Maria Nikolajeva
University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, Faculty Member
- Narrative Theory, Children's Literature, Children's and Young Adult Literature, Children's Literature & Culture, Literary Theory, Literary Criticism, and 22 moreFairytales, Swedish Literature, Fantasy Literature, Visual Literacy, Cognitive Literary Theory, Russian literature (Literature), Intermediality, Transmediation, Russian Children's Literature, Harry Potter studies, Picture Books, Children's reading, Scandinavian Literature, Education, Philosophy of Education, Literary translation, Translation Studies, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Evolutionary Literary Criticism, Embodied Cognition, Spatiality (Cultural geography), and Space and Place in Literatureedit
- I was born in Russia, and I moved to Sweden in 1981. Until 2008 I was a Professor of Comparative Literature at Sto... moreI was born in Russia, and I moved to Sweden in 1981.
Until 2008 I was a Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. Now I am a Professor and Chair at the University of Cambridge, UK, which is about the highest an academic can get.
To learn more about my professional career, read my CV on this page. Some highlights include a Fulbright Grant at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; a Fellowship at the International Youth Library in Munich and H. W. Donner Visiting Chair at Åbo Akademi. In 2006 I was also made Honorary Professor at the University of Worcester, UK. In 1993-97 I was President of the International Research Society for Children's Literature. However, the crown of my success is the International Brothers Grimm Award 2005 from the Osaka Institute for Children's Literature, given for a life-time achievement in children's literature research.
I have written and edited twenty scholarly books and about three hundred articles and reviews. I have also published two young adult novels, two picturebooks, a cookbook and a memoir. My current research project is on literary cognitivism.
I have been a visiting lecturer all over the world: Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia and South Africa.
I am married to Staffan Skott, who is a Swedish writer and journalist. We have five children and ten grandchildren.
My current hobbies are gardening, pottery, star gazing, papermaking and miniature making, and I also enjoy cooking and eating a good meal. Believe it or not, but I do read for pleasure sometimes. My favorite book is Winnie-the-Pooh. Recently, I have been re-reading classics, such as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Cervantes's Don Quixote and Melville's Moby-Dick. Visit my Shelfari site to learn more.
If you do not find this information sufficient, you can read about me in Something about the Author, volume 127 (Gale, 2002), pp. 161-165. edit
A collection of newly-commissioned essays tracing cutting-edge developments in children’s literature research Time has passed since ‘having a PhD in children’s literature’ was a funny joke in You’ve Got Mail. Children’s literature... more
A collection of newly-commissioned essays tracing cutting-edge developments in children’s literature research
Time has passed since ‘having a PhD in children’s literature’ was a funny joke in You’ve Got Mail. Children’s literature research is now one of the most dynamic fields of literary criticism and of education, and has a bright future ahead – as children’s writers and publishers invent yet more forms of literature for young people, and researchers find yet more sophisticated ways of exploring them. This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children’s literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children’s poetry, picturebooks and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature.
Key Features
Features the most recent directions in children's literature theory and criticism
Introduces the leading international scholars in the field as well as new emerging scholars
Offers a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, including a mixture of empirical and theoretical research, and analyses at the intersection of education and literary studies
Time has passed since ‘having a PhD in children’s literature’ was a funny joke in You’ve Got Mail. Children’s literature research is now one of the most dynamic fields of literary criticism and of education, and has a bright future ahead – as children’s writers and publishers invent yet more forms of literature for young people, and researchers find yet more sophisticated ways of exploring them. This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children’s literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children’s poetry, picturebooks and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature.
Key Features
Features the most recent directions in children's literature theory and criticism
Introduces the leading international scholars in the field as well as new emerging scholars
Offers a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, including a mixture of empirical and theoretical research, and analyses at the intersection of education and literary studies
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Third, revised edition of the highly successful handbook on children's literature from a narratological perspective. After a theoretical introduction, chapters include Plot, Theme, Setting, Character, Narration and Temporality. Textual... more
Third, revised edition of the highly successful handbook on children's literature from a narratological perspective. After a theoretical introduction, chapters include Plot, Theme, Setting, Character, Narration and Temporality. Textual analysis is based on a wide range of international titles.
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How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfere fictional experience into real life? Why do they care about fictional characters? How does fiction enhance young people's sense of selfhood? Supported by cognitive... more
How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfere fictional experience into real life? Why do they care about fictional characters? How does fiction enhance young people's sense of selfhood? Supported by cognitive psychology and brain research, this ground-breaking book is the first study of young readers' cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction. It explores how fiction stimulates perception, attention, imagination and other cognitive activity, and opens radically new ways of thinking about literature for young readers. Examining a wide range of texts for a young audience, from picturebooks to young adult novels, the combination of cognitive criticism and children’s literature theory also offers significant insights for literary studies beyond the scope of children’s fiction. An important milestone in cognitive criticism, the book provides convincing evidence that reading fiction is indispensable for young people’s intellectual, emotional and social maturation.
