Silent Conversations in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Ruskin Bond’s Rusty novels

The essay undertakes an analysis of the connections and conversations between Rudyard Kipling’s Kim(1901) and Ruskin Bond’s largely autobiographical Rusty(1955-) novels. Kipling’s Kimhas evoked many literary responses and reactions across India. While writers such as Sarath Kumar Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, T.N. Murari,and even Sashi Tharoor have boldly written back to Kim, Ruskin Bond silently acknowledgesit in his Rusty series of children’s fiction. At times, Bond’s pointed and conscious avoidance ofKipling becomes his means of accepting Kipling’s influence on him. The essay traces the implicit dialogue between thesetwo Anglo-Indian authorsand their protagonists.It undertakes a close reading of theirnovelsto analysethe evolution of English literature and Anglo-Indianism in India, whilealsoexaminingthe divided identities of the authors and their fictional protagonists.

“Distinct Characters of Their Own”: Mermaids in late 19th-mid 20th Century Australian children’s fiction

While mermaids have been found all around the world, their literary and cultural representations are traditionally associated with Europe. Recently attention has been paid to the particular resonance of mer-folk narratives in specifically Australian contexts. Hayward, Floyd, Snell, Organ and Callaway have drawn attention to examples of mer-worlds that directly intersect with and comment on Australian environments. Beginning in the late 19th Century, predominantly women writers relocate mermen and mermaids to explore relationships between land and sea, city and bush that have local resonance for young readers. These stories are often accompanied by rich illustrations designed to appeal to young imaginations. This note comments on three writers whose work relates mer-cultures to Australia: J.M Whitfield, Pixie O’Harris and Harriet Stephens, along with their illustrators, G.W Lambert, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and O’Harris herself.

‘Never Just a Game’: Storytelling, Gaming, and Death in Luka and the Fire of Life and Joseph Anton

Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life and Joseph Anton both reflect on his concerns with death along with an attempt to keep the process of storytelling alive. This article explores Rushdie's addressing of the literal threat of death in the memoir and the metaphorical death of storytelling abilities in the children's fiction. The emphasis of this article is on Rushdie's usage of gaming and virtual reality to retain his authority in the storytelling world.

Eyes and speech in English, Finnish and Czech children’s literature

This study explores cross-linguistically, in English, Czech and Finnish, eye-behaviour that occurs in children’s fiction in the vicinity of character speech. We explore how authentic eye behaviour, as an important part of non-verbal communication, is rendered in fictional worlds. While there are more similarities than differences across the languages in the characteristics and narrative functions of fictional eye-behaviour, the linguistic encoding differs substantially due to typological differences between the languages. The same semantic roles are often expressed by divergent syntactic means. The divergence is reflected primarily in the relative weight of different word-order principles, the different means of indicating simultaneity, as well as the role of inflection in Finnish and Czech.

Children’s fiction and anime: The case of Shōkōjo Sēra

This article considers the case of Shōkōjo Sēra (1985), a Japanese animated series based on the novel A Little Princess, within the context of the World Masterpiece Theater, a television staple that popularized the practice of adapting classic children’s books into long-running anime. The analysis identifies the changes occurring in the adaptation, casting a light on the creative and productive choices undertaken by the Japanese staff. In doing so, the original novel and its reception in Japan are taken into account, with regard to the role of translated literature for local children’s and girls’ fiction. The study thus demonstrates that the alterations found in the series are both genre-related and explicable in terms of cultural-filtered interpretations, as can be seen in the negotiation of the protagonist as a Christian damsel-in-distress, combining melodramatic tropes, a signifier of westernization and a domesticating rationale of her alleged passivity.