The Aeneid with Rabbits: Children's Fantasy as Modern Epic

<p>Despite their apparent dissimilarity, children's literature and the epic tradition are often intertwined. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the frequent retelling and repackaging of epics such as Beowulf and the Odyssey as children's books. If there is potential for epic to become children's stories, however, there is also potential for children's stories to become epic, and a number of important works of children's fantasy have been discussed as epics in their own right. In this thesis, I examine the extent to which writers of children's fantasy can be viewed as working in an epic tradition, drawing on and adapting epic texts for the modern age as Virgil and Milton did for their own times. Looking specifically at key works of British fantasy written post-WWI, I argue that children's literature and epic serve similar social and cultural functions, including the ability to mythologise communal experience and explore codes of heroism that are absorbed by their intended audience. Rosemary Sutcliff's retellings of epic texts for children suggest the ways in which epic can be reworked to create new heroic codes that are a combination of their source material, the values of their new cultural context, and the author's own personal worldview. This potential is further explored through Richard Adams's Watership Down, an animal story that functions in part as a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid with rabbits. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit uses the tension between epic and children's fairy-tale to examine the codes at the heart of Norse and Anglo-Saxon epic, and suggest an alternative that nonetheless allows for the glory of an epic worldview. Both T.H. White and Sutcliff engage with the Arthurian myth and the Matter of Britain in ways that use children's literature as a starting point for national epic. Finally, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman each make use of Milton's Paradise Lost (and, in Pullman's case, of Lewis's earlier work) to produce very different fantasies that each look ahead to the end of epic. Cumulatively, these books illustrate the manner in which children's texts provide a home for the epic in a postmodern age in which many critics suggest the epic in its pure form can no longer survive. The rise of scientific empiricism, combined with national disillusionment following WWI, has been argued to have left epic's traditional worldview of myth, religion and the supernatural impossible to be used without irony. Children's fantasy, ostensibly addressed to “an audience that is still innocent” (Gillian Adams 109), allows authors to eschew irony in favour of story-telling, and explore ideas such as courage, honour and transcendence that lie at the heart of epic.</p>

The Aeneid with Rabbits: Children's Fantasy as Modern Epic

<p>Despite their apparent dissimilarity, children's literature and the epic tradition are often intertwined. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the frequent retelling and repackaging of epics such as Beowulf and the Odyssey as children's books. If there is potential for epic to become children's stories, however, there is also potential for children's stories to become epic, and a number of important works of children's fantasy have been discussed as epics in their own right. In this thesis, I examine the extent to which writers of children's fantasy can be viewed as working in an epic tradition, drawing on and adapting epic texts for the modern age as Virgil and Milton did for their own times. Looking specifically at key works of British fantasy written post-WWI, I argue that children's literature and epic serve similar social and cultural functions, including the ability to mythologise communal experience and explore codes of heroism that are absorbed by their intended audience. Rosemary Sutcliff's retellings of epic texts for children suggest the ways in which epic can be reworked to create new heroic codes that are a combination of their source material, the values of their new cultural context, and the author's own personal worldview. This potential is further explored through Richard Adams's Watership Down, an animal story that functions in part as a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid with rabbits. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit uses the tension between epic and children's fairy-tale to examine the codes at the heart of Norse and Anglo-Saxon epic, and suggest an alternative that nonetheless allows for the glory of an epic worldview. Both T.H. White and Sutcliff engage with the Arthurian myth and the Matter of Britain in ways that use children's literature as a starting point for national epic. Finally, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman each make use of Milton's Paradise Lost (and, in Pullman's case, of Lewis's earlier work) to produce very different fantasies that each look ahead to the end of epic. Cumulatively, these books illustrate the manner in which children's texts provide a home for the epic in a postmodern age in which many critics suggest the epic in its pure form can no longer survive. The rise of scientific empiricism, combined with national disillusionment following WWI, has been argued to have left epic's traditional worldview of myth, religion and the supernatural impossible to be used without irony. Children's fantasy, ostensibly addressed to “an audience that is still innocent” (Gillian Adams 109), allows authors to eschew irony in favour of story-telling, and explore ideas such as courage, honour and transcendence that lie at the heart of epic.</p>

Constructing Age for Young Readers

Children's literature studies has been relatively slow in adopting techniques from digital humanities. This article explains a method for digitising, annotating, and analysing texts in xml to investigate the implicit age norms that children's books convey. The case studies are seventeen books by Bart Moeyaert and La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman. The analysis of speech distribution, topic modelling, syntactic parsing, and lexical analysis with digital tools adds information about implicit age norms that can support and inspire narrative analyses with close reading.