Research Interests: Children's Literature, Theory of Children's Literature as a Genre, Visual Literacy, Children's and Young Adult Literature, Philosophy of Literature, and 9 moreNarrative and Identity, Narrative Theory, Ethical Criticism, Cognitive Poetics, Picturebooks, Possible Worlds theory and Fictional worlds, Cognitive Criticism, Memory In Literature, and Emotions In Literature
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Research Interests: Illustrations, Children's Literature, Intermediality, Picture Books, Theory of Children's Literature as a Genre, and 8 moreLiterary Criticism, Children's Literature & Culture, Visual Literacy, Children's and Young Adult Literature, Visual Semiotics, Literary Theory, Narrative Theory, and Picturebooks
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Research Interests: Children's Literature, Theory of Children's Literature as a Genre, Literary Criticism, Children's Literature & Culture, Visual Literacy, and 6 moreChildren's and Young Adult Literature, Literary Theory, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Narrative Theory, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, and Translation
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"Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world,... more
"Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world, nationhood and identity, the mapping of sexual awakening onto postcolonial awareness, hybridity and trans-racial romance, transgressive sexuality, the sexually abused adolescent body, music as a code for identity formation, representations of adolescent emotion, and what neuroscience research tells us about young adult readers, writers, and young artists.
Throughout, the volume explores the ways writers configure their adolescent protagonists as awkward, alienated, rebellious and unhappy, so that the figure of the young adult becomes a symbol of wider political and societal concerns. Examining in depth significant contemporary novels, including those by Julia Alvarez, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce, Malorie Blackman and Meg Rosoff, among others, Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.
Reviews: 'Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture is a theoretically rich collection of essays that gathers together the most compelling and provocative issues currently at play in the study of adolescent literature. Perspectives including feminism, post-colonialism, cognitive linguistics, eco-poetics, genre study, and psychoanalysis work together to demonstrate both how complex adolescent literature is and how much the field has to contribute to the expansion of post-structural literary criticism. The essays are smart, innovative, and sophisticated, making the collection one of the most significant contributions yet to appear in the field.'
Roberta Seelinger Trites, Illinois State University, USA
This title is also available as an ebook, ISBN 978-1-4094-3989-9"
Throughout, the volume explores the ways writers configure their adolescent protagonists as awkward, alienated, rebellious and unhappy, so that the figure of the young adult becomes a symbol of wider political and societal concerns. Examining in depth significant contemporary novels, including those by Julia Alvarez, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce, Malorie Blackman and Meg Rosoff, among others, Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.
Reviews: 'Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture is a theoretically rich collection of essays that gathers together the most compelling and provocative issues currently at play in the study of adolescent literature. Perspectives including feminism, post-colonialism, cognitive linguistics, eco-poetics, genre study, and psychoanalysis work together to demonstrate both how complex adolescent literature is and how much the field has to contribute to the expansion of post-structural literary criticism. The essays are smart, innovative, and sophisticated, making the collection one of the most significant contributions yet to appear in the field.'
Roberta Seelinger Trites, Illinois State University, USA
This title is also available as an ebook, ISBN 978-1-4094-3989-9"
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The first part of title of the paper is a quotation from a young adult novel by Patrick Ness, More Than This (2013), in which the protagonist awakens, presumably after death, in a new place where he does not know the rules. Through... more
The first part of title of the paper is a quotation from a young adult novel by Patrick Ness, More Than This (2013), in which the protagonist awakens, presumably after death, in a new place where he does not know the rules. Through exploring the unfamiliar space, the character gradually comes to insights about his true identity. The paper, based on recent studies in spatiality and cognitive narratology, focuses on the ways fiction for young readers evokes the sense of place and space that supports identity formation. Through a close reading of selected passages from texts describing characters' perception of unfamiliar space, the paper argues that fiction offers readers embodied experience of space and therefore of space-related identity.
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Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature
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The twenty-first century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn, in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. While cultural theories have generated... more
The twenty-first century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn, in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. While cultural theories have generated fruitful approaches to children's fiction through the lenses of gender, class, race or sexual orientation, and while psychoanalytically oriented theories have explored ways of representing childhood as a projection of (adult) interiority, the physical existence of children, albeit in their fictional worlds, has been obscured by constructed social and psychological hierarchies. Recent directions of literary studies, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies and cognitive criticism, bring back scholars' attention to the physically of a child's body and the environments within which this body exists, functions and develops. This trend, however, does not simply take scholars of children's literature back to essentialism, but reflects the complexity, plurality and ambiguity of our understanding of childhood and its representation in fiction produced ams marketed for young audiences. This article examines some of the current trends in international children's literature research with a particular focus on materiality.
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In The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer.
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The 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for identifying the spot in the human brain responsible for spatial orientation. While not discovered yet, there is doubtless a mechanism in the brain that allows readers to orientate within... more
The 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for identifying the spot in the human brain responsible for spatial orientation. While not discovered yet, there is doubtless a mechanism in the brain that allows readers to orientate within fictional worlds. Such orientation is possible through life-to-text projection, when readers transfer their experience of real places onto fiction; and through text-to-life projection, when they learn how to navigate real worlds through reading experience. This article explores the affordances of fictional texts written and marketed for young readers, which enhance their understanding of fictionality and stimulate attention, imagination, memory, and other aspects of cognitive activity. The article brings together recent research within cultural geography, cognitive criticism and children's literature.
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The article, based on a crossdisciplinary framework of cultural geography and children's literature theory, discusses three children's novels set on islands: Kensuke's Kingdom (1999), by Michael Morpurgo, Gullstruck Island (2009), by... more
The article, based on a crossdisciplinary framework of cultural geography and children's literature theory, discusses three children's novels set on islands: Kensuke's Kingdom (1999), by Michael Morpurgo, Gullstruck Island (2009), by Frances Hardinge, and Midwinterblood (2011), by Marcus Sedgwick; all of which operate within ambiguous fictional worlds and use ambiguous narrative perspective. While the island topos and the presence of maps are prominent features in children's literature, the three texts illustrate different approaches to the employment and function of maps. In each text, the issues of belonging/not belonging, othering, time/space connections and interactions, mythical and contemporary world, nature/culture, displacement and spatial marginalisation are emphasised through the maps that acquire a substantially more prominent part of the narrative than in most conventional children's novels.
