Cirrus@Austlit

Pope introduces the focus for the next five issues of Papers, which examine the literature Australian children read in the nineteenth and early twentieth century from the position that children's stories are powerful tools of socialisation and novels in general are 'direct expressions of cultural consciousness' (3). The texts discussed are all located in Australia and described as frontier texts which draw on the three most common perceptions of Australia in relation to British Imperialism: Australia as the New World; Australia as alien and threatening; and early conservation texts which challenge 'the masculine narratives of action and success' (4)

Strain's article looks at the domestic novel in the late nineteenth century, which she argues, functioned to 'enculturate young readers' into adulthood 'through narratives of romance, successful enterprise and the rewards of virtue' (5). For Strain, the novel Annie Carr: A Tale of Both Hemispheres sets up a model of female virtue for young girls to follow which fundamentally fixes 'the female as other' and persuades the readers to '...accept the constructions of gender, race, class, family and Australia embodied in the text' (5). Strain defines the gender model in the text as one that supports the subjugation of women 'through espousing a 'natural distinction' between the sexes based on 'natural' qualitites of masculinity and femininity which subordinates the female through privileging the physically active public role accorded to the male' (16).

Mayers is interested in examining the symbiotic relationship between realism and fantasy, which she sees as a 'hybrid twinning of two constructs' rather than two discrete and opposing genres (18). Setting up a comparative reading between Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began and Carmody's Greylands, Mayers contends that Marsden's novel, 'conflates future and past tense' in ways that locate it in the realm of 'speculative fantasy' despite the narrative's dicourse which situates events as 'close to reality' (19). The result is a narrative which according to Mayers, 'negates any solid compatibilty between the two genres [fantasy / realism] and privileges their binary opposition' in ways that manipulate the reader to accept the homogonenized adolescent narrative voice as a reflection of 'real' adolescence experience in contemporary society (20-21). On the other hand, she reads Carmody's novel as one that deftly intergrates the two genres by blurring the boundaries between fantasy and realism in a narrative that 'shifts comfortably between incident and imagination' and enables readers to 'make connections between their experience of dreams and of reality' (21).

Pope discusses a selection of papers from the inaugural Australian Children's Literature Association for Research conference (ACLAR) held at the University of South Australia in April 1997. The formation of this conference entitled Old Neighbours, New Visions, is driven by 'the desire by those working in the discipline to promote children's literature as a field of research in order to gain recognition for the area in mainstream literary studies and provide a source of collegial support for researchers' (45). Pope briefly discusses a number of essays from the collection, all of which 'consider various representations of Australia as a nation, and of characters and implied readers as Australian subjects; and how those representations, past and present, are encoded in children's literature' (48).