CFP – Special Issue of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens: “Dear Child”: Talking to Children in Victorian and Edwardian Children’s Books

“Dear Child”: Talking to Children in Victorian and Edwardian Children’s Books
To be published in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 92 (autumn 2020)
https://journals.openedition.org/cve/

The 92nd issue of the French peer-reviewed journal Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens (CVE) will address the question of communicating with children in Victorian and Edwardian children’s books.

Like the many (adult) novels analyzed by Stewart in Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience of Nineteenth-Century Fiction, nineteenth-century children’s books are particularly aware of their audience. Yet if Stewart scrutinizes the prototypical address “Dear reader” that, he feels, is the symbol of “the relentless micromanagement of response in nineteenth-century narrative” (21), he does not see that address and its variations as instrumental in constructing a conversational tone. Children’s books, on the other hand, with their prototypical address, “Dear child” (rather than “Dear reader”), seem to rely on, and create conversations between the implied author and/or narrator and the implied reader and/or narratee, in keeping with the tone that Chambers (1978) says is usual for children’s books, “the tone of a friendly adult storyteller” (5).

Children’s books entertain a specific relationship with their audience. They are often said to be the product of conversations: as Grenby (2009) reminds us, children’s authors of all time have indeed frequently insisted that the books that they published grew from private conversations with children they knew. This is famously the case of 19th-century authors such as Lewis Carroll (who improvised some episodes of Alice’s Adventures under Ground, which then served as a basis for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, while rowing a boat with Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell), J. M. Barrie (who entertained the Llewelyn Davies boys with tales of a boy who would not grow up and later published Peter Pan) and Kenneth Grahame (who told his son Alastair stories he subsequently developed for The Wind in the Willows). Many other children’s authors specify in the prefaces or dedications to their books that the stories they tell originated from conversations with children (for instance, Catherine Sinclair in Holiday House, Mary Molesworth in Four Winds Farm, or Rudyard Kipling in Just So Stories). As Grenby puts it (2006: 17), such assertions about the conversational geneses of children’s books endow child readers “with a flattering agency in the creation and conservation of stories,” and consequently may aim to incite child readers to actively respond to stories, and not merely receive them passively, becoming, in effect, participants in the conversation. Various strategies may be used to trigger responses: the narrator may address the child reader, or ask direct questions to him/her; the author may also leave what Iser (1972) and Chambers (1978) after him call “gaps” in order to “challenge the child reader to participate in making meaning of the book” (Chambers 10).

Conversing with children while elaborating stories may also alter the way children are depicted in children’s books, as well as the place and role of conversations with children in children’s books. For instance, as Gubar (2009) and Iché (2015) have shown, Alice is frequently talked to in the Alice books and is recurrently portrayed as an active collaborator in the meaning-making or even storytelling process. Though not explicitly endorsing the myth of the domestic origins of their books, some children’s authors, namely Dinah Craik, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Mary Louisa Molesworth and Edith Nesbit, who probably “had the chance to observe children’s development at close[…] range,” also decided to “help the young find their own voices” (Gubar 2009, 127). One way of giving pride of place to children is to show the role of children in shaping stories (see Rosing’s analysis of Ida’s role in Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Mrs. Overtheway’s Remembrances) or to employ child narrators (as in Ewing’s Six to Sixteen or in Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers). Are the voices of these child narrators and child characters markedly dissimilar from the voices of adult narrators and child characters as portrayed by adult narrators? How thematically and stylistically different are the conversations led by these child figures?

Rose (1984), Nodelman (1992) and many other scholars have highlighted though the power imbalance between adult authors and child readers, with adult authors constructing children as other in order to constrain them and their reactions. Gubar, though deconstructing this vision of children as disabled and non-agential (2013), argues in Artful Dodgers that this is, in effect, one of the lessons of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, in which a manipulative storyteller circumscribes Jim’s actions under the guise of celebrating his power. Iché (2015) similarly argues that the Alice books (and in particular The Nursery Alice) give the impression of eliciting the implied child reader’s participation in the conversational construction of the story, while actually controlling his or her every reaction. Child narrators, who are but the product of (more or less) hidden adults (see Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult 2008), may also prove to be cunning manipulators, who engage in mock-two-way-conversations with the narratee in order to shape his or her mind—in keeping with the didactic origins of children’s literature.