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The challenge of madness discourse targeting a young audience is to offer readers something that they can engage with cognitively and emotionally, with the limited cognitive-affective skills they possess, at the same time retaining the... more
The challenge of madness discourse targeting a young audience is to offer readers something that they can engage with cognitively and emotionally, with the limited cognitive-affective skills they possess, at the same time retaining the artistic rigour and narrative irony necessary to convey the mental state. Unlike general fiction, representing adolescent madness in a novel intended for adolescent readers has to take into account both the cognitive discrepancy between the (adult) author and the adolescent protagonist and the cognitive discrepancy between the (adult) author and the adolescent reader. Employing cognitive poetics as a theoretical framework, this essay explores representation of madness in two young adult novels, Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese (1977) and Sonya Hartnett's Surrender (2005). The purpose of the essay is not primarily to offer an analysis of these novels, but to use them as examples of how madness, against all odds, can be represented for an audience that not only lacks experience of it, but also lacks cognitive capacity to understand it.
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Fiction portraying disabled protagonists invites readers to use their imagination to consider a human condition beyond their own life experience; a condition so fundamentally different from their own that there are hardly any common... more
Fiction portraying disabled protagonists invites readers to use their imagination to consider a human condition beyond their own life experience; a condition so fundamentally different from their own that there are hardly any common points to identify or empathise with the characters. This chapter discusses how texts targeting young audiences may potentially enhance their cognitive and emotional literacy by activating and stimulating imagination, attention and memory. Advocates of cognitive literary theory that underpins this research claim that it is not merely a new direction of inquiry, but a completely new way of thinking about literature. The chapter demonstrates how, by using the cognitive toolkit, we can think in a new way about representation of disability, and by extension, about representation of other themes and issues in literature. There are significant commonalities between arts and medicine in their approaches to childhood, where the disciplines can successfully learn from each other. However, we cannot escape the fact that, unlike medicine's children, who have both bodies and minds, literary children are made entirely of words, socially and artistically constructed on the basis of adult writers' ideas about childhood, disability and subjectivity. We cannot see these constructed, fictional children, we cannot hear them, we cannot touch them, we cannot measure their height, we cannot take their temperature, we cannot test their blood pressure, and we cannot treat their illnesses. And yet we are able to engage with them in a most profound manner, sharing their joys and sorrows, hunger and pain. Philosophers of literature have always wondered how this is possible; why readers care about these non-existent people with their non-existent concerns and emotions; but it is only recently that neuroscience has provided some insights into this mystery. We now know that our cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction is not a romantic idea, but a fact that, although so far on a limited scale, can be measured and scientifically analysed. This chapter examines three recent young adult novels to illustrate the argument: The White Darkness, by Geraldine McCaughrean, She is Not Invisible, by Marcus Sedgwick, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon. Thematically, the three texts present a number of similar motifs, including adults' betrayal of young people's trust. All three portray a journey, one of the most common patterns in children's and young adult fiction. All three disabled protagonists are superheroes, each in their own way. Yet the novels are not about disability; and the focus of the chapter is on how texts, through various narrative devices, engage readers and often manipulate them into adopting certain cognitive, emotional and ideological positions. The primary purpose of the chapter is, therefore, not to offer an analysis of these novels, and not even analyse disability as represented in them, but use them as examples of a number of theoretical points at the
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Seemingly, emotions and ethics appear on radically different levels of a fictional narrative. However, within the emergence of cognitive criticism, interiority and ethics in fiction have been explicitly connected. Cognitive literary... more
Seemingly, emotions and ethics appear on radically different levels of a fictional narrative. However, within the emergence of cognitive criticism, interiority and ethics in fiction have been explicitly connected. Cognitive literary critics such as Patrick Hogan, Blakey Vermeule and Suzanne Keen point out that while emotions are predominantly egoistic, ethics implies developing emotion control in favour of altruism, and further, that fiction offers readers opportunities to contemplate ethical issues, empathy and social justice in a safe mode. Coming from a different theoretical perspective, philosopher Martha Nussbaum views emotions as ethical categories. One of the major findings of affective psychology is that strong emotions frequently override reason, which has been an ongoing philosophical debate for the past two thousand years. The conflict between emotions and reason, including a sense of duty, is the central theme of all world literature. Indeed, in children's and young adult fiction emotions are frequently pitched against ethical values. Yet since cognitive criticism is a relatively new area within children's literature research, few scholars have paid particular attention to the issue of cognitive-affective disparity between the adult author and the young reader. This chapter explores how children's and young adult fiction targets readers' cognitive and affective engagement by balancing emotions and ethics. The predominantly theoretical argument is illustrated will the Chaos Walking trilogy (2008-2010), by Patrick Ness.
