scholarly journals Recent Trends in Children's Literature Research: Return to the Body

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Nikolajeva
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Strong Response ◽  
Young Audiences ◽  
Literature Research ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Recent Trends

Twenty-first-century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. Cultural theories have generated fruitful approaches to children's fiction through the lenses of gender, class, race and sexual orientation, and psychoanalytically oriented theories have explored ways of representing childhood as a projection of (adult) interiority, but the physical existence of children as represented in their fictional worlds has been obscured by constructed social and psychological hierarchies. Recent directions in literary studies, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies and cognitive criticism, are refocusing scholarly attention on the physicality of children's bodies and the environment. This trend does not signal a return to essentialism but reflects the complexity, plurality and ambiguity of our understanding of childhood and its representation in fiction for young audiences. This article examines some current trends in international children's literature research with a particular focus on materiality.

scholarly journals Veljka Ruzicka Kenfel (Ed). New Trends in Children’s Literature Research --Twenty-first Century Approaches –200-2012. (2014). Spain: Peter Lang Edition. 239 pages.

InterSedes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (34) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Vásquez Carranza
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literature Research ◽  
Children And Young Adults ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The University

This text incorporates various studies by researchers who belong to the group Anglo-German Children’s Literature and its Translation at the University of Vigo, first set up in 1992. The main focus is to describe new tendencies within literature for children and young adults, including translation, adaptation, comics, and palindrome.

“Affluence of the Heart”: Wastefulness and the Search for Meaning in Millennial Japan

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Nongovernmental Organizations ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
Twenty First Century

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Japan experienced a surge in the evocation of the word “mottainai,” most simply translated as “wasteful.” Children's literature, mass-market nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, songs, government ministries, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations deliberately used and defined the term as they took up the question of what was to be deemed wasteful. This essay examines how discourses that were ostensibly about wastefulness constituted an articulation of values, a search for meaning and identity, and a certain conception of affluence in millennial Japan. It suggests that this idea ofmottainaireflected wide-ranging principles and beliefs that were thought to define what it meant to be Japanese in the twenty-first century, at a time when there settled in an uneasy acceptance of economic stagnation and a desire to find meaning in an economically anemic, yet still affluent, Japan.

Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-Adult-Child Events in Children's Literature Research

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-201
Author(s):  
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Literature Research ◽  
School Year ◽  
Alternative Communities

As Nathalie op de Beeck (2018) has recently pointed out, children's literature scholars need to forge more meaningful connexions between ecoliteracy and environmental action to create possibilities for achieving environmental justice. I propose that we achieve this goal by (auto-)deconstructing our research practices and subjectivities through promoting the participation of children as active contributors to all elements of the research process. Such approaches enable young decision-makers to engage with one another, with books and with the world through ethics of interconnectivity. I see such praxis as exemplifying deconstructive events and discuss their emergence in Shaping a Preferable Future: Children Reading, Thinking and Talking about Alternative Communities and Times (ChildAct), a project I co-conducted with children in Cambridgeshire, UK, in the school year 2017–2018. The project centered on child-adult collaboration towards a better understanding of how utopian literature shapes ideas for preferred futures, how these ideas evolve in readers’ encounters with their localities and how they call readers into action. As I show, ChildAct testifies to the possibility of de-centering children's literature research towards a field promoting a shared sense of belonging to and responsibility for our world.

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