The child metaphor can carry positive and negative connotations. The positive connotation suggests hope, imagination, and an idealised nostalgia, whereas the negative one is often used to characterise marginalised or underprivileged groups (the colonised or disabled). This study investigates the use of the child metaphor in Sabine Kuegler’s Dschungelkind, which features as narrator a German child who grows up among the Fayu tribe in the Papuan jungle. The study shows that the text’s use of childhood metaphors to depict the Fayu defies categorisation as entirely positive or negative. From the narrator’s perspective, the metaphors she associates with the tribe are favourable. Analysis using Susanne Zantop’s concept of German colonial fantasy, however, shows that the narrative portrays the German family as “father” figures to the indigenous people (“children”) whom they educate. The Fayu are thus portrayed like other colonised societies, as children who need guiding to a civilised way of life.
The paper analyses Slovenian picturebooks intended for children up to ten years of age, representing the partisan movement. The analysis focuses on the construction of cultural memory and identity. Early partisan picturebooks drew on folklore texts by employing anonymous protagonists, the motifs of struggle against overwhelming enemies, as well as symbolic interactions with and assimilation into animals and vegetation. Their struggle symbolically positions the partisans in a liminal space between separation from a fascist-oppressed society and reintegration into a new, more just social order. Two intersecting discourses can be identified: commitment to anti-fascist resistance and pacifism. Children are sometimes depicted as child soldiers legitimising the partisan cause, but more often as witnesses of wartime suffering. In the 1960s, the theme of forgetting emerged, reflecting both the erosion of recognition of war victims and a constructive forgetting that facilitates reintegration into peacetime society.
This study examines the influence of state control mechanisms over publishing and translating children’s and young adult literature from 1945 to 1952. During this period, two geopolitical disruptive events occurred in former Yugoslavia: the establishment of the Communist regime following the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the Tito–Stalin split in 1948. Two sets of extra‑textual data are analysed to map the landscape of translations of children’s literature in Croatia in the relevant period and probe into the interplay of the dominant ideology, the particular geopolitical context, and literary transfers through translation in the field of children’s literature. One set comprises bibliographic data, and the other the reports and directives of the Commission for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) from Hrvatski državni arhiv (the Croatian State Archives) in Zagreb.
Children’s Literature is a flourishing academic discipline worldwide, and anextremely complex one. If we are going to explore it, we must understandhow it has developed, and what it has developed into. I would like to takeyou on a fanciful, synchronic, journey. Let us imagine an island – Children’sLiterature Land. It is densely forested with texts, and in the many clearingslive the tribes who all claim to be the true owners of the island. Not only dothey have their own dialects, but they can rarely agree about what is worthsaying about the books around them. They include the books-and-childrenpeople, the educationalists and the librarians, who spend their timegetting real books to real children. At the other end of the island, there areancient libraries and multi-dimensional archives, where lurk dust-coveredbibliographers, bibliophiles and rare-book people. They live close to theantiquarian booksellers, and the bookbinders, and have nothing to do withchildren. Then there are the historians, and the wild archivists, and thosemost extreme and addictive scholars who form the author-society tribes.Dominating the island are the publishers and the media tribes, with theirslaves, the authors – although a few are still running wild – and there arepossibly poets for children although nobody knows whether they actuallyexist. Or can. But where we must tread most carefully is in the Swamps ofAcademia, for the three main critical tribes – the reviewers, the theorists,and the inclusivists – still rampage freely there. The strangest tribes are thewandering literary tourists, the most benign, the independent booksellers,and the most harmless the Professors of Children’s Literature.
This paper aims to present children’s poetry as a complex phenomenon that eludes strict definitions and classifications, even if scholars attempt to define and classify it. Another objective is to review the Polish situation for an international audience. Children’s poetry appears as a significant element of every culture; as such, it constitutes a challenge for poets, translators, editors, critics, scholars, teachers, librarians… The article provides insight into Polish (and to some extent international) research. The place of children’s poetry in the corpus of poetry as a whole is considered and the role of illustrations is emphasised. The examples come mostly from Polish literature with several significant foreign works translated into Polish. The article consists of five main parts. Each of them has a question mark in the title which expresses my conviction that there are still more questions than answers in this field. And perhaps this is also the value of poetry – it defies academic formulas.