This issue will thus examine the question of how children are talked to, and consequently ascribed a specific place and role in the conversation. Attention can be paid to characters, whether they are children or child stand-ins, narratees, implied and real-life readers. Venues of inquiry for this issue include (but are not limited to):

  • the conversational geneses of 19th-century children’s books and their impact on the narrative structures and/or the role of the child reader
  • the role and place of conversations with children in 19th-century children’s books
  • the conversational relationship between child or adult narrators and child narratees
  • the narrative and stylistic strategies to enhance / restrain child agency
  • adult-led conversations and children’s responses
  • the issue of child narrators

Please send abstracts (no longer than 400 words) with a short bio-bibliographical notice (no longer than 50 words) by January 10, 2019, to Virginie Iché (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France): virginie.iche@univ-montp3.fr.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2019. Full articles will be due by June 20, 2019. Proposals in English or French will be considered.

Selective Bibliography

Beauvais, Clémentine. “What’s in “the Gap”? A Glance Down the Central Concept of Picturebook Theory.” Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics 6 (2015): 1-8.
Chambers, Aidan. “The Reader in the Book: Notes from Work in Progress.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 1978: 1-19.
Grenby, M. O. “The Origins of Children’s Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature. M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (eds.). Cambridge: CUP, 2009: 3-18.
Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2009.
—. “Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38.4 (Winter 2013): 450-457.
Iché, Virginie. L’esthétique du jeu dans les Alice de Lewis Carroll. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1974 [1972].
—. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
Knowles, Murray and Kirsten Malmjær. Language and Control in Children’s Literature. London: Routledge, 1996.
Nodelman, Perry. “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17 (1992): 29–35.
—. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 2008.
Prince, Gerald. “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.” Reader-Response Criticism. Jane P. Tompkins (ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980: 7-25.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Houndmills and London: Macmillan Press, 1994 [1984].
Rosing, Meghan. “‘Stories by Bits’: The Serial Family in Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Mrs. Overtheway’s Remembrances.” Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Victorian Studies 39.2 (2013): 147-162.
Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1996.
Wall, Barbara. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.
Watson, Victor. “The Possibilities of Children’s Fiction.” After Alice: Exploring Children’s Literature. Morag Styles, Eve Bearne and Victor Watson (eds.). London: Cassell, 1992.

CFP – Youngsters 2: On the Cultures of Children and Youth

CALL FOR PAPERS — Youngsters 2: On the Cultures of Children and Youth
The Association for Research in the Cultures of Young People
May 9-12, 2019
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

Deadline for paper, panel, and roundtable proposals: October 12, 2018

The Association for Research in the Cultures of Young People invites proposals for our second Youngsters conference in the field of children’s and youth studies. While scholars have been producing exciting work in the field for decades, that work has found itself positioned most often under the umbrella of other fields, including children’s literature, sociology, and education, media, or cultural studies. This conference seeks to draw together scholars from these diverse fields to showcase and discuss the astonishing breadth of interdisciplinary scholarship in children’s and youth studies.

We welcome approaches to the study of childhood and children’s and youth cultures from an array of disciplines, fields, and historical periods, including work deploying a wide range of methodologies and theoretical approaches. We strongly encourage dynamic and innovative proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, or other formats.

