Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures invites essay submissions for a special issue addressing the many interpretations of consumption and their meanings in relation to youth texts and culture(s). We welcome essays that consider registers of race, class, gender, and disability. Essays should be between 6,000 and 9,000 words in length and prepared for blind peer-review.

Consumption is a vehicle through which we come to understand proprietary relationships with people, places, bodies, and identities. If food is the primary signifier when we think of consumption, how might we read metaphoric consumption (of capital, culture, and place, for instance) in light of notions of necessity and survival?

Article submissions are requested by: 15 December 2013.

Topics may include:

• representations of food or the ingestion of food and drink
• eating disorders, the stigma of obesity, and fatphobia
• pedagogy of health
• consumption as disease (ie. tuberculosis)
• obsession or fixation
• symbolic acts of devouring/being devoured
• cannibalism or consuming the self (eg. vampires, fairy tales)
• consumption, purchasing, ownership, and material culture
• discourses of consumption (good/bad consumers)
• young people as consumers, advertising for or about young people
• cultural consumerism/tourism

Inquiries may be directed to Larissa Wodtke, Managing Editor: l.wodtke@uwinnipeg.ca

Further information about submission guidelines is available at: http://jeunessejournal.ca.

Download a PDF of the CFP.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

RESEARCH CENTER FOR RUSSIAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
INSTITUTE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE (THE PUSHKIN HOUSE)
ILLINOIS WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
URAL FEDERAL UNIVERSITY

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AS A TERRITORY OF CONFLICTS: TEXTS, PERSONALITIES, AND INSTITUTIONS
June 1-3, 2014
Institute of Russian Literature (The Pushkin House)
St. Petersburg, Russia

This international conference will discuss children’s literature as a territory of conflicts: institutional, personal, and textual. Presentations might address issues such as:

Antagonisms between the state and the writer/reader, problems of religious and political censorship, tension between traditional and innovative forms of children’s literature, previously silenced and taboo subjects (gender, disability, race, ethnicity, sexuality, criminality, death, etc.), generational differences and conflicts, shifts in aesthetic norms and values, construction of the canon and mechanisms of canonization of children’s literature, multiple adaptations and translations of foreign texts, historical conceptions of plurality within children’s literature, children’s literature in the school curriculum, etc.

Proposals may also address:

• Innovative authors of children’s books and their careers
• Professional, regional, and informal societies of writers
• History of different generations of children’s writers
• Problems and conflicts in national children’s literatures
• Theoretical and critical approaches to children’s literature

Please send us your 300-word proposal and a short bio by September 1, 2013. You will be notified by October 1, 2013, if your abstract has been selected for the conference.

Working languages: Russian and English

Contact information: detlit2014@gmail.com

Organizational committee:
Marina Balina, Illinois Wesleyan U (USA)
Valentin Golovin, Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg
Mariia Litovskaia, Ural Federal U
Svetlana Maslinskaia, Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg
Larissa Rudova, Pomona College (USA)
Inna Sergienko, Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg
Valerii Viugin, Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg

“You’re Out of Control!” The Unruly Child in Children’s Literature

Unruly, wild and loud children are common in children’s literature. Indeed, there seems to be a need to portray children outside parental control, or even of children who rebel against oppressive adult regimes, as in Shockheaded Peter or Pippi Longstocking. One could argue that children’s and YA fiction establishes a zone of freedom where (fictional) children are allowed a measure of freedom. It is of course true that the unruly and anarchic child can be used as a warning, but more often than not the disobedient and troublesome child saves the day. Both Astrid Lindgren’s Emil and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter are rule-breakers who go their own ways, yet they ultimately bring about harmony and redemption.

The unruly child can be seen from different perspectives. Concepts that can open up the notion of the unruly child include: identity, power (not least between adult-child), normativity, body, performativity, animalism, and queer. Some of the questions that beg to be asked are: what is the role of the unruly child in children’s literature? What are the limits of “unruliness”? How close is the state of the wild child to that of animals? Thus, the wild, the loud and the unruly will be the Barnboken – Journal of Children’s Literature Research Spring theme 2014. We welcome proposals and articles in that spirit, and we do so up until:

23 September 2013 (proposals)
25 November 2013 (articles)

Britt G. Hallqvist 100 Years

Britt G. Hallqvist (1914-1997) is one of the most important figures in Swedish children’s literature during the 20th C. Her contribution is at once deep and versatile. From the début with the comic masterpiece Rappen’s på Blåsopp [The Rappens of Blåsopp] in 1950, over numerous children’s and YA-books, several collections of poetry and verse, children’s drama, to children’s songs, hymns and prayers, her work is characterized by a both playful and exact attitude to language. Equally important was her role as a congenial translator of children’s literature. She translated Kipling’s The Jungle Books, Wilder’s The Little House on the Prairie, Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Tolkien’s The Hobbit, to just mention a few. Finally, in her translations just as in her original work, she switched with perfect ease from pose to poetry as can be seen in her indispensable translations of nonsense poetry (Plath, Lear, Eliot, Krüss) into Swedish. Barnboken – Journal of Children’s Literature Research will devote the 2014 Autumn issue to Britt G. Hallqvist and her contribution to Swedish children’s literature. We welcome proposals and articles up until:

25 November 2013 (proposals)
1 April 2014 (articles)

The Institutions that Shape Children’s Literature: Schools, Publishers and Libraries

Children’s literature cannot be reduced to the book the reader holds in her hand. The act of reading comes at the end of a long chain of actions, all of which are prompted and supported by different literary, cultural, pedagogical institutions (schools, libraries) as well as by commercial interests (publishers, booksellers). Thus, to understand the conditions that shape children’s literature and children’s reading it is necessary to scrutinize children’s literature as a cultural field with its own infrastructure. Through which channels do children’s books reach the child reader? What is the role of publishers, libraries, reading campaigns, reviews of children’s books, literary prizes? Which discourses about children and childhood shape the institutions of children’s literature? What is the role of new technologies and media forms in creating new arenas for children’s literature? Which tools can children’s literature research bring to bear on the field of children’s literature and the cultural practices of reading? These are some of the questions that Barnboken – Journal of Children’s Literature Research will address in the 2015 Spring issue. We welcome proposals and articles on these and related topics up until:

12 August 2014 (proposals)
25 November 2014 (articles)

For more information, please see www.barnboken.net.

CALL FOR PAPERS for a two-day symposium on
Children’s Literature, Childhood Death, and the Emotions in the Long Eighteenth Century

Date: 5-6 December, 2013
Venue: The University of Western Australia

Although historians from many disciplines have begun the work of documenting the histories of childhood and childhood culture, very little is known about the ways in which emotions relating to childhood were represented to children through the literature and accompanying images created for, about and, occasionally, by them. Currently the majority of work on children’s literature sits outside cognate historical studies. This symposium, co-hosted with the Children’s Literature Unit of Newcastle University, UK, will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to build links with children’s literature studies through an examination of material relating to the death of children. It aims to develop understanding of how children were taught about, experienced and taught to manage the powerful emotions associated with the death of children – siblings, friends, characters in texts or their own impending death – and how attitudes and responses to a range of emotions changed across time and place. In addition to materials specifically for children, sources of interest include diaries, journals, correspondence, teaching materials, medical treatises, drawings, samplers, ballads, legal papers, instructions for rituals and any other kinds of documents and materials that provide insights into children’s emotional reactions to childhood death and the emotions children’s deaths provoked in others. The symposium will demonstrate the value of putting information about children alongside texts for children.

To facilitate connections across disciplines and to strengthen research through participation, all papers will be given in plenary sessions using a mixture of co-ordinated panels, individual speakers and prepared responses. There will be no charge for registration, but since it may be necessary to limit numbers, all who wish to attend in person at UWA should indicate this in advance.

Video link presentations are possible.

Confirmed plenary speakers from the Children’s Literature Unit in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, UK

• Kate Chedgzoy, Professor of Renaissance Literature and Head of School
• Matthew Grenby, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies
• Kimberley Reynolds, Professor of Children’s Literature

Proposals are invited for papers on any topic from any discipline that can be used to increase understanding of how the death of children was presented to children in texts for them as part of the emotional economies of the period. Deadline for responses 31 July 2013.

Topics of interest could include but are not limited to:

• Childhood death and grief/sorrow
• Adults’ responses to childhood death
• Institutional responses to childhood death
• Illustrating death for/of children
• Managing children’s responses to childhood death
• Children’s fear of death
• Emotions associated with potentially fatal illnesses and injuries
• Child martyrdom, child murder and infanticide
• Dramatizing the death of children

It is intended to bring a number of papers from the conference together to create either an edited volume suitable, for example, for the Palgrave History of Childhood series, or a special number of an appropriate peer-reviewed journal.

Please send 300-word abstracts to kim.reynolds@ncl.ac.uk by 31 July 2013. General queries about the conference theme should also be sent to Kim Reynolds at that address.

Queries about travel, venue and other practical arrangements should be addressed to Pam Bond at UWA: pam.bond@uwa.edu.au.