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Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new stimulating approaches to literary texts and neuroscientists with new insights about human emotions, empathy and memory through evidence from... more
Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new stimulating approaches to literary texts and neuroscientists with new insights about human emotions, empathy and memory through evidence from fiction. What has so far been largely neglected is the implications of cognitive criticism for the study of literature targeting a young audience, whose theory of mind and empathic skills are not yet fully developed. The imbalance of the cognitive and affective competences of the sender and the receiver makes children's and young adult literature a unique study object. In addition, the representation of a young protagonist's consciousness and emerging empathy poses specific demands on the writer as well as the reader. Thus a cognitive approach to children's and young adult literature has to meet several challenges less relevant in general fiction. Firstly, how is a young fictional character's consciousness represented by an author whose cognitive and affective skills are ostensibly superior? Secondly, how do texts instruct their young readers to employ theory of mind in order to assess both the young protagonist's emotions and their understanding of other characters' emotions (higher-order mind-reading)? Thirdly, how can fiction support young people's development of their theory of mind? The paper will discuss these issues with a particular focus on memory and identity, expressed textually through tense and narrative perspective. While the frequent employment of a present-tense first-person narration in contemporary young adult fiction obviously attempts to convey a strong sense of here and now, it does not allow for the heteroglossia created by the separation between the narrating and the experiencing self, which in children's fiction is the foremost device to explore identity formation. Drawing on the work by Lisa Zunshine (2006) and Blackey Vermeule (2010), the predominantly theoretical argument is illustrated by a contemporary young adult novel, Slated (2012) by Teri Terry.
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As seen clearly from the avalanche of publications, picturebooks not only have become a legitimate object of academic pursuit, but have also generated a whole theoretical field. Paradoxically, while there are still heated debates... more
As seen clearly from the avalanche of publications, picturebooks not only have become a legitimate object of academic pursuit, but have also generated a whole theoretical field. Paradoxically, while there are still heated debates concerning the nature and scope of children's literature, the international picturebook scholars' community seems to be in agreement about the major postulates of picturebook theory, including the interdependence of word and image, materiality, and sequentiality. Picturebook theory has produced a wide range of concepts and terms for the analysis of the various aspects of pictirebooks. Seemingly, like with natural science in the end of the nineteenth century, “everything has been discovered”. Yet as we know, scientists were wrong, and subsequent research found more questions than answers. As picturebooks are rapidly entering the digital age, there is an urgent need to keep picturebook theory up to date. The multimodal nature of picturebooks, that so far has predominantly implied a combination of the verbal and the visual modes, is expanding to include auditory, tactile and perfomative dimensions
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Fairy tales are not normally associated with a rich internal life of the characters. Moreover, our affective engagement with fairy-tale actors is impeded by their clear-cut narrative roles and the unequivocal distinction between good and... more
Fairy tales are not normally associated with a rich internal life of the characters. Moreover, our affective engagement with fairy-tale actors is impeded by their clear-cut narrative roles and the unequivocal distinction between good and evil. However, the analytical tools provided by cognitive poetics, a field of inquiry at the crossroads of literary criticism and cognitive science, allow a more subtle discussion of readers' or listeners' emotional involvement. With the concepts of empathy and mind-reading, it is possible to discern the implicit interiority that explains why we engage with fairy-tale characters in the first place, and how we make inferences about their motivations and judge their ethical choices. The chapter explore the implications of cognitive poetics for fairy-tale studies, illustrating the argument with the Russian fairy tale "The Frog Princess".
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This chapter considers the representation of books and reading from the perspective of cognitive criticism, a direction of inquiry that investigates readers' cognitive and affective engagement with fictional texts, including such aspects... more
This chapter considers the representation of books and reading from the perspective of cognitive criticism, a direction of inquiry that investigates readers' cognitive and affective engagement with fictional texts, including such aspects as understanding of fictionality and literary conventions; extraction of factual, social, ethical and metaphysical knowledge; and empathy. Although cognitive literary scholarship is rapidly expanding (e.g. Zunshine 2006; Keen 2008; Vermeul 2010; Hogan 2011), there is little research focused on young readers, whose cognitive and emotional development is different from that of adults. My interest, however, is not primarily readers, whether real or implied, but the kinds of engagement that fictional texts offer through narrative structures, and the ways vicarious, second-degree experience of literature and reading can function in children's fiction. In this particular chapter I consider what kinds of cognitive and emotional responses are evoked by images of books, reading and literacy that we meet in texts targeting young audience. The inclusion of these representations is intentional, and they have educational as well as aesthetic purpose. Following cognitive criticism, the texts invite readers to engage with the representations, using their life experience, memories, and previous literary encounters. Among the aspects I examine are: omission (the conspicuous absence of books and reading in the majority of conventional children's literature); denigration (negative representation of reading); encouragement (positive representation of reading); conspiracy and cultural memory; metafiction and breaking of narrative frames; metatextuality (fictional characters' familiarity with other fictional texts); immersive and empathic identification; and high-order mind-reading (readers' understanding of fictional characters' thinking about other fictional characters).