Themes and topics may include:

  • The Racialization of Childhood
  • Childhood, Borders & (Im)mobilities
  • The Geographies of Children and Youth
  • Indigenous Youth Media
  • Two-spirit, and non-binary/gender fluid/creative childhoods
  • Queer and trans childhood and 2SLGBTQIA+ youth cultures
  • Futurity and queer temporalities of childhood
  • Child’s Play
  • Youth activism
  • Youth Subcultures and Scenes
  • Cross-disciplinary methodologies of Child and Youth Studies
  • Archiving children and youth
  • Institutional childhoods
  • Sex-Education & the Child
  • Critical disability studies and youth studies
  • Remediated and Transmedia Childhoods
  • Ecologies of Youth
  • Queer parenting and families
  • Criminal Youth and Child Perpetrators
  • Animated Childhoods
  • Young people and sports history
  • Dance, theatre arts, and childhood cultures
  • Digital media and early childhood education
  • Youth Fan Cultures
  • The Limits and Possibilities of Children’s Rights
  • Childhood and Cultures of Risk
  • Baby Cultures
  • Parenting and surveillance
  • The Sartorial Child
  • Utopian/Dystopian Youth
  • The Child in Ecocriticism
  • Child Celebrities

Submission Guidelines

All proposals must be submitted by email to admin@arcyp.ca by 11:59pm PST on October 12, 2018.

Individual Submissions

Please use the following format for the subject line of your email: “Proposal Last Name First Name” (e.g. Proposal Woodson Jacqueline). Please assist us by attaching a single document in .DOC, or .DOCX format only with the following information in exactly the order listed below:

  • Paper Title
  • Name; institutional affiliation; position or title; degrees and granting institutions; email address; and phone number
  • Full abstract of the content and rationale of the paper: up to 300 words. (Presentation time for papers is 20 minutes maximum)
  • Short abstract (150 words max)
  • Brief (2-3 sentence) scholarly biography of presenter
  • Indicate any audiovisual needs or special accommodations

Special-interest panel or roundtable/workshop proposals

We are open to proposals for special interest panels, roundtables, workshops, and other alternative formats. Please use the following format for the subject line of your email: “Special Panel/Roundtable Last Name First Name” (e.g. Special Panel/Roundtable Rowling J.K.). Please assist us by attaching a single document in .DOC, or .DOCX format only with the following information in exactly the order listed below:

  • Panel or roundtable (or alternative format/workshop) Title
  • Name; institutional affiliation; position or title; degrees and granting institutions; email address; and phone number
  • 1-2 sentences format explanation (time allotment or creative format breakdown as needed)
  • Abstract for panel/roundtable/workshop (150 words max)
  • Brief (2-3 sentence) scholarly biography for each participant including the organizer
  • Indicate any audiovisual needs or special accommodations

Please be in touch with any questions about workshops, roundtables, or any proposed panels distinct from the three paper panel format. Contact: naomi.hamer@ryerson.ca

ARCYP would like to acknowledge that this conference will be hosted at Ryerson University in the City of Toronto. Toronto is in the “Dish With One Spoon” Territory. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabek and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share and protect the land in a spirit of peace, friendship and respect. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and many newcomers now live and work in the Dish and are obliged to honour these principles. As conference organizers and participants we will work to find ways to address and honour these principles.

CFP – REIYL Conference: Transatlantic Conversations in Research on Inclusive Youth Literature

The REIYL Conference: Transatlantic Conversations in Research on Inclusive Youth Literature
8-10 August 2019
Scottish Youth Theatre, Glasgow

Confirmed Keynotes: Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Pennsylvania, and Darren Chetty, University College of London

The idea for Researchers Exploring Inclusive Youth Literature (REIYL) began in January of 2018 when doctoral students Breanna McDaniel at the University of Cambridge and Josh Simpson at Strathclyde University began a conversation about justice and equity focused research on inclusive representation in children’s literature in the UK. From this came the idea of bringing together like-minded students and established academics dedicated to the study and analysis of current research, in the UK and abroad, to form a network through this first conference. We facilitate teaching and knowledge exchange with the hopes of building a more engaged and interconnected community, so that gains made in one space can reach other spaces in a timely and even manner. With these goals in mind, we are organising this conference to map the terrain of current research in our field.

