Cirrus@Austlit

'Shaun Tan is an eminent figure of Australian children's literature in the twenty-first century. Tan's international success has been marked commercially by the proliferation of international editions and translations of his picture books and critically by the proliferation of awards, including an Academy Award for the animated short film adaptation of The Lost Thing, and in 2011 the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is given for sustained aesthetic and humanist achievement in children's literature. In 1959, a figurative expressionist group calling themselves The Antipodeans held an exhibition in Melbourne, the catalogue for which saw the first publication of "The Antipodean Manifesto". This section of the Manifesto was contributed by John Brack, and Brack's identity as a figurative expressionist and as an artist of adaptation mark his work in particular as significant for a full understanding of The Lost Thing.'

'The Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) administers the oldest national prize for children’s literature in Australia. Each year, the CBCA confers “Book of the Year” awards to literature for young people in five categories: Older Readers, Younger Readers, Early Childhood, Picture Books and Information Books. In recent years the Picture Book category has emerged as a highly visible space within which the CBCA can contest discourses of cultural marginalization which construct Australian (‘colonial’) literature as inferior or adjunct to the major Anglophone literary traditions, and children’s literature as lesser than its adult counterpart. The CBCA has moved from asserting its authority by withholding judgment in the award’s early years towards asserting expertise via overtly politicized selections in the twenty-first century. Reading across the CBCA’s selections of picture books allows for insights into wider trends in Australian children’s literature and culture, and suggests a conscious engagement with social as well as literary values on the part of the CBCA in the twenty-first century.'

"The trope of lostness [...] animates complex critical considerations of culture and subjectivity as in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) and Matt Ottley’s Requiem for a Beast: A Work for Image, Word and Music (2007), where the experience of lostness shapes the protagonists’ journeys, and is understood (like the books themselves) as applicable to children and adults." (Source: introduction)

This chapter explores adaptations of three recent Australian picture books for tablet technology, attending to the effects of interactivity and digital affordances on narrative coherence and meaning. In this chapter, Hateley examines three e-texts which seek to adapt the experience of a printed picture book to a digital environment but which do so with varying levels of exploitation of digital affordances. Reading e-book and app versions of recent picture books highlights the opportunities and constraints offered by such texts in contemporary reading cultures: inside the classroom and beyond.

'Shakespeare in Children's Literature looks at the genre of Shakespeare-for-children, considering both adaptations of his plays and children's novels in which he appears as a character. Drawing on feminist theory and sociology, Hateley demonstrates how Shakespeare for children utilises the ongoing cultural capital of "Shakespeare," and the pedagogical aspects of children's literature, to perpetuate anachronistic forms of identity and authority.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)