and so on) and reception. The texts discussed here address their many readers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous,...

Constituting Christopher: disability theory and Mark Haddon's; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... In Extraordinary Bodies: figuring disability in American culture and literature, Rosemary Garland Thompson contends that disability is another 'culture-bound, physically justified difference to consider along with race, gender, class, ethnicity...

Narrative in Robyn Kahukiwa's Matatuhi: culture and narrative.
December 1, 2006... The question of a dominating Western metanarrative in postcolonial societies has particular significance when people write for children in a bi-cultural situation. In a recent study the Maori scholar Jon Battista shows that fictional texts...

Postcolonial transformation and traditional Australian Indigenous story.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Published in 1964, The Legends of Moonie Jarl, told by Wilf Reeves and illustrated by his sister Olga Miller, marked a new direction in Australia's literary history. My examination of the history of traditional Australian Indigenous stories for...

Cultural explorations of time and space: Indigenous Australian artists-in residence, conventional narratives and children's text creation.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Introduction This paper details a project, funded by the University of Ballarat in Victoria, which addresses a local problem of schools' lack of acknowledgement of their being positioned on traditional owners' land. In addressing this...

'Like Columbine! Viva Columbine!' Abjection and the representation of school violence in young adult fiction.
December 1, 2006... Young adult literature has long been characterised as a genre concerned with the process of coming-of-age, and as such is implicated in Western cultural notions of teenagers: who they are, what is important to them, what they are capable of....

'Advocating and celebrating the abomination of sodomy': the cultural reception of lesbian and gay picturebooks.
December 1, 2006... Tale of 'gay family' angers Tories. LONDON. A schoolbook about a five-year-old girl who lives with her father and his homosexual lover has raised the ire of the Thatcher Government which is seeking to ban it. Jenny Lives with...

'Change the story, change the world': witches/crones as heroes in novels by Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones.(Book review)
December 1, 2006... Representations of the witch in the western European fairy tale have been stereotypically negative: the witch was depicted generally as an ugly crone and always as malevolent. (1) The black cloak and pointed hat associated with the witch...

Gender Trouble in Arcadia or a world of multigendered possibility? Intersubjectivity and gender in The Wind in the Willows.(a book by Kenneth Grahame)(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... 'Liberal' feminist readings: Misogynistic overtones in The Wind in the Willows According to Peter Green, sex (and more particularly puberty/adolescence) is one of the 'great enemies' in Kenneth Grahame's world because it signals the end of...

Starving desire: new (Deleuzean) readings of anorexia in Australian young adult fiction.(Essay)
December 1, 2006... Anorexia nervosa is recognised as a particularly prevalent disorder among young adult women and much attention has been paid to its multifarious 'causes'. Intense media scrutiny of the issue has spilled over into the fictional representations...