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The IRSCL Award
ÂThe IRSCL Award for outstanding research was established in 1994. It honours a distinguished work in the field of children's literature research published in the two (calendar) years prior to the Congress at which it is awarded. The recipient must be an IRSCL member in good standing and must have been nominated by another member. Board members are not eligible for nomination.
Award Winners
2007
Historien om børnelitteratur: dansk børnelitteratur gennem 400 år / The History of Children's Literature: 400 Years of Danish Children's Literature
Torben Weinreich
Copenhagen: Branner & Korch, 2006
One of the necessary and most relevant activities in a relatively young field of research is historiography. Analysing the historical emergence and development of one’s object of study in a convincing and nuanced way requires mature distancing, thorough research, rich knowledge and a convincing theoretical framework to compose a history, a story of the development of children’s literature in a particular area. Torben Weinreich’s The History of Children's Literature: 400 Years of Danish Children’s Literature is just such an ambitious and successful enterprise, offering valuable insights and models of thinking for other areas, fields, or geographical locations.
2005
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The Poetics of Childhood
Roni Natov
New York / London: Routledge, 2003
The Poetics of Childhood is a study of the sensibility of childhood and the way writers have attempted to find a language in their work for children and for a mature audience with which to recreate this sensibility. Closely and intelligently reading an eclectic range of works from classics of children's literature (Burnett's The Secret Garden, Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden ) as well as modern titles (Rowling's Harry Potter ), the poetry of Wordsworth and Blake, Nabokov's Lolita, Lessing's The Fifth Child or Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things , Natov examines the construction of innocence, of the pastoral and the anti-pastoral, not shirking from the dark images that contribute to the poetics of childhood.
Reviews of Roni Natov's The Poetics of Childhood by IRSCL scholars from the Netherlands, the USA, Finland, the UK and Italy can be read in the review section of the IRSCL.
2003
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Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature
Clare Bradford
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2001
Reading Race demonstrates how Australian children's texts of all genres (fiction, non-fiction, picture books, school texts, films) represent Aborigines and Aboriginality to Australian children. It examines the ideologies of race which inform Australian children's texts, the cultural shifts that are visible in their representations of Aboriginality, and the tensions and uncertainties which they disclose. In its deployment of postcolonial theory and its attention to Aboriginal textuality, Reading Race affords models of theorized analysis of texts. It deals with questions of gender, colonialism and the sacred; issues of cultural appropriation, hybridity and reconciliation as they manifest in Australian texts.
2001
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Kinderliterarische Komparatistik [Comparative Children's Literature]
Emer O'Sullivan
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000
Emer O'Sullivan's pioneering study examines the relevance of basic questions and concepts of comparative literature for children's literature studies and develops them further. What emerges is a map of the relevant areas:
- general theory of children's literature,
- contact and transfer studies (including translation and reception),
- comparative poetics of children's literature (including thematology),
- intertextuality studies,
- image studies,
- comparative genre studies,
- comparative historiography of children's literature and
- comparative history of children's literature studies.
The translation of children's literature is a special focus of the book. O'Sullivan draws on a communicative model of translation which links the theoretical fields of narratology and translation studies.
A final section addresses the concepts of world literature for children and children classics and analyses the globalisation of children's literature today.
1999
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Norsk Barnelitteraturhistorie [The history of Norwegian Children's Literature]
Tone Birkeland, Gunvor Risa & Karen Beate Vold
Oslo: Det norske samlaget, 1997
1997
ÂThe Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children's Literature
Rod McGillis
New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.
1995
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When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis and Development
Lois Rostow Kuznets
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
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When Toys Come Alive focuses on the role of toy characters (dolls, animals, mechanical objects) in older classics written for children or adults ( e.g.,The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, Pinocchio, Winnie the Pooh, The Velveteen Rabbit) through modern texts like The Mouse and His Child, popular cartoons, and science fiction. Kuznets uses a variety of intertextual critical approaches to show how toy characters act out deep human needs, desires, and fears, reflect socio-economic hierarchies, and raise existential issues of power and creativity.
IRSCL Honour Books
2009
Mondialisation et Littérature de Jeunesse
[Globalization and Youth Literature]
Jean Perrot
Paris: Electre, Edition du cercle de la librairie, 2008
The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature
Perry Nodelman
Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
2007
Pippi Langstrumpf als Paradigma: Die deutsche Rezeption Astrid Lindgrens und ihr internationaler Kontext / Pippi Longstocking as a Paradigm: The German Reception of Astrid Lindgren's Works and their International Context
Astrid SurmatzTübingen: A. Francke, 2006
2005
Peter Hunt (ed)
International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, 2nd edition
Oxford: Routledge, 2004
2003
Youth Cultures: Texts, Images, Identity
Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce (eds)
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003
John Stephens (ed)
London and New York: Routledge, 2002
2001
Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity
Robyn McCallum
New York: Garland Publishing, 1999
Jean Perrot
Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 1999
IRSCL Fellows
Since 2001 IRSCL has awarded an honorary fellowship to members who have made outstanding contributions to IRSCL and to research in children's literature. This award is announced and presented at IRSCL Congresses. IRSCL Fellows are:
2009
- Sonja Svensson
The IRSCL Fellowship recognises Sonja's extensive and longstanding contributions to IRSCL and to research in children's literature, especially in Sweden. Sonja's first contact with IRSCL occurred in 1976 outside Stockholm, when she assisted Mary Ørvig and Göte Klingberg, who as secretary and chairman organised the symposium. After the Moscow conference in 1981 she was elected to the IRSCL Board and served as Secretary to Denise Escarpit in preparing the Bordeaux program in 1983, the same year in which she obtained her PhD and succeeded Mary Ørvig as director of the Stockholm Institute. Sonja served as Vice President until the conference at Montreal in 1985 and attended further IRSCL Congresses in Cologne, Salamanca, Paris, Stockholm and Kristiansand.
