Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature articles from September 2005

Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature archives from September 2005

Editorial.
September 1, 2005... The title of this special issue--Spaces of Transformation--encapsulates the exciting possibilities opened up by the kinds of writing for children and young people considered by the contributors. Responding to an invitation to write on topics...

New social orders: reconceptualising family and community in utopian fiction.
September 1, 2005... The family is the cradle into which the future is born; it is the nursery in which the new social order is nourished and reared during its early and most plastic period. (Sidney Goldstein, Marriage and Family Living, 1946) (1)...

Education, state and agency in dystopian children's texts.
September 1, 2005... Formulations of utopian and dystopian societies have always engaged with the politics of state power and government, since the better worlds envisaged in utopian thinking commonly rely on the interplay of individual, communitarian and political...

Allan Baillie's Secrets of Walden Rising as critical dystopia: problematising national mythologies.
September 1, 2005... Allan Baillie's Secrets of Walden Rising (1996) is a novel about 'the politics of history' (Fernandez 2001, p. 42) and an examination of the text's significant challenges to the dominant historical stories of its time seems appropriate as...

'Belonging' in young adult dystopian fiction: new communities created by children.
September 1, 2005... In this paper I will discuss the role that young adults play in the creation of new communities governed by young people in four dystopian novels set during the fragmentation of society in the near future. I will focus on novels narrated by or...

'When I was a child I thought as a child ...': the importance of memory in constructions of childhood and social order in a selection of post-disaster fictions.
September 1, 2005... This paper will analyse the construction of childhood in three post-disaster texts for young readers: Ruth Hooker's Kennaquhair, Robert C. O'Brien's Z for Zachariah, and Hugh Scott's Why Weeps the Brogan?, exploring how the relationship between...

Desiring perception: finding utopian impulses in Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing.
September 1, 2005... In his picture book The Lost Thing (2000), Shaun Tan visually depicts a futuristic Melbourne, Australia as a dystopic industrialised modernist cityscape. Melbourne flattens into a sepia-toned city comprising buildings and people that echo each...