ABSTRACT

This book explores the meaning of nation or nationalism in children’s literature and how it constructs and represents different national experiences. The contributors discuss diverse aspects of children’s literature and film from interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches, ranging from the short story and novel to science fiction and fantasy from a range of locations including Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Norway, America, Italy, Great Britain, Iceland, Africa, Japan, South Korea, India, Sweden and Greece. The emergence of modern nation-states can be seen as coinciding with the historical rise of children’s literature, while stateless or diasporic nations have frequently formulated their national consciousness and experience through children’s literature, both instructing children as future citizens and highlighting how ideas of childhood inform the discourses of nation and citizenship. Because nation and childhood are so intimately connected, it is crucial for critics and scholars to shed light on how children’s literatures have constructed and represented historically different national experiences. At the same time, given the massive political and demographic changes in the world since the nineteenth century and the formation of nation states, it is also crucial to evaluate how the national has been challenged by changing national languages through globalization, international commerce, and the rise of English. This book discusses how the idea of childhood pervades the rhetoric of nation and citizenship, and how children and childhood are represented across the globe through literature and film.

chapter |8 pages

First Things

Introduction

part One|42 pages

The Child and the Nation

chapter One|12 pages

A New “Bend in the Road”

Navigating Nationhood through L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables

chapter Two|16 pages

Ski Tracks in the Wilderness

Nature and Nation in Norwegian Young Adult Books from the 1930s

chapter Three|12 pages

Wild Nature Revisited

Negotiations of the National Self-Imagination

part Two|60 pages

Subversive Tales

chapter Four|16 pages

Dangerous Children and Children in Danger

Reading American Comics under the Italian Fascist Régime

chapter Five|12 pages

The World Is a Confused Pink Sheep

Subversive Uses of Icelandic Themes in the Poetry of Þórarinn Eldjárn

chapter Seven|14 pages

“The Ghost Remembers Only What It Wants To”

Traumas of Girlhood as a Metonym for the Nation in the South Korean Whispering Corridors (Yeogo Goedam) Series

part Three|47 pages

Nations Before and Within

chapter Eight|12 pages

Nation as Home?

A New Quest from Taiwanese Aboriginal Literature

chapter Nine|14 pages

Nation-Building in Australia

The Pre-Federation Children's Novels of Ethel Turner

chapter Ten|20 pages

“Our Motherland”

Mapping an Identity in Bengali Children's Literature

part Four|47 pages

Empire, Globalization, and Cosmopolitan Consciousness

chapter Eleven|14 pages

Writing and Righting History

Henty's Nation

chapter Thirteen|14 pages

International Classic Characters and National Ideologies

Alice and Pinocchio in Greece

part Five|65 pages

Childhood as Nation Imagined

chapter Fifteen|11 pages

Set in Stone

Runes, Nation, Childhood

chapter Sixteen|12 pages

Post-Fordist Nation

The Economics of Childhood and the New Global Citizenship

chapter Seventeen|16 pages

“I Thought I Lived in a Country Where I Had Rights”

Conceptualising Child Citizenship in the Posthuman Era