Cirrus@Austlit

'Many Australians know of E.W. Cole (1832–1918) from Cole's Funny Picture Book, first published in 1879 and followed by new editions, reissues and reprints into the 1990s. But the afterlife of Cole's career amounts to more than memories of childhood reading. Richard Broinowski's Under the Rainbow: The Life and Times of EW Cole takes an expansive view of Cole's life in a thorough and engaging biography which tells the story of Cole's success as a marketer and entrepreneur, and provides insights into the convictions that energised him. Prominent among these was his passionate rejection of the White Australia Policy, which found expression in pamphlets, public addresses and his three-month visit to Japan in 1903. Under the Rainbow is a strikingly handsome book with many judiciously-chosen visual images.'  (Introduction)

'Through a comparison of Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand texts published between 1840 and 1940, From Colonial to Modern develops a new history of colonial girlhoods revealing how girlhood in each of these emerging nations reflects a unique political, social, and cultural context.

'Print culture was central to the definition, and redefinition, of colonial girlhood during this period of rapid change. Models of girlhood are shared between settler colonies and contain many similar attitudes towards family, the natural world, education, employment, modernity, and race, yet, as the authors argue, these texts also reveal different attitudes that emerged out of distinct colonial experiences. Unlike the imperial model representing the British ideal, the transnational girl is an adaptation of British imperial femininity and holds, for example, a unique perception of Indigenous culture and imperialism. Drawing on fiction, girls’ magazines, and school magazine, the authors shine a light on neglected corners of the literary histories of these three nations and strengthen our knowledge of femininity in white settler colonies.'  (Publication summary)

'That each volume of the Oxford History of the Novel in English incorporates chapters on fiction for the young is itself a powerful comment on the emergence of children's literature as a component of the publishing industry and a field of scholarly research...' (Introduction)

"The ‘Ubby’s Underdogs’ books are the first graphic novels published by Magabala Books,representing an innovation which maintains the inventiveness characteristic of Magabala’s picture books. The trilogy’s treatment of the Underdogs’ exploits in multicultural Broome foregrounds the encounter between Aboriginal and Chinese cultural traditions. By drawing on a blend of cultural signifiers, the novels display the carnivalesque qualities described by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1984). In McKenna’s novels carnivalesque scenes, polyglot voices and intercultural dialogues give rise to a transformative vision of a community which resists monologic authoritarianism. Like graphic novels more generally, the Underdogs novels rely on visual, verbal and cultural stereotypes to enable rapid identification of characters of various ethnicities. They transform such stereotypical and exoticised figures through modes of representation and narrative which privilege the ‘culture of folk carnival humour’ (Bakhtin 1984, p. 4) to present negotiations between and across cultures in the setting of post-war Broome." (Introduction)

'From the Harry Potter series to urban fairy roman, the Middle Ages comprise a rich source of stories, symbols, characters and setting sin texts for the young. The Middle Ages in Children's Literature is the first thorough study of medievalism for the young - that is, post-medieval imaginings of the Middle Ages - in fiction, non-fiction and films.

In this book Clare Bradford shows that medievalism for the young both provides moments of enchantment and also serves as a distancing strategy which enables texts to address contentious and difficult topics. the Middle Ages in Children's Literature examines how changing conceptions of history have influenced the writing of historical fiction. Examining representations of disabilities, monstrous bodies, and animals, Bradford shows that medievalist texts use the medieval to reflect on modernity. The book ends with a chapter which explains why so many texts for the young treat the Middle Ages as a source of comedy.'

Source: Back cover.

Looking at a range of picture books involving the Middle Ages, this chapter considers their possibilities for 'personal and social capability', showing how fantasy addresses real-life questions by providing readers with critical distance which enables them to approach contentious or 'difficult' ideas. Because the Middle Ages constitutes a fantasy world to young readers, picture books set in medieval times readily address contemporary topics such as relations between people of different ethnicities. Through the use of humour, visual and verbal interaction and intertextual references, these picture books create light-hearted and engaging narratives with clear relevance to the lives of young readers.

'In 1989 Ursula Dubosarsky published her first book, Maisie and the Pinny Gig, illustrated by Roberta Landers. Since then, Dubosarsky’s novels, picture books, illustrated books and non-fiction texts have engaged diverse audiences ranging from very young children to older readers. Among her body of work, the novels The First Book of Samuel (1995), The Red Shoe (2006) and The Golden Day (2011) have attracted high praise, along with the non-fiction book The Word Spy (2008), illustrated by Tohby Riddle. The Red Shoe stands out for its evocation of Cold War Sydney, viewed from the perspective of the 21st century; for historical fiction never simply delivers the past but interprets it in the light of the values and cultural norms of its own time. The book’s title identifies the red shoe as its symbolic centre, but in fact the narrative is structured around multiple red shoes, the stories of which intermingle and glance off one another.' (Introduction)

This chapter provides an overview of ecocriticism, discussing the extent to which children's environmental texts mobilise concept and approaches from this field.

'Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of children's literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and children's books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose's rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children's literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children's texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.' (Source: Author's abstract)

'The Victorian Readers subset profiles one important group of texts for Australian children. But the Victorian Readers have much in common with the Tasmanian Readers, the Queensland Readers and the Adelaide Readers: they were developed and used in state and independent schools in the decades following Federation; and they share many of the same components, since favourite texts were frequently recycled. To read these collections and to ponder on the socialising agendas evident in the selection and arrangement of excerpts and in the ways in which texts were modified, is to understand how these school readers positioned children as Australian subjects.' - author's conclusion