Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature articles from December 2008

Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature archives from December 2008

Editorial.
December 1, 2008... The theme of the Eighth International Conference of the Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research (ACLAR), held at Victoria University of Wellington on 27-29 June 2008, was 'Other Worlds in Children's Literature: Fantasy,...

Fantasy as epanalepsis: 'an anticipation of retrospection'.
December 1, 2008... I begin with a paragraph that unaccountably disappeared when something I wrote for the book The Gothic in Children s Literature, transferred from my computer to the publisher's computer. Somehow or other, a paragraph in my essay on the vampire...

'Abandoned boys' and 'pampered princes': fantasy as the journey to reality in the Harry Potter sequence.
December 1, 2008... With the publication of the seventh and final novel in the Harry Potter sequence, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), it is at last possible to judge not only the thematic agendas of the sequence but also its overarching narrative...

Fantasy motif metaphors: magical powers as exceptionality in Disney's The Incredibles and Zizou Corder's Lion Boy trilogy.
December 1, 2008... While works of the fantasy genre convey literal stories which make sense according to the laws of their fictional worlds, the very impossibilities of these narratives invite further readings of their 'secondary or tertiary levels of meaning'...

'Do what you wish or wish what you want?' Michael Ende's Fantastica and Rudolf Steiner's moral imagination.
December 1, 2008... In Ende's The Neverending Story, a boy named Bastian travels into the fantasy world of Fantastica which is being eaten up by 'Nothing' (Ende 1983, p. 19). He saves this ailing world by giving a new name to its ruler, the Childlike Empress, and...

Towards reclaiming the colonised mind: the liberating fantasies of Duiker and Ihimaera.
December 1, 2008... Ursula le Guin once observed that 'the story - from Rumpehtiltskin to War and peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding' and that while 'there have been great societies that did not...

Conflicting ideologies in three magical realist children's novels by Isabel Allende.
December 1, 2008... A recent movement to establish ecopoetic frames in children's literature has led to the exploration of a critical confluence of magical realism with ecocriticism. Because of a common capacity to interrogate dominant Western value systems,...

Mise en abyme and the ontological uncertainty of magical events in at the Back of the North Wind.
December 1, 2008... George MacDonald's novel At the Back of the North Wind tells the story of a boy's magical journey with a mysterious figure, the North Wind, who reveals to the boy his spiritual life. This novel has been categorised as fantasy, in spite of the...

The real lies: the simulacrum in Catherine Fisher's The Oracle.
December 1, 2008... Fiction written for children and young adults has absorbed postmodern culture in many ways, overtly in some picture books, and more covertly in other young adult fiction. One aspect of postmodernism is concerned with what is real, what is more...

Haunted histories: time-slip narratives in the antipodes.
December 1, 2008... In a startling moment in Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters, Harry draws apart from the rest of her family in her attic bedroom in the family beach house, Carnival's Hide, She looks into a mirror and sees her image dismantle, allowing a very...

Flights of fantasy? or space-time compression in Asian-Australian picture books.
December 1, 2008... Metaphors of hybridity and the like not only recognize difference within the subject, fracturing and complicating holistic notions of identity, but also address connections between subjects by recognizing affiliations,...

Gossip girls in a transmedia world: the sexual and technological anxieties of integral reality.
December 1, 2008... The proliferation of sexualised imagery of children and adolescents - especially girls - within media and advertising has elicited considerable public debate and academic discussion within Australia and overseas. Within these debates, girls are...

Behind the bum: a psychoanalytic reading of Andy Griffiths' Bum trilogy.
December 1, 2008... Anal jokes abound in Andy Griffiths' trilogy of novels for children. The Day My Bum Went Psycho (2001)1, Zombie Bums From Uranus (2003) and Bumageddon (2005). The titles of the second and third volumes give a fair idea of the quality and makeup...