CP – Number 19 (2014)

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

This paper looks at some of the political, gender and educational implications of rewriting history in English-language children’s literature and the ways in which writers of fiction manipulate historical ‘facts’, in the context of the relatively small amount of historical knowledge that modern British children possess.

Keywords:

history, children’s literature, gender, education, fiction, politics.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0001 [0004337]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

This article aims to decipher the semiotic journey which is experienced by the fairy tale characters in the tradition of storytelling. From a semiotic perspective, every storytelling process transfers its own perception to the reader; in other words, every text creates its own reader. Storytelling in fairy tales reconfigures the moral history ideologically in order to maintain the so-called integrity and continuity of religious, cultural, politic and economic values. When the reader/the child is attracted into the text, then s/he accepts what is given by the narrator without any objection. The author will tackle aspects such as: how fairy tales serve as the cultural adaptors of transference, revision and duplication of moral histories through signs in nature for inhabiting the traditional patriarchal moral stance in the brains to shape a certain identity.

Keywords:

fairy tales, moral history, nature, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Little Red Cap”, “The Werewolf”, “The Queen Bee”, “The Three Animal Kings”.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0010 [0004328]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

This article explores adaptations of Shakespeare’s Henry V in the years leading up to World War I, and demonstrates how they articulated an unreservedly positive vision of Henry V, turning this play into an imaginative narrative resource offered to British children to arouse patriotism. By emphasizing the king’s heroism and the unity of the English (British?) people, retellings of Shakespeare’s Henry V provided a powerful inspiration for a national spirit which is represented as a fantasy to be shared with the original Elizabethan audience.

Keywords:

Henry V, adaptation, children’s literature, patriotism.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0009 [0004329]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

This article explores Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, as a contemporary play, which manages to be highly entertaining and at the same time educationally enriching. While not written for adolescents, they have flocked to see the play onstage. Among other topics, the author focuses on the different methods of teaching history of three teachers at a secondary school in the North of England in the 1980s. Dramatic conflict and humour derive from the way he pits against each other the view of history held by his teacher-protagonists, often throwing the students into a state of intellectual confusion. Which teacher are they to believe? Through a close reading of the play, it would appear that the spectator, including an adolescent spectator, is left free. He or she can choose to identify with one of the teachers and the view of history she or he is purporting, or simply watch the play, appreciating the challenging intellectual debate it sets forth.

Keywords:

history teaching, adolescents, Alan Bennett, World Wars.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0008 [0004330]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

A passionate engagement with the education of children pervades Dickens’s writing. In fiction, throughout his extended career as a journalist and in his daily correspondence he argued strenuously on their behalf: to take their educational needs seriously, to treat pupils with kindness, to provide intelligent and well-informed instruction, and, most importantly, to be “devilish sharp in what we do to children” (Letters 4: 653). This paper has two sections. It begins with a brief comment about the biographical context of that remark as it is refracted in Dickens’ fiction. The latter section shows Dickens’s opinions concerning the teaching of English history and the control of the curriculum that loses none of its urgency as Government ministers seek to implement notions of ‘British values’ that provoke fierce opposition from a range of opponents.

Keywords:

Dickens, history, schools, children, teachers, the past, monarchs.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0007 [0004331]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

The paper deals with particular ways of telling History to children. The analysis refers to Les arbres pleurent aussi (written by Irène Cohen-Janca and illustrated by Maurizio A.C. Quarello; 2009) and Memorial (having Gary Crew as author and Shaun Tan as illustrator; 1999). Conceived in different cultural contexts – European and Australian – these picture books are linked by specific expressive choices, regarding content items and formal solutions: in both books, the main characters are trees which become unexpected witnesses of History and frail guardians of Memory. Images are thus endowed with a semantic and narrative function: they amplify the strength of the story, without falling into pathos or rhetoric. These are stories that show the expressive dignity which visual language can take when it intersects with words in the definition of a text conceived as textum, as discursive fabric whose overall design depends both on verbal and iconic threads. The way these images ‘talk’ to the reader is metaphorical. They operate through figures which offer themselves as a field of exploration open to multiple possibilities of signification.

Keywords:

(teaching) History, memory, trees and stories, war and stories, Shaun Tan, Irène Cohen-Janca, Maurizio Quarello, picture book, textum.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0006 [0004332]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

In 1872, a few months after the end of the conflict, G. A. Henty, who had been a war correspondent, published The Young Franc-Tireurs and Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War. In the hundred or so historical novels he would subsequently write, the young reader will have occasion to witness similar historical events, seen through the eyes of a protagonist, a boy of his own age; this in many titles is explicit: With Clive in India (1884), With Wolfe in Canada (1887), With Moore at Corunna (1898), With Buller in Natal (1901). This paper will discuss the books Henty dedicated to the history of England in the Middle Ages: Beric the Briton (Romanization), The Dragon and the Raven (King Alfred and the Danes), Wulf the Saxon (the Norman Invasion) and half a dozen others. At school history was schematic, indeed boring; for the avid readers we then were, History, authentic History, was that described by Henty.

Keywords:

children’s literature, Middle Ages, G, A, Henty, Victorian novels.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0005 [0004333]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

My paper analyses how some modern and contemporary children and young adults’ picture books tell and portray the First World War, in particular trench warfare on the Western Front. In order to do this, I have chosen modern and contemporary picture books which not only describe the war to children, but they also do it through children’s eyes. My starting point is John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” and Linda Granfield’s In Flanders Fields: The Story of the Poem by John McCrae (1995), illustrated by Janet Wilson. Daily life in the trenches is also dealt with in Norman Jorgensen’s In Flanders Fields (illustrated by Brian Harrison-Lever) and Lynn Huggins-Cooper’ One Boy’s War (illustrated by Ian Benfold-Haywood), published, respectively, in 2002 and 2008.

Keywords:

children’s literature, young adults’ literature, picture books, World War I, the trenches, In Flanders Fields.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0004 [0004334]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

This paper analyses Captain Frederick Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest, published in 1847, the first British historical novel addressed to children. The aim is to highlight the coming of a new interest in children’s literature, that is the use of history both for didactic purposes and for entertaining a juvenile audience. Through a simple and linear language, Captain Marryat depicts the historical context of 1647 during the time of the English Civil War, showing his unexpected support for the Royalist cause. The form of the Robinsonade used by the author also recalls the texts of Daniel Defoe and Johann Wyss. This entertaining adventure story with its incisive dramatic effects is a turning point for children’s literature as far as the theme of history is concerned.

Keywords:

Captain Marryat, historical novel, children’s literature, Robinsonade, Royalist, Roundheads.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0003 [0004335]

Issue:

CP, Number 19

Section:

No. 19 (2014)  Editorial

Abstract:

Theodor Adorno’s statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric exemplifies the artists’ loss for representational paradigms after the horrors of World War II. This issue is especially relevant when it comes to children’s literature, and much scholarship has discussed whether conflicts and genocides should be suitable topics for the younger addressees. Published in 1971, Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an interesting case. In this article I argue that Kerr’s book is a semi-autobiographical story which raises interesting considerations concerning representation, memory, language and discourse. I explain how, by telling the story of a nine-year old asylum-seeker, Kerr’s novel reveals a dual tension between the need for those who survived the Shoah to elaborate trauma, and the role of testimonial literature in counterbalancing the risks of narratives of denial. I also suggest that, by portraying such events from a child’s perspective, the novel focuses on the way refugee children attempt at defining their own identity once they leave their homeland and must settle in a host country.

Keywords:

children’s literature, literature of war, Judith Kerr, representation of trauma, Shoah.

Code [ID]:

CP201419V00S01A0002 [0004336]