scholarly journals Colonialism, Race, and White Innocence in Finnish Children’s Literature: Anni Swan’s 1920s’ Serial “Uutisasukkaana Austraaliassa”

2021 ◽  
pp. 171-197
Author(s):  
Raita Merivirta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
First Nations People ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies ◽  
White Innocence

AbstractThis chapter focuses on colonialism, race, and White innocence in Finnish 1920s’ children’s literature, arguing that children’s literature was an influential channel through which colonial discourse and public colonial imagination were created, consumed, and circulated in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As an example of such literature, Merivirta examines the Finnish children’s author Anni Swan’s serial “Uutisasukkaana Austraaliassa” (“Living as Settlers in Australia”, 1926). The serial depicts a Finnish settler family’s life in Queensland, focusing on their encounters with First Nations people. The chapter explores how colonialism and race in the Australian context are depicted and racial and cultural hierarchies constructed in Swan’s text. The chapter shows that Swan’s text circulates a number of common European and American colonial tropes and portrays Finnish settler colonialism in Australia as innocent and noncolonial.

scholarly journals Minimal Departures: Narratives of Younger Female Mobility in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Italian Children’s Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
Rita Caviglioli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
World War I ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
National Development ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Mobility narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Italian literature for children reflect the dramatic conditions of vagrancy, abandonment and forced relocation, as well as the situation of child-labor exploitation and child trade through apprenticeship contracts. They also document experiences of mass emigration. In my essay I intend to: i) acknowledge that children’s conditions have been the object of an extensive multi-disciplinary debate in the 1800s and early 1900s; ii) briefly discuss the specifics of Italian children’s literature and the representation of young male mobility; iii) identify some recurring narrative patterns of female (im)mobility; iv) point to three specific narrative plots that relate the mobility of younger female characters to national-identity and national-development issues; v) analyze two of these narratives, Maria Messina’s Cenerella and Olga Visentini’s La zingarella e la principessina, which were written during or in the aftermath of World War I.

The Place of Girls in the Traditions of Minstrelsy and Recitation

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Lynne Vallone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
American Black ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Children's literature criticism has been enhanced by classic and recent work that considers and analyses the important roles children play in performance, but there is a gap in current scholarship on drama as children's literature. This gap concerns how the place of children – especially girls and notions of girlhood – has changed over time in texts and cultural productions around the traditions of recitation and minstrelsy.1Robin Bernstein has argued persuasively that the ‘scripts’ of a racist past inform the cultural constructions of the present and that children's material and popular culture is often its repository: ‘Sentimentalism or minstrelsy may have peaked in the lives of adults in the nineteenth century, but the popular cultures of childhood … delivered, in fragmented and distorted forms, the images, practices, and ideologies of sentimentalism and minstrelsy well into the twentieth century’ (7). This essay attempts to bridge this gap in scholarship by investigating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American black and white girlhood through readings of recitation pieces and playtexts, important aspects of children's literary culture, broadly conceived

Blackness, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Dominican Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Stacy Ann Creech
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Specific Construction

From pre-Columbian times through to the twentieth century, Dominican children's literature has struggled to define itself due to pressures from outside forces such as imperialism and colonialism. This paper examines the socio-political contexts within Dominican history that determined the kind of literature available to children, which almost exclusively depicted a specific construction of indigeneity, European or Anglo-American characters and settings, in an effort to efface the country's African roots. After the Educational Reform of 1993 was instituted, however, there has been a promising change in the field, as Dominican writers are engaged in producing literature for young people that includes more accurate representations of Blackness and multiculturalism.

The Children’s Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary System

This chapter explores the development of the children’s novel throughout the twentieth century. This period represents a change from the protection of childhood to the commodification of childhood, and from essentially gentleman-amateur publishing to highly professional production and marketing. But for all its successes, the idea that the children’s novel is necessary inferior to its adult counterpart dies hard. This is the more illogical because novels for children do not have exact counterparts in the adult literary ‘system’. From an adult point of view, all children’s literature is necessarily ‘popular’ or ‘lowbrow’, or at its ‘best’ merely ‘middlebrow’. Equally, the term ‘literature’ is not useful or relevant in the criticism of children’s novels, and the most valued texts in children’s literature may be precisely those that have the least to offer the adult.

“Who Are You?”: Modernism, Childhood, and Historical Consciousness in Faulkner’s The Wishing Tree

2017 ◽  
pp. 122-134
Author(s):  
Hannah Godwin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Child Reader

This chapter considers an “uneasy yet potentially fruitful confluence” between modernist writing and children's literature in the only Faulkner tale penned specifically for children. Drawing on “the Romantic reverence for the child as transcendent and inspirational,” a reverence qualified to some degree by twentieth-century psychoanalysis and its suspicion of childhood innocence, modernist artists portrayed the child as “a vessel of consciousness” and “instinctual, intense perceptions,” and thus a source of “defamiliarizing perspectives” that fostered artistic experimentation. In The Wishing Tree, writing for young readers may have helped Faulkner awaken his creative potential. The Wishing Tree's rich mix of fantasy and history “works to imbue the child reader with a sense of historical consciousness” while recognizing her as the bearer “of a more hopeful future”.

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