We invite submissions for papers or presentations on inclusive youth literature publishing and scholarship with a particular focus on transatlantic conversations. While we are beginning with this focus, and are also open to critiques of this focus, we hope this will be the first of many conversations and collaborations. We seek abstracts for individual presentations and panels from graduate students and seasoned scholars, which both pose and respond to critical questions about:

  • Social media activism: #WeNeedDiverseBooks, #WeNeedDiverseScholars, #ReflectingRealities*
  • Youth literature texts and research in conversation across disciplines and borders
  • Youth literature outside of the “mainstream Western canon” and destabilizing the very concept of “mainstream” youth literature
  • Interdisciplinary engagement with youth literature and other forms of creative expression including theatre, filmmaking etc.
  • Intersections of identities in youth literature, i.e., (not exhaustive) indigeneity, race, gender, disability studies, immigration status, language, religion, sexuality, and class
  • Data collection on books featuring people and cultures that are typically marginalised and stereotyped
  • Critical engagement with foundational approaches to diversity in youth literature (for example, Bishop’s mirrors, windows, sliding glass doors)
  • New critical approaches to integrating critical race, disability, feminist, gender, religious, post-colonial, queer etc. theory in youth literature and the intersections of these theories

The proposed papers and panels should show how the contributor(s) will critically engage with the chosen topic. In other words, the proposal should do more than identify the current state of things (what might be called an “all-about” paper) and instead work toward a specific, arguable thesis and, where appropriate, include a specific case study.

We invite 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers or panel proposals to be submitted by 1 January 2019. Details on how to submit abstracts, as well as further information on the conference, will be made available on a designated website soon.

For questions and concerns, please contact Breanna McDaniel or Joshua Simpson at questions@REIYL.com.

*We are particularly interested in developing urgent, critical conversations around the hashtag, study and ensuing studies occurring in the wake of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education’s #ReflectingRealities report, which reveals that, of all the children’s books published in the UK in 2017, only 1% had a BAME main character and only 4% featured any BAME character(s) at all (2018, p. 5)

CFP – Special Issue of the Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights: Disability and Children’s Rights

The Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights (CJCR) invites interested contributors to submit articles to its special themed issue entitled “Disability and Children’s Rights: Reflecting on the CRC–30 Years and Beyond.” In marking the 30-year anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), this theme issue will focus on children with disabilities and human rights in Canada and across transnational borders. Globally, one in twenty children live with some significant disabilities–many of them a product of inadequate food, inaccessible heath care, clean water, and other basic needs that have impacts on their overall growth and well-being (UNICEF, 2013). Mass migration, enhanced border control, and aggressive policies that separate children from their parents in the United States, Australia, and across the European borders have constituted and increased children’s statelessness (Balint, 2016; Boyden & Hart, 2007; Pisani & Grech, 2017). These human conditions have deprived these children from their right to have rights (Arendt, 1968)–the rights of every individual to belong to their political communities.

To mark the 30-year anniversary of the CRC, this themed issue is intended to span what Pisani & Grech (2017) refer to as “critical intersectionalities.” Such an approach calls for critical interrogations of the intersections of, and tension among, the fields of human rights and children’s rights, disability studies, childhood/girlhood studies, inclusive education, migration studies, social work, history, and political science with regard to the rights of children with disabilities. This approach also calls for a critical perspective on disabled children’s intersectional childhoods, recognizing colonial, neo-colonial and neo-imperialist histories in shaping the situations of disabled children (Erevelles, 2011). Disability studies highlight the need to challenge what might be called ablenationalism, which, as disability studies scholars explain, is “the degree to which treating people with disabilities as an exception valorizes able-bodied norms of inclusion as the naturalized qualification of citizenship” by modern states (Snyder & Mitchell, 2010, p.113). This themed issue not only reclaims the rights of children having physical, psychological, cognitive or sensory impairments; it also recognizes the diversity of disabled childhoods, including female, trans and queer children, racialized children, refugees, children defined as orphans, in relation to structural conditions shaping the inequalities between countries and communities in the global North and South.