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The chapter considers how various emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear) can be conveyed through the interaction of word and image in multimedial texts addressed to young readers. The theoretical framework employed in the chapter... more
The chapter considers how various emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear) can be conveyed through the interaction of word and image in multimedial texts addressed to young readers. The theoretical framework employed in the chapter develops ideas from cognitive literary theory adapting it to the specific conditions in which there is a significant difference between the sender's and the recipient's cognitive level. The concept of emotion ekphrasis is used to demonstrate the various ways of representing emotions, and a special attention will be paid to the issues of mind-reading, empathy, identification, projection, simulation, misattribution and other aspects of recipients' engagement. The predominantly theoretical argument is illustrated by a number of classic and contemporary picturebooks, including "Curious George", "Little Blue and Little Yellow", "The Red Tree" and "The Lost Thing"
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"The articles takes as its point of departure the recent cross-disciplinary field of scholarly inquiry, interchangeably called cognitive poetics, cognitive narratology and cognitive literary criticism, that utilises research in cognitive... more
"The articles takes as its point of departure the recent cross-disciplinary field of scholarly inquiry, interchangeably called cognitive poetics, cognitive narratology and cognitive literary criticism, that utilises research in cognitive science to inform studies of readers' cognitive and emotional engagement with literary texts. The main argument is that reading fiction provides an excellent training for young people in developing and practising empathy and theory of mind, that is, understanding of how other people feel and think. Both empathy and theory of mind are considered to be essential social skills. The article shows how fictional texts encourage readers to engage affectively with the characters, without losing the sense of fictionality or getting fully immersed in fiction. The argument is illustrated by the classical children's novel The Secret Garden, which is not normally recognised for its representation of interiority. Employing reading strategies from cognitive criticism allows a deeper investigation of the dimensions of fictional texts overlooked by previous research. It also offers practitioners a new approach to fiction that may prove fruitful in teaching emotional literacy.
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The paper takes as its point of departure cognitive criticism, the direction of inquiry that investigates readers' cognitive and affective engagement with literature, partly based on recent brain research. It argues that for young readers... more
The paper takes as its point of departure cognitive criticism, the direction of inquiry that investigates readers' cognitive and affective engagement with literature, partly based on recent brain research. It argues that for young readers who may not yet have developed full comprehension of fundamental moral issues and who have not attained the literary competence necessary to understand fictive characters' mental processes, representation of emotions in literature may produce a problem. Since guilt is a complex social emotion, involving a reconciliation of several contradictory goals, such representation demands well-developed empathy and advanced mind-reading skills, as well as factual knowledge of relevant legislation and understanding of moral implications of crime, guild and remorse. The paper examines these issues through a reading of two texts for young audience, Forbidden (2010), by Tabitha Suzuma, and His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), by Philip Pullman. The former is totally focused on guilt, in legal as well as moral sense, experienced by two siblings who enter an incestuous relationship. In the latter, guilt is less conspicuous, yet proves on closer consideration to be a major plot engine in the protagonist Lyra's physical and spiritual quest. While Suzuma's novel has an overt educational agenda, it is ambiguous in supporting young readers' ethical position towards the protagonists' guilt. In Pullman's trilogy, guilt becomes closely connected with the fundamental philosophical issues of determinism and free will. Although Pullman does not provide any clear-cut ethical guidance either, the use of emotion discourse, or emotion ekphrasis, is more subtle, not least because the genre allows a outward projection of emotions in the form of daemons. Lyra's guilt becomes a driving engine in her maturation process. The ultimate argument of the paper is that literature provides an excellent training field for young readers' developing of empathy skills, and the vicarious experience of guilt exposes readers to a wide range of ethical questions.
Research Interests: Education, Children's Literature, Theory of Children's Literature as a Genre, Literary Criticism, Children's Literature & Culture, and 8 moreChildren's and Young Adult Literature, Literary Theory, Affect/Emotion, Cognitive Poetics (as such), Philip Pullman, Adolescent literature, Cognitive Criticism, and Tabitha Suzuma
The articles considers how emotions can be conveyed through the interaction of word and image in picturebooks addressed to young readers. The theoretical framework employed in the article develops ideas from cognitive literary theory... more
The articles considers how emotions can be conveyed through the interaction of word and image in picturebooks addressed to young readers. The theoretical framework employed in the article develops ideas from cognitive literary theory adapting it to the specific conditions in which there is a significant difference between the sender's and the recipient's cognitive level. The concept of emotion ekphrasis is used to demonstrate the various ways of representing emotions, and a special attention is paid to the issues of mind-reading, empathy and other aspects of recipients' affective engagement. The theoretical argument is illustrated by picturebooks by Max Velthuijs, Shaun Tan, Anthony Browne, and Maurice Sendak.
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Have you ever considered how and why young readers engage emotionally with fictional characters? This article explores how teachers can encourage the development of empathy in young readers through picturebooks.
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This chapter will take a close look at Mrs Pepperpot stories through the lens of cognitive literary theory, a cross-disciplinary direction of inquiry that employs concepts from cognitive psychology to examine readers' cognitive and... more
This chapter will take a close look at Mrs Pepperpot stories through the lens of cognitive literary theory, a cross-disciplinary direction of inquiry that employs concepts from cognitive psychology to examine readers' cognitive and affective engagement with fiction. While cognitive criticism has achieved significant results in investigating fictional texts with analytical tools such as empathy and theory of mind, little attention has been paid to the consequences of this field for the study of literature for young readers whose empathic skills are not yet fully developed. Theory of mind, that is, ability to understand other people's throughts and feelings, is an important social skill, and fiction can support its emergence and development in young readers. The stories of Old Mrs Pepperpot would not be immediately recognised as focusing on interiority; rather they would fit into the common category of children's texts as plot-oriented. However, with the cognitive approach, these stories reveal dimensions that cannot be reached through other literary theories. It has repeatedly been claimed that children's literature is employed as a socialisation vehicle; yet there are no reliable studies on the potential of children's fiction to convey factual, social and interpersonal knowledge; neither has it been contemplated on exactly how texts compel the young reader to understand their explicit and implicit moral and ethical values. The unique feature of children's literature is the power imbalance between the author (usually an adult) and the child reader, which also makes children's fiction substantially more intentional than general fiction. Although transmission of knowledge is not necessarily the primary purpose of fiction, children's authors can utilise literary texts to enhance their understanding of their physical, social, emotional and ethical environment. In my discussion of Mrs Pepperpot stories I will examine what kind of knowledge about the physical world, society, human beings and ethics these stories offer to their readers, who may have limited life experience as well as experience of previous reading.
