This paper traces the presentation of these traditional minority groups in Finland and the emergence of literature incorporating the more recently arrived groups of immigrants in the history of Finnish language children’s literature. We contextualize the development of multicultural themes in children’s literature within the history of Finnish nation-building and the country’s struggles for independence. We conclude with a brief consideration of how these less than ideal books might, nevertheless, serve to promote pluralism.
Resisting the will to empathise with a focalised character is assumed to be difficult for young readers, yet empirical evidence on how they actually respond is limited. This paper combines recent insights gleaned from cognitive literary studies with a small-scale empirical study of thirty-five Swedish adolescents reading an Irish short story in order to investigate how teenagers respond to a text which is strongly focalised through a single character. The students were asked to rewrite the events in the story from another character’s point of view. Their texts were coded and analysed, as were follow-up interviews with six students. The findings indicate that Swedish-speaking teenage readers rarely have difficulty resisting focalisation, but they often struggle with irony.
Appearing first as a weekly serial in The Christian Herald, Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna was first published in book form in 1913. This popular story of an impoverished orphan girl who travels from America’s western frontier to live with her wealthy maternal Aunt Polly in the fictional east coast town of Beldingsville went through forty-seven printings in seven years and remains in print today in its original version, as well as in various translations and adaptations. The story’s enduring appeal lies in Pollyanna’s sunny personality and in her glad game, her playful attempt to accentuate the positive in every situation. In celebration of its centenary, this collection of thirteen original essays examines a wide variety of the novel and its sequel’s themes and concerns, as well as adaptations of the story in film, manga and translation. In this edited collection on Pollyanna, internationally respected and emerging scholars of children’s literature consider Porter’s work from modern critical perspectives. Contributors focus primarily on the novel itself but also examine Porter’s sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up, and the various film versions and translations of the novel. With backgrounds in children’s literature, cultural and film studies, philosophy, and religious studies, these scholars extend critical thinking about Porter’s work beyond the thematic readings that have dominated previous scholarship. In doing so, the authors approach the Pollyanna from theoretical perspectives that examine what happens when Pollyanna engages with the world—her community and the natural environment—around her, exposing the implicit philosophical, religious, and nationalist ideologies of the era in which Pollyanna was written. The final section is devoted to studies of adaptations of Porter’s protagonist.
The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture brings together essays that offer compelling analyses of children’s bodies as they read and are read, as they interact with literature and other cultural artifacts, and as they are constructed in literature and popular culture. The chapters examine the ideology behind the cultural constructions of the child’s body and the impact they have on society, and how the child’s body becomes a carrier of cultural ideology within the cultural imagination. They also consider the portrayal of children’s bodies in terms of the seeming dichotomies between healthy-vs-unhealthy bodies as well as able-bodied-vs-disabled, and examines flesh-and-blood bodies that engage with literary texts and other media. The contributors bring perspectives from anthropology, communication, education, literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, physical education, and religious studies. With wide and astute coverage of disparate literary and cultural texts, and lively scholarly discussions in the introductions to the collection and to each section, this book makes a long-needed contribution to discussions of the body and the child.
Invited presentation
A series of 14 lectures, undergraduate seminars, graduate seminars and public lectures given over the course of two weeks
This paper situates Margaret Engels’ collection of poems that form a novel, The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom (2008), in both the historical context it depicts (The various wars against Spain 1850-1899) and the emerging field of human-plant studies (HPS). Noting that Cuba’s indigenous population was destroyed by genocide and imported illnesses, the paper suggests that the island itself, as portrayed in Engels’ poetry, has colluded in human politics and played an active role in determining who can lay claim to Cuban nativity. Human-plant studies provide a rationale for suggesting that, in Engels’ The Surrender Tree, the flora of the island determines the progress of the Wars of Independence. This argument is extended to crystals, which also ‘grow’ but which are not deemed to be ‘living’, to suggest that, in The Surrender Tree, it is not the people who choose their nation and fight for its independence or to maintain Cuba’s connection to an empire of nations, but rather that the island itself chooses its people.