The challenges of children’s rights and disability, displayed at conceptual, institutional, and methodological levels, invite many questions:

  • How are the rights of children with disabilities conceptualized and by whom?
  • Who defines who is disabled and who is not?
  • What rights are seen as most essential and for whom?
  • What structural, political, economic, and cultural conditions prevent disabled children from enjoying their rights?
  • How do disabled children experience violence in the context of war, transnational migration, displacement, and statelessness?
  • How do gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation impact these experiences and constructions of the children in relationship to the state?
  • What are the tensions between state sovereignty and forms of violence that are yet to be tackled by children’s rights scholars and activists?
  • How can “ablenationalism” be theorized using a combined disability studies/ children’s rights lens?
  • What methodologies are being used to enhance the participation of these children?
  • How can disabled children’s views be engaged with more politically?

The guest editors invite critical reviews, empirical research studies especially those that privilege the agency of children, analysis of the meaning, implications, challenges, and impacts of the CRC and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) for disabled children in different local contexts. We encourage potential authors–academics, practitioners, policymakers, children’s rights and human rights activists and young people themselves — to think through, reflect on, and generate stimulating and challenging discussions about diverse forms of disabled children’s childhoods in relation to the conditions which shape and re-shape their intersectional identities.

Each manuscript submission will undergo a masked peer review process: double masked review of scholarly articles and single masked review for submissions to the open section.

The deadline for online submission of full manuscripts (up to 8,000 words plus references for scholarly articles) for the 2019 Issue is April 1, 2019.

Further inquiries to: Dr. Xuan Thuy Nguyen at xuanthuy.nguyen@carleton.ca or Dr. Claudia Mitchell at claudia.mitchell@mcgill.ca.

Call for Chapters – Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years

Call for Chapters – Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years
Deadline for Submissions: October 31, 2018
Editor: Jennifer Harrison, East Stroudsburg University, USA
Contact email: jharriso11@esu.edu

I am currently seeking chapter submissions for an edited volume celebrating the centenary in 2026 of A. A. Milne’s The World of Pooh. This collection is under contract with the University Press of Mississippi in conjunction with the ChLA, and will be included in the ChLA’s centennial series.

As classics from the “golden age” of children’s literature, Milne’s Pooh stories have received considerable attention from critics and fans over the years; however, less critical attention has been devoted to the continuing relevance of the Pooh phenomenon in contemporary children’s culture. As recent critics have discussed, the Pooh stories are complex and multifaceted, written in many different modes and employing a vast array of different narrative styles and techniques; they have also undergone transformation and adaptation into a plethora of related cultural artefacts.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of The World of Pooh, therefore, this volume will explore Pooh in light of cutting-edge children’s literature and culture theory, with a particular focus on how the Pooh stories have engaged critical theorists across the decades since its publication. Anticipated publication of this volume is for 2020 – the birthyear of Christopher Robin, and the year in which the “real” Winnie was adopted by London Zoo.

Submissions of an interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome, as are submissions which examine the relationship between the texts and modern adaptations and artefacts. High-priority areas for inclusion in the volume include:

  • Pooh across cultures and from multicultural perspectives
  • The marketing of the Pooh franchise
  • Postcolonial and ecocritical readings
  • Interdisciplinary readings (especially readings from outside the Arts)

However, this list is nowhere near exhaustive and I am happy to consider any submission which focuses on the Pooh stories and their role in modern children’s culture.

I hope to include chapters by authors from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of current studies in children’s literature and culture, as well as the diverse relevance of the Pooh stories in modern children’s culture. Please submit a 500-word chapter abstract and a biography of no more than 250 words by October 31, 2018, to: jharriso11@esu.edu. Full chapter drafts will be due by December 31, 2018.