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Gender Studies, Teacher Education, New Historicism, Genre studies, and 15 moreChildren's Literature, Theory of Children's Literature as a Genre, Literary Criticism, Children's Literature & Culture, Gender and Sexuality, Phenomenology, Pedagogy, Cultural Materialism, Curriculum Development, Cognitive Poetics (as such), New Economic Criticism, Cognitive Criticism, C S Lewis, Early Modern English Literature and Drama, and History of the Theater
ABSTRACT The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attracting growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new... more
ABSTRACT The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attracting growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implications for a research agenda. The new configuration is created through an analysis of place-related identities in narrative theory, texts and literacy processes. The emerging research agenda focuses on the ways children perceive and ...
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Información del artículo Winner of the author award: Ana María Machado: The power of language.
In its short life, the ALMA award, established in memory of the great Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, has made a huge impact, honouring authors, illustrators and a major reading promotion. Maria Nikolajeva here considers the criteria for... more
In its short life, the ALMA award, established in memory of the great Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, has made a huge impact, honouring authors, illustrators and a major reading promotion. Maria Nikolajeva here considers the criteria for the awards and the questions the jury has to battle with. She also overviews some of the winners' books
Abstract This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of... more
Abstract This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children's place-related identities through their engagement with, and creation of, texts. This paper will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two classes in primary schools in Eastern ...
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The spatial turn has been marked by increasing interest in conceptions of space and place in diverse areas of research. However, the important links between place and identity have received less attention, particularly in educational... more
The spatial turn has been marked by increasing interest in conceptions of space and place in diverse areas of research. However, the important links between place and identity have received less attention, particularly in educational research. This paper reports an 18-month research project that aimed to develop a theory of place-related identity through the textual transactions of reading and writing. The research was an in-depth qualitative study in two phases: the first phase involved the development of an interdisciplinary theory of place-related identity, which was ‘tested’ in a second empirical phase. Two contrasting primary school classes were the site for the research that included the development of a unit of work, inspired by the book My place, as a vehicle for exploring place-related identity. The data were interviews, classroom observations and outcomes from pupils’ work. The construct of transcultural meanings, established from the analytic categories of localising identity, othering identity and identity as belonging, was identified as a defining phenomenon of place-related identity. The conclusions offer reflections on the development of our initial theory as a result of the empirical work, and the implications for practice and future research.
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On re-reading The Witch’s Boy (1995) by Michael Gruber, you notice how skilfully the obvious fairy-tale intertexts are hidden, foreshadowed and successively revealed in the text, causing both a joy of recognition and an irritation of... more
On re-reading The Witch’s Boy (1995) by Michael Gruber, you notice how skilfully the obvious fairy-tale intertexts are hidden, foreshadowed and successively revealed in the text, causing both a joy of recognition and an irritation of one’s failure to anticipate the apparent. While intertextuality is frequently regarded as enhancing the artistic qualities of a literary text, it is at the same time a means of manipulating readers toward specific interpretations. The eclecticism of the novel is characteristic of postmodern writing. Some intertexts are explicit, some hinted at, yet others demanding deeper acquaintance with intertexts. The reader is expected to recognize the rich layers of famous fairy tales, but these are in the novel fractured, deconstructed and reassembled in a fascinating as well as a disturbing manner. There is, further, an overarching structure that both confirms and subverts the familiar fairy-tale pattern. With the help of the various intertextual and reader-response theories, the essay will explore how the novel invites readers to participate in a game of (mis)recognition and (mis)interpretation.
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The materiality as a characteristic feature of the picturebook does not only imply its existence as an artefact, but also its ability to represent a material world through images in a more direct and immediate manner than verbal texts.... more
The materiality as a characteristic feature of the picturebook does not only imply its existence as an artefact, but also its ability to represent a material world through images in a more direct and immediate manner than verbal texts. This paper considers the representation of beds in picturebooks from two discreet yet closely connected perspectives: semiotics and cultural geography. The concept of place and space in a broad sense is central for the argument. Beds constitute a young child’s closest surroundings and are frequently the only private space available. At the same time, beds are areas of power struggle between child and adult, as well as a border between self and the world, private and public. The paper discusses, firstly, the physical aspects of the represented objects: their form, size, position on the page and spatial relationship to other objects and characters, which all create a sense of space. Secondly, it probes into the function of the objects, such as their cultural connotations, significance for the narrative and metaphorical implications.
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The title of my essay alludes to one of the seminal works of New Criticism, “The Intentional Fallacy” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). Its main point is that real, flesh-and-blood authors and their presumable intentions are insignificant in... more
The title of my essay alludes to one of the seminal works of New Criticism, “The Intentional Fallacy” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). Its main point is that real, flesh-and-blood authors and their presumable intentions are insignificant in considering literary works. Instead, as we know, New Criticism focused wholly on the literary work itself, speaking about the text’s intentions and also introducing the concept of the implied author, the authorial agency within the text, expressing the text’s, rather than the real author’s ideology (see e.g. Selden 1997).