Helene Ehriander (Växjö University) received the award on Sonja's behalf and read her acceptance speech. Helene also outlined Sonja's contributions to IRSCL and to children's literature, pointing out that she has published and lectured nationally and internationally in the field since the late 1960s. Sonja's main research interests have been children´s periodicals, young adult literature and the interaction of society and literature. She was responsible for sections on children´s books in Sweden’s most extensive history of literature and its leading modern encyclopaedia. From 1983 to 2005 Sonja was engaged as Director of the Swedish Institute for Children´s Books. In this role she organized research conferences and was the editor of the Institute's biannual magazine and of some 70 titles in the Institute’s professional series, in most cases offering authors professional advice and manuscript readings. She has been a member of diverse juries, including the Italian Rolando Anzilotti Award (1986–94) for outstanding international studies in the field and the Brothers Grimm Award of the Osaka Institute (1998–2008). She was on the advisory board of Bookbird 1997-98 and in retirement continues to pursue research into children's periodicals.
- Riitta Kuivasmäki
The Fellowship awarded to Riitta Kuivasmäki recognises her service to IRSCL and to children's literature research in Finland. Riitta joined IRSCL in 1981 and served on the IRSCL Board from 1985 until 1989. In her second term on the Board she took on the responsibility of Treasurer with notable efficiency, computerising membership information for the first time. The Frankfurt Congress was the eighth Congress which Riitta attended.
Riitta Kuivasmäki has been one of the main pioneers of children’s literature research in Finland. Her doctoral thesis was among the first studies ever written about children’s literature in Finland, and she was the first academic to work in the field of children’s literature in Finland. She initiated the founding of the Finnish Institute for Children’s Literature in 1978, and was its first director, leading the institute from 1980 until her retirement in 1999. During her period as director of the Finnish Institute for Children's Literature she produced bibliographical material still used by Finnish scholars. Riitta has always encouraged young scholars and has initiated many projects. She has had many international interests, including a period as visiting scholar in the Osaka Institute of Children’s Literature.
To celebrate Riitta's Fellowship the current group of young Finnish scholars wrote and performed the following song in her honour at the IRSCL Banquet:
Tanssi, Riitta, laula, Riitta,
on pränikkä nyt sulla,
kunnia on ikuinen ja lisääkin voi tulla!
Tutki, Riitta, tutki, Riitta,
kirjoja on monta,
koivu, tähti, Jörö-Jukka
-- ei oo mahdotonta!
A Finnish folk song melody
Lyrics by ‘The Young Finns’
“Dance, Riitta, sing, Riitta, you’ve now been awarded. The honour stays for ever, and there might be even more on the way! Research, Riitta, research, Riitta, the books are so many. A birch*, a star*, a Struwwelpeter – nothing is impossible! (*The birch and the star refer to a literary fairy tale of Zacharias Topelius after which the bibliography of Finnish juvenile literature published between 1543 and 1899 was named. The bibliography was written by Riitta Kuivasmäki, Marja Kukkonen and Marita Rajalin).
2007 - Ann Lawson Lucas.[Ann Lawson-Lucas was a board member in the 1990s who organised both a symposium with publication and a congress with proceedings in the UK. The congress she managed in York, 1997 'The Presence of the Past in Children's Literature', made a significant contribution to the Society's funds which enabled us to support numerous travel and research grants. More recently she has been instrumental in approaching Edinburgh University Press and negotiating a contract that sees them publishing the IRSCL journal. In this process she not only gave her time and expertise to securing what is an important new development for the Society's future and status but she has also supported it in other ways, including by serving in a senior capacity on its advisory board.]
- Anne Scott MacLeod.[Anne Scott MacLeod was President from 1985-89, a crucial period in the Society's history. She oversaw the creation of the by-laws and the regularisation of financial and congress arrangements. Under her leadership the IRSCL became a more robust and effective organisation for its members; without her efforts it might not have survived.]
2005 - Jean Perrot.[Jean Perrot was for many years Director of the Institut International Charles Perrault, a center for research in children’s literature which he founded in Eaubonne in 1994. He has organized a host of international conferences and edited many important collections of essays. In 1991, he hosted the highly successful 10th Biennial IRSCL Congress in Paris, and then edited the proceedings of the congress, Culture, texte et jeune lecteur, which were published with the Presses Universitaires de Nancy in 1993. He has also served on the IRSCL Board of the IRSCL. Jean’s indefatigable promotion of international exchange and collaboration in the study of children’s literature has had a major impact on the field. In 2001 he was awarded the International Brothers Grimm Award.
2003 - Göte Klingberg
2001 - Klaus Doderer