All proposed abstracts will be given full consideration, and submission implies a commitment to publish in this volume if your work is selected for inclusion. All questions regarding this volume should be directed to: jharriso11@esu.edu.

CFP – Special Issue of South: Quaring Childhood

CFP: Quaring Childhood

south: a scholarly journal invites submissions for “Quaring Childhood,” a special issue guest edited by Katherine Henninger, to be published in Spring 2019. This issue brings several fields that have developed substantially in the past two decades—childhood studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and new southern studies—into dialogue.

Responding to what he sees as a willful blindness toward race, class, and ethnicity in queer theory, E. Patrick Johnson borrowed from the southern vernacular to advocate for “quare studies,” which accounts for tangible, material bodies as they are situated in local (racialized, religious, regional) epistemologies and practices of everyday life. Following Johnson, Michael Bibler suggests that any discursive analysis of southern queerness must go beyond gender and sexuality to include “a [quare] recognition of how race, ethnicity, class, and locality shape the materiality of relations and identities” between region and nation, within the South, and for readers (Keywords for Southern Studies 211).

“Quaring Childhood” will, broadly speaking, place the precepts of quare in conversation with theories and representations of southern childhood as a way to explore the multivalent association of the South with queerness; the materialities of that association as embodied in representations of raced and sexed child experience; the multiple forms in which such experiences are represented in southern literary, visual, or aural culture; and the implications for queer theory, childhood studies, and/or southern studies.

Scholarly, creative, and inventive essays are welcome. Essays that work within and transgress disciplinary, historical, or geographical boundaries are welcome. We encourage work that engages entanglement, immigration, and diaspora. We also welcome abstracts that do not necessarily engage Johnson but traffic in themes of quare childhood more broadly, perhaps engaging with (but not limited to) issues of national or regional formation; narratology or form (music, photography, graphic, digital, literary); temporality (history, apocalypse, Afrofuturism); or genre (science fiction, southern gothic, neo/slave narratives, advice manuals, graphic novels, humor, children’s or young adult literature).

Please submit completed essays (7,500 words maximum including notes and works cited) by November 1, 2018 to our online submissions manager. See our guidelines for submissions for our editorial preferences.

CFP – Special Issue of Mythlore: Mythopoeic Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Call for Papers: Mythopoeic Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Special Issue of Mythlore, Fall 2019
Guest Edited by Donna R. White

Draft Deadline: March 30, 2019
Final paper deadline: June 30, 2019

Mythlore, a journal dedicated to the genres of myth and fantasy (particularly the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis), invites article submissions for a special issue focused on children’s literature. Children’s fantasy has always been a part of mythopoeic literature, and Mythlore has occasionally published articles about myth-building children’s writers such as J.K. Rowling and Nancy Farmer; however, this special issue marks the first time we have focused specifically on mythopoeic literature for children and young adults.

As always, we welcome essays on The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit, but we also encourage articles that discuss the works of other mythopoeic writers for young readers. Classic works like Peter Pan and The Wind in the Willows have clear mythopoeic elements, as do modern fantasies by Philip Pullman, Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, and many others. Studies of lesser known writers like Carol Kendall are also welcome.

To get an idea of the range of topics covered in Mythlore, visit the online archive at https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/ and consult the electronic index, which can be downloaded free at http://www.mythsoc.org/press/mythlore-index-plus.htm.

Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.mythsoc.org/mythlore/mythlore-submissions.htm. Drafts and final papers should be submitted via https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/.

Send queries and questions to Donna R. White, dwhite@atu.edu.

CFP – Special Issue of ChLAQ: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature and Culture

Call for Papers
Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature and Culture
Sara Van den Bossche and Lydia Kokkola (Eds.)