In children’s literature research, the intentional fallacy has been still more tenacious than in general criticism, because of the universal belief in the children’s author’s urge to instruct and educate the reader. Still today we currently encounter statements about children’s authors as mouthpieces for socialization; and we can also come across questions, put by schoolteachers as well as empirical researchers: “What did the author want to say with this work?” The question is in fact illegitimate, since it presupposes that the author indeed wanted to say something, which, from the New Critical point of view, is of no consequence.
I would like, however, to draw our attention to yet another common fallacy, which, perhaps more than any other critical stance, reveals a striking inconsistency between children’s literature research and literacy education, demonstrating once again the notorious “literary-didactic split”. It is habitual in teaching children’s literature to children to encourage them to “identify” themselves with one of the literary characters, normally with the protagonist and/or the focalizing character, that is, adopt a fixed subject position imposed by the text. In contrast, contemporary scholarly studies, especially those leaning on narratology and reception theory, emphasize the importance of the readers’ ability to liberate themselves from the protagonists’ subjectivity in order to evaluate them properly (see Stephens 1992, 47-83). This ability is an essential part of reading competence, which facilitates sophisticated readers’ ideological and aesthetic understanding of the text.
In children’s literature research, the intentional fallacy has been still more tenacious than in general criticism, because of the universal belief in the children’s author’s urge to instruct and educate the reader. Still today we currently encounter statements about children’s authors as mouthpieces for socialization; and we can also come across questions, put by schoolteachers as well as empirical researchers: “What did the author want to say with this work?” The question is in fact illegitimate, since it presupposes that the author indeed wanted to say something, which, from the New Critical point of view, is of no consequence.
I would like, however, to draw our attention to yet another common fallacy, which, perhaps more than any other critical stance, reveals a striking inconsistency between children’s literature research and literacy education, demonstrating once again the notorious “literary-didactic split”. It is habitual in teaching children’s literature to children to encourage them to “identify” themselves with one of the literary characters, normally with the protagonist and/or the focalizing character, that is, adopt a fixed subject position imposed by the text. In contrast, contemporary scholarly studies, especially those leaning on narratology and reception theory, emphasize the importance of the readers’ ability to liberate themselves from the protagonists’ subjectivity in order to evaluate them properly (see Stephens 1992, 47-83). This ability is an essential part of reading competence, which facilitates sophisticated readers’ ideological and aesthetic understanding of the text.
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The recent publication of David Benedictus’s Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (2009), the controversial sequel to A.A. Milne’s famous children’s classic Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), has renewed the ongoing critical debate on one of the... more
The recent publication of David Benedictus’s Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (2009), the controversial sequel to A.A. Milne’s famous children’s classic Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), has renewed the ongoing critical debate on one of the prominent features of children’s literature: its obsession with sequels. Apart from commercial reasons, it has been frequently claimed that children enjoy repetition and predictability. This chapter discusses the artistic premises for series, sequels, and prequels, illustrating the argument with a number of contemporary “quels” to classic children’s novels such as Anne of Green Gables, The Wind in the Willows, and Peter Pan.
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Åse Marie Ommundsen's PdD thesis Literary transgressions: When boundaries between children's and adult literature are blurred contributes to the explosive recent development of picturebook studies and is one of the first of its kind in... more
Åse Marie Ommundsen's PdD thesis Literary transgressions: When boundaries between children's and adult literature are blurred contributes to the explosive recent development of picturebook studies and is one of the first of its kind in Norway. Ommundsen argues that contemporary Norwegian children's literature, particularly picturebooks, has grown more complex and norm-breaking, approaching the marginal zone of “literature for all ages”. The thesis is a challenging piece of scholarship, with a broad scope of material and an interesting eclectic theoretical platform. It shows that with the current level of sophistication of children's books it is no longer fruitful to distinguish between children's and adult literature on the grounds of complexity, but only through their implied audience. Although some theoretical and methodological stances of the thesis can be questioned, it is in the first place valuable through generating considerable new knowledge and making connections between the previously unrelated facts.
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This semiotically informed article problematizes the concept of literacy as an aesthetic activity rather than reading skills and offers strategies for assessing young readers’ understanding of fictional texts. Although not based on... more
This semiotically informed article problematizes the concept of literacy as an aesthetic activity rather than reading skills and offers strategies for assessing young readers’ understanding of fictional texts. Although not based on empirical research, the essay refers to and theorizes from extensive field studies of children’s responses to literature. The concept of the implied reader, derived from reception theories, is employed to explore the skills demanded in order to make meaning from fictional texts. The essay presents a number of interpretative codes, including anticipatory, narrative, hermeneutic, semic, symbolic and referential. The implication of these codes is investigated in their relevance for texts specifically addressed to young readers. The article argues that literary competence is an essential component of a child’s intellectual growth that should be trained and encouraged, and that the acknowledgement of this competence it is of overall importance for educational research as well as for practitioners.
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Abstract The paper discusses the children's novel Gaffer Samson's Luck (1984), by Jill Paton Walsh, from three different perspectives; those of a cultural geographer, a literary scholar and an English teacher. It... more
Abstract The paper discusses the children's novel Gaffer Samson's Luck (1984), by Jill Paton Walsh, from three different perspectives; those of a cultural geographer, a literary scholar and an English teacher. It is part of a larger research project on children's perception of their place-related identities through reading and writing. The novel is used as a case study to develop a multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon theories of literature and reading, and a conceptualisation of space in cultural geography. Employing ideas from different ...
