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Rutherford examines two novels intended for an adolescent, female readership, Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park and The Devil's Own by Deborah Lisson and in which an anti-social female child, 'is domesticated and rendered safe by means of an initiation into romantic love' (3). She argues that in both narratives, the child becomes a 'woman' by attaining a complimentary (male) lover who makes her 'complete' and that 'by means of this process the child becomes colonized to the needs of the adult members of the family' (3). This follows the traditional paradigm of romantic fiction, whereby the ideological construction of 'the mother under patriarchy' is maintained and perpetuated by way of the female hero and her quest to find the male counterpart which will complete her (3). Rutherford suggests that rather than representing childhood, both novels fundamentally represent 'parental anxieties about the child's desire for autonomy' (3) and instead of a narrative concerned with female adolescent desire, the texts inhere 'adult anxieties about the potentially uncontollable female child' and as such, continue to support 'the domestication of female sexuality' (12).
Scutter canvasses over 20 Australian children's and young adult novels, some in more detail than others, with a view to examining their representation of the 'pastoral'. While drawing attention to the changing significance of how the pastoral is portrayed, Scutter points out that the fundamental paradigm of the pastoral continues to depend upon the dichotomy, or contrast between the city and country (23). Scutter believes that 'the future locus of the pastoral' lies in 'the continued exploration of what is perceived to be other in our lives' (36) and sees the genre as moving in two distinct directions: 'towards the otherness that is within the individual psyche' and 'towards a more expansive otherness', one which takes the pastoral out of the 'secret garden or hidden valley into the wider world' (36).
Mills discusses Gary Crew's Strange Objects and John Marsden's So Much to Tell You, in relation to the representation of women and the central images in both narratives of mutilation, blood and death. She argues that 'In each book a mutilated female body speaks mutely and powerfully about the betrayal of women and the failure of words to make the writer new' (41). For Mills, the mutilated bodies in both texts are positioned 'outside the order of nature' and while the narratives may 'speak of development in time towards a happy or catastrophic ending...the message burnt or hacked into female flesh is timeless' (41).
This article offers an overview of current and apparent trends in the teaching of children's literature in Australian tertiary institutions. The aim of the paper is to provoke discussion and provide a forum to explore and develop the study and teaching of children's literature. Rossiter and Tandy briefly outline some approaches to the study of children's literature and list the focus of units before detailing the subsets and genres which are generally emphasized within the units/curriculum. They conclude that a definite assessment is hard to make as topics are dispersed widely, however they surmise that 'the teaching of theory may be a way of demonstrating the intellectual credibility of studies in children's literature' (42).