Submissions are invited for articles using cognitive approaches to the study of children’s literature and other media for a special issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Cognitive approaches are inherently cross-disciplinary as they combine insights from fields such as the cognitive sciences, linguistics, and education with more traditional literary approaches such as narratology and reader response to form new types of knowledge about readers and viewers. Publications such as Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature (Nikolajeva 2014) and Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature (Seelinger Trites 2014) have proposed that cognitive approaches are particularly relevant for the study of children’s literature and culture since the latter are defined by the reader/viewer rather than the producer. Essay collections, such as Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Moruzi, Smith and Bullen [eds] 2017), attest to the broad range of topics that cognition-oriented analyses of children’s texts and cultural products can address.

The aim of the special issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly is to create a “state of the art” overview of the contribution cognitive approaches have to offer the field. We welcome contributions that highlight the multidisciplinary nature of this approach, and particularly encourage contributors to reflect on marginalization on the grounds of age, race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability etc. in relation to both literature and readers. We also welcome constructive critiques from scholars who remain skeptical towards cognitive approaches to children’s literature and culture.

Possible areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to, the following inquiries:

  • Are young readers really cognitively different from adult readers?
  • How are scripts and schemas deployed in children’s cultural products, for instance, to confirm or question national, racial, gendered or other stereotypes?
  • How do metaphors shape the way we think about certain topics?
  • What is the cognitive impact of the literary techniques such as alienation, focalization, and multiple narrators?
  • Do cognitive approaches risk essentializing “the child” or qualities such as ethnic identity?
  • How do children’s changing bodies and cognition impact on their understanding of literature and other media?
  • How are empathy and Theory of Mind (mind-reading) used as narrative strategies in texts for children?
  • How are children’s cultural products designed to exploit their cognitive development for educational, moral, or political gain?
  • In what way are emotions represented in children’s cultural products?
  • What is the value of empirical studies of young readers?

Manuscripts of articles (c.a. 5-6000 words, conform to MLA style) should be submitted to Sara Van den Bossche (S.VandenBossche@uvt.nl) and Lydia Kokkola (lydia.kokkola@ltu.se) by 31 October 2018 for peer review. Please send your submission by e-mail attachment in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format. The journal issue will be published in Volume 44 (2019). Good-quality submissions that are not included in the special issue can be considered for later issues of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.

CFP – LGBTQ Comics Reader: Critical Challenges, Future Directions

CFP: LGBTQ Comics Studies Reader (University of Mississippi Press)

Critical scholarship of comics, cartoons, and graphic narratives has been a burgeoning field in research and debate for at least the last twenty-five years. Amid such scholarly richness, LGBTQ comics criticism and scholarly attention to LGBTQ comics and cartoons is at least keeping pace with a field within which it is still negotiating its position. Until recently, LGBTQ comics lurked at the edges of the mainstream or hid in plain sight, existing in a “parallel universe,” published almost exclusively in gay newspapers and magazines, and available mostly in LGBTQ bookstores, even as all kinds of male and female homosociality, body and physique art, identity narrative, and varieties of the “outsider” appeared in a mainstream that was itself overcoming kinds of denigration (as unserious and trivial, or lurid and dangerous, etc.) familiar to LGBTQ experience. A new generation of LGBTQ readers is creating and analyzing comics, amalgamating, building on, and surpassing those suggestive tendencies. Recent scholarly comics criticism anthologies include separate chapters on LGBTQ comics. The moment is right for LGBTQ comics criticism to have a scholarly anthology of its own.

The LGBTQ Comics Studies Reader will honour LGBTQ work that emerged from and was influenced by the underground and alternative comix movement of the mid-1960s to become what is still an underrepresented sub-genre in comics scholarship: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) comics, their critical implications, their provocative current iterations, and their future directions. The aim of this LGBTQ Comics Studies Reader is to provide a platform for sustained, theoretically rigorous thinking about the various social, economic, historical, cultural, ethical and pedagogical issues at work in LGTBQ comics and cartoons, from around the world.