THE ROLE OF VIDEO CONFERENCING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING AMONG YOUNG STUDENTS

During the coronavirus pandemic research on video conferencing effects on young language learners is more than ever relevant. During the sharp transition, educators need to fully understand the benefits and possible pitfalls of video conferencing, but also overcome resistance to change through knowledge. As author Philip Pullman rightly points out, “You cannot change what you are, only what you do.” This article summarised key research and provided evidence for and against the use of video conferencing in foreign language education. Thus, it gives food for thought and reflection, as well as directions for possible interventions. However, the research was limited in terms of time and available literature, and the topic certainly requires more attention. In future, it is recommended to further research the use of multimodal interactions (sound, audio, text) in video conferencing, as well as coping strategies for dealing with the lack of interaction in the video conferencing-enabled classroom.

The essential "Star Wars"Philip Pullman's baroque aesthetics

This essay has a twofold purpose: to consider the issues of contemporary Young Adult literature addressed to “the children of the videosphere” within the context of globalized culture and to assess the importance of postmodern Baroque aesthetics in the “Star Wars” system of modern Letters and mass-media. Writers often resort to such aesthetics with the prospect of commercial hegemony, but some of them find their “distinction” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s delineation) through intertextuality – be it avowed or hidden – with the great masters of the past (William Blake and John Milton). We will investigate the secret workshop of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy and some of his other works, as well as Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World and diverse literary productions. With their arresting butterflies as significant baroque emblems, these works provide a new and spellbounding vision of the Western hero and offer a new “reterritorialization” of Letters. More particularly, Philip Pullman’s literary gesture has been to extract the baroque message from the vulgarised versions of popular mass media and to give it a new distinction.Key words: Postmodern baroque, William Blake, picaresque, humour, parody, Philip Pullman, Jostein Gaarder.

Comment changer une grenouille en prince ? Les metamorphoses traductives de « Der Froschkönig oder der eiserme Heinrich» en anglais, d' Edgar Taylor a Philip Pullman

La fortune des Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812-1857) doit beaucoup aux traducteurs et illustrateurs qui ont façonné un imaginaire des contes de Grimm parfois très éloigné des récits réunis par les érudits allemands. Tel est le cas de la première traduction anglaise de « Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich ». L’histoire de la réception de ce conte emblématique débute avec « The Frog-Prince », une libre traduction-adaptation d’Edgard Taylor et de son collaborateur David Jardine parue dans German Popular Stories (1823-1826). Destinée à de jeunes lecteurs, cette première traduction (ou transcréation) rencontrera un succès considérable en Angleterre et au-delà. Suivront de nombreuses retraductions qui se distinguent par leur « fidélité » à la source allemande, ou poursuivent le travail d’infantilisation dans des livres illustrés ou des albums pour la jeunesse. Cet article s’attache en particulier à une version récente de Philip Pullman dans Grimm Tales for Young and Old (2012) réalisée à partir des traductions classiques de Margaret Hunt, Ralph Manheim et Jack Zipes. « The Frog-King, or Iron Heinrich » récapitule en quelque sorte l’histoire de la réception anglaise du conte des Grimm, tout en proposant une lecture inédite de cette histoire plus singulière qu’elle n’en a l’air, en mettant en évidence la dimension « queer » du récit. Chaque traduction s’apparente ainsi à une relecture (retelling) créative et critique d’un conte lui-même palimpseste, dont elle souligne les infinies capacités de métamorphose – à l’image de la grenouille enchantée. Mots clé:Le Roi Grenouille, Edgar Taylor, Philip Pullman, études de traduction, étude des contes