”och mymlan flög / och mjölken for”

The Child Readers and Poetry in Tove Jansson’s Picturebook The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My Abstract: Tove Jansson’s picturebook Hur gick det sen? Boken om Mymlan, Mumintrollet och lilla My (The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My) from 1952 is a book which makes use of its material aspects in many regards, employing the interactivity of the picturebook format to its maximum. Given the fact that it is written in verse, and is considered a classic by all means, it is surprising to find that the function that poetry plays within the book has been scarcely explored in prior research. By examining how the format of this particular picturebook guides the manner in which the child reader experiences it, and by studying the function of poetry within that framework, the article shows that poetry potentially plays a vital role in how child readers make sense of it. In particular, the role of poetry manifests itself as an opportunity for child readers to – at their own pace, and in their own manner – deal with the delicate balance between the attachmentseeking struggles of the anxious character of Moomin, on the one hand, and the exploratory individuation of the adventurous character of Little My, on the other. Through these examinations, the article demonstrates how the use of poetry can facilitate an emancipatory opportunity for child readers within picturebooks – and how this potential is ever-present within the format and the reading situation of picturebooks for children in general.

‘Antonio, il Mercante della Nostra Storia’: Adapting The Merchant of Venice for Italian Children

This essay discusses the challenges of adapting Shakespeare’s play in narrative form for young readers. It cites the history of such adaptation, thinking about the ‘set of instructions’ authors have provided child readers to respond to the problematic elements of the play (usury, religious and personal prejudice, mercenary marriages, homosexual attraction, cuckoldry). It tracks Tosi’s experience of translating/adapting the play and examines the narrative and ideological choices she made in her illustrated version (2015). The power of this story for children, Tosi argues, lies in its potential to ask questions relevant to their lives today.

Family bonds, humour and the redefinition of adulthood in The Adventures of Dzherik by Natal’ia Nusinova

This article investigates how Natal’ia Nusinova’s autobiographical tale about the Soviet period, The Adventures of Dzherik, establishes the reliability of the narrative voice by providing a source of moral guidance for its child readers, the author being an adult and an intellectual raised in intellectual family. The importance of this should be viewed within the context of post-Soviet culture, wherein came the crisis of intellectual world and that of adults as suitable care-providers. In Nusinova’s book family love functions as the centre of the production of meaning and is joined with late Soviet humour. All these fill in the voids of sense in Natasha’s (the author’s child self) experience of Soviet times, and make her invulnerable to the most traumatic aspects of Soviet society, of which she is nonetheless part. The narrative voice establishes her position as an adult able to guide a post-Soviet child at the end of a ritualistic plot of rebirth that unites the introduction, the single chapters and the final glossary together into a macrotext.

The Modernist Picture Book in three Dimensions

This chapter explores the way modernist picture books reconceive three-dimensionality, and hence the book as object. Around 1900, a Europe-wide vogue for picture books (Gertrud Caspari, Andre Hellé) in which toys come to life overlapped with new enthusiasm for building block play (H. G. Wells and E. Nesbit advocate the construction of “little worlds”), toy-centered ballets, and the explorations of movement and perspective enabled by the advent first of cinema, and then of cubism. The essay also discusses 1920s and 1930s constructivist, cubist, and De Stijl picture books by Lou Loeber, Nathalie Parain, Alexander Rodchenko, and Varvara Stepanova in relationship to the emergence, in schools and art schools, of new art pedagogies centered on paper crafts, a new sense of the picture book itself as a template for future art-making, and of child readers as fledgling artists in their own right.

Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel

This chapter focuses primarily on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and the novels—including Scott’s subsequent crusading fictions—that paid tribute to it through their engagement with roughly the same period of English history. In the hands of writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley, the historical novel after Scott tended to present the Norman invasion as an enduringly formative moment in the making of modern imperial Britain. Popular fictions by Charlotte Yonge and G. A. Henty, composed for child readers, were similarly inspired by Scott, though in their reductive rewriting of Ivanhoe they further contributed to Scott’s ‘descent to the school-room’. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1883), by contrast, I will argue in conclusion, recovers the playfully reflexive scepticism of Ivanhoe and detaches the adolescence of its confused hero from any idea of an analogous national emergence.

Parafoveal pre-processing in children reading English: The importance of external letters

Although previous research has demonstrated that for adults external letters of words are more important than internal letters for lexical processing during reading, no comparable research has been conducted with children. This experiment explored, using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, whether parafoveal pre-processing in English is more affected by the manipulation of external letters or internal letters, and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Six previews were generated: identity (e.g., monkey); external letter manipulations where either the beginning three letters of the word were substituted (e.g., rackey) or the last three letters of the word were substituted (e.g., monhig); internal letter manipulations; e.g., machey, mochiy); and an unrelated control condition (e.g., rachig). Results indicate that both adults and children undertook pre-processing of words in their entirety in the parafovea, and that the manipulation of external letters in preview was more harmful to participants’ parafoveal pre-processing than internal letters. The data also suggest developmental change in the time course of pre-processing, with children’s pre-processing delayed compared to that of adults. These results not only provide further evidence for the importance of external letters to parafoveal processing and lexical identification for adults, but also demonstrate that such findings can be extended to children.