This paper draws on two forms of cognitive studies to examine how a minority language literature endeavours to form feelings of in-group belonging. The minority in focus are the Tornedalingar: Swedish nationals who live near the Torne River which marks the border with Finland. The official language of the Tornedalingar is “Meänkieli” which literally translates as “our language”. The first part of the paper draws on the work of Sara Ahmed to show that emotions are both embodied and culturally specific, the second half of the paper takes this argument a step further, drawing on studies of children’s poetry by Karen Coats and Debbie Pullinger to show how the rhythmical patterns of Meänkieli poetry entrain children into a culturally specific sense of belonging.
Since the New London group coined the term ‘New Literacies’ to describe the activities involved in making sense of on-line digital texts, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which this form of reading differs from traditional book reading. A broad array of studies demonstrate that reading print-on-paper texts are better for memory recall after reading (Mangen, Walgermo & Brønnick, 2013), for digesting complex information (Stoop, Kreutzer & Kircz, 2013a, 2013b), and for immersing oneself in a story (Mangen 2013b; Mangen & Kuiken 2014). Digital texts, on the other hand, are only superior for “quick information gathering, communication and navigation” (Stoop, Kreutzer & Kircz, 2013a, 2013b). The reasons for these differences are not yet clear, but the physical ways in which our bodies perform literate acts and how our brain processes materials provides a means by which to examine this phenomenon.
This paper begins by summarising existing research on how the brain responds to these different environments, and how the bodily movements that surround these acts of literacy differ. It will conclude with a proposal that changing how children use their bodies when they are reading might improve comprehension.
The ability to shift reading position has long been recognised as a means for politically minded readers – particularly those motivated by Marxist, feminist and/or race-related agendas – to read against the grain and uncover the implicit ideologies in the text. Little research has been conducted on how inexperienced and thus less sophisticated readers learn to make strategic decisions about how they will respond to the reading position offered by the text. Reading against the grain is a highly sophisticated reading practice which cannot be mastered successfully before the reader is able to simultaneously recognise the communicative practices of the author and reject the proffered viewpoint. This paper begins by examining how the novel Push by Sapphire (1996) encourages readers to try out more than one reading position, and in doing so enables her readers to gain the prerequisite skills for future political readings.
‘Home’ is often assumed to be a safe place, a place to which children can return after their adventures ‘Away’. For many gay and lesbian teens, both fictional and in real life, however, the space they share with their family of origin is not a place where they can feel ‘at home’. The heterosexual family home is often so hostile to queerly desiring teens that they are forced to leave in search of a place in search of a place where they can feel at home. The queer spaces the enter in their search are usually defined in terms of risk – public spaces, urban spaces, the bar and the street – unhomely spaces. In these temporary, in-between spaces, the queerly desiring teens in the novels examined in this paper form new family structures. Although all the novels end on moments of up-lift and hope for the future, the association of the queerly desiring youngster with risky spaces suggests that the queer teens are themselves unheimlich (uncanny).
Although plagiarism has a much longer history, many teachers of English have noticed that the amount of copying has increased alongside the use of the Internet. The paper begins with a review of the literature demonstrates that although much attention has been paid to undergraduates in academic environments, little attention has been paid to plagiarism in schools. Other studies indicate that plagiarism is more common when people are writing in their L2, and when working with online sources. Combined, the review suggests that studies of L2 plagiarism in schools are needed, particularly studies where pupils are working with English language online sources.The paper reports on a study in which pupils aged 14-17 in Swedish secondary schools were interviewed about the use of source texts in an English lesson. Their teachers and High School teachers were also interviewed. A phenomenological analysis of the interviews revealed a mismatch between the teachers’ instructions, the pupils’ understanding of the instructions and the teachers’ interpretation of copying behaviour. The pupils’ opinions were mostly based on the pedagogical reasons given by their teachers to explain why they should not copy other people’s work, rather than on ideas related to the ownership of ideas. The teachers primarily understood the activities in terms of cheating and laziness.