Chapter-length submissions may consider issues such as the following, but are not limited by these suggestions:

  • The history of LGBTQ comics and graphic novels, and LGBTQ comics scholarship/criticism;
  • Representations of LGBTQ experience in comics and graphic novels (coming out, romance/dating/heartbreak, health/illness, relationship building, gay/lesbian culture/society/community, celebration/pride, creativity, political action/activism, etc.);
  • Comics and graphic novels created by LGBTQ artists and writers for LGBTQ audiences; LGBTQ characters in non-LGBTQ comics and graphic novels;
  • Emerging and/or established trends and genres (superheroes, fantasy, memoir/autobiography, manga, Young Adult (YA), erotica, slash fiction, kink, etc.);
  • Theoretical approaches to LGBTQ comics (psychoanalysis, queer studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, sexuality studies, visual studies, media discourse studies, materialist studies, transnational and world literatures analysis, reader response approaches, etc.);
  • LGBTQ comics and cartoons within, across, in relation, and/or in resistance to various national/regional contexts/traditions (French BD; Mexico; Latin America; Japan, etc.), including cross-cultural reception and circulation of LGBTQ comics;
  • LGBTQ Children’s literature/culture and Childhood Studies;
  • LGBTQ “adult” literature/erotica/kink/sex comics;
  • Adaptations of LGBTQ comics and graphic novels (inter/transmediality, web comics), narratology and textual analysis across media; cross-cultural LGBTQ adaptations;
  • LGBTQ comics fandom (including conventions, cosplay, etc.);
  • Teaching with LGBTQ comics, cartoons and/or graphic novels (including, for example, health promotion, cultural literacy, sexual development, etc.); and
  • Representations of LGBTQ characters and/or experiences in other comics.

Abstracts should run about 250 words and are due by 1 November 2018. All submissions will be acknowledged. Final papers should be approximately 15-18 pages double-spaced, 12-point font, addressing both a scholarly and a more advanced general reader.

Contributors’ first drafts will be due by 1 March 2019, and final drafts by 1 September 2019 for a summer 2020 publication date.

Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce images in their article, and must pay permission costs. Permissions must be cleared before publication. Please send low resolution images (small jpegs), in separate attachments. If the article is accepted, high quality images will be required.

Queries may be directed to Professors Alison Halsall (ahalsall@yorku.ca) and Jonathan Warren (jwarren@yorku.ca).

CFP – Special Issue of Revista Belas Infiéis: Translation Studies and Children’s Literature

Call For Papers
Translation Studies and Children’s Literature

Editors:
Professor Álvaro Faleiros – University of São Paulo, Brazil
Professor Germana Henriques Pereira – University of Brasília, Brazil
Lia Araujo Miranda de Lima – Ph.D student; University of Brasília, Brazil

The consolidation of Translation Studies as a field of scholarly research, in the 1980s, is contemporary to the publishing of two pioneering works regarding children’s literature and translation: Gita Klingberg’s Children’s Fiction in the Hands of the Translators and Zohar Shavit’s Poetics of Children’s Literature, both from 1986. From then on, in Brazil and abroad, important events have taken place and numerous works have been dedicated to this subject, including monographs, theses, dissertations, articles, and books. Some of the themes that have arisen in the most recent events and publications are: (1) history of translation for children; (2) translating picture books and multimodality; (3) adaptations for children; (4) problems in translating cultural elements; (5) translation and morals; (6) the translator’s voice; (7) the child reader’s image; (8) the double addressee in translation of children’s literature, among others. Following up these advances, and aiming at cooperating with the consolidation of this field in Brazil, we invite researchers to present contributions in the form of articles, reviews, translations and interviews that discuss some of the above-mentioned topics, or others regarding translation and children’s literature.

Deadline: FEBRUARY 20, 2019

All contributions must be sent only through the system of Revista Belas Infiéis. For further information, please check the “Author Guidelines.”