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The article discusses the two novels by George MacDonald, Phantastes and Lilith, based on the definition of esoterism. It investigates the construction of esoteric spaces and the inadequacy of language to convey the esoteric experience,... more
The article discusses the two novels by George MacDonald, Phantastes and Lilith, based on the definition of esoterism. It investigates the construction of esoteric spaces and the inadequacy of language to convey the esoteric experience, as felt by the protagonists.
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Children's literature as a side effect of evolution Evolutionary, or Neo-Darwinist criticism is a direction of inquiry that explores the role of arts for survival and natural selection. As a theory based on biology and biopsychology,... more
Children's literature as a side effect of evolution Evolutionary, or Neo-Darwinist criticism is a direction of inquiry that explores the role of arts for survival and natural selection. As a theory based on biology and biopsychology, evolutionary criticism is extremely hostile toward most twentieth-century literary studies, in particular New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism and various directions of critical theory, that have been widely employed in children's literature scholarship. Instead, it claims that any study of literature and arts must take biological aspects of human existence into consideration. In this stance, evolutionary criticism constitutes a similar turn as ecocriticism, material studies, cognitive and corporeal narratology – interdisciplinary fields that bring firm scientific foundation into humanities. Evolutionary criticism draws our attention to the significance of natural and imagined orders in the history of humanity. Imagined orders, as opposed to natural orders, include
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Childness Revisited. University of York, May 5, 2017
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Frames of the body. Spaces and places in Children’s Literature, international symposium. University of Padua, Italy, April 20, 2017
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Empathy Lab Pioneer Schools Day, March 9, 2017
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Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepperpot; or Heidi, fresh from her Swiss mountainside – these foreign stars of children’s literature were popular fixtures on British bookshelves... more
Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepperpot; or Heidi, fresh from her Swiss mountainside – these foreign stars of children’s literature were popular fixtures on British bookshelves at the end of the last century. So where are the new international children’s stories for tonight’s bedtime reading? (Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, September 4, 2016).
The ongoing debate about the paucity of translated books in the UK encourages publishers and book promoters to widen British children's horizons by exposing them to literature from foreign cultures. But if publishers are looking for a new Pippi they are looking in the wrong place. Contemporary Swedish children's and young adult literature has gone a long way from the idyllic Småland of Astrid Lindgren's works. They reflect the harsh reality of today's young Swedes, the anxiety and frustration of the twenty-first century.
This talk explores some recent Swedish young adult novels, discussing them against the common British cultural image of Nordic children's literature illustrated by Pippi, the Moomins and Mrs Pepperpot.
The ongoing debate about the paucity of translated books in the UK encourages publishers and book promoters to widen British children's horizons by exposing them to literature from foreign cultures. But if publishers are looking for a new Pippi they are looking in the wrong place. Contemporary Swedish children's and young adult literature has gone a long way from the idyllic Småland of Astrid Lindgren's works. They reflect the harsh reality of today's young Swedes, the anxiety and frustration of the twenty-first century.
This talk explores some recent Swedish young adult novels, discussing them against the common British cultural image of Nordic children's literature illustrated by Pippi, the Moomins and Mrs Pepperpot.
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200 Years of The Nutcracker. Anglia Ruskin University. December 2, 2016
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Centre for Intermediality and Multimodality, Linnaeus University, Sweden. January 24, 2017
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Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepperpot; or Heidi, fresh from her Swiss mountainside – these foreign stars of children’s literature were popular fixtures on British bookshelves... more
Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepperpot; or Heidi, fresh from her Swiss mountainside – these foreign stars of children’s literature were popular fixtures on British bookshelves at the end of the last century. So where are the new international children’s stories for tonight’s bedtime reading? (Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, September 4, 2016).
The ongoing debate about the paucity of translated books in the UK encourages publishers and book promoters to widen British children's horizons by exposing them to literature from foreign cultures. But if publishers are looking for a new Pippi they are looking in the wrong place. Contemporary Swedish children's and young adult literature has gone a long way from the idyllic Småland of Astrid Lindgren's works. They reflect the harsh reality of today's young Swedes, the anxiety and frustration of the twenty-first century.
This talk will explore some recent Swedish young adult novels, discussing them against the common British cultural image of Nordic children's literature illustrated by Pippi, the Moomins and Mrs Pepperpot.
The ongoing debate about the paucity of translated books in the UK encourages publishers and book promoters to widen British children's horizons by exposing them to literature from foreign cultures. But if publishers are looking for a new Pippi they are looking in the wrong place. Contemporary Swedish children's and young adult literature has gone a long way from the idyllic Småland of Astrid Lindgren's works. They reflect the harsh reality of today's young Swedes, the anxiety and frustration of the twenty-first century.
This talk will explore some recent Swedish young adult novels, discussing them against the common British cultural image of Nordic children's literature illustrated by Pippi, the Moomins and Mrs Pepperpot.
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This talk sets the emergent digital literature in a broader evolutionary context, beginning with the the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago and further to the invention of writing and the invention of printing. Building on Maryanne... more
This talk sets the emergent digital literature in a broader evolutionary context, beginning with the the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago and further to the invention of writing and the invention of printing. Building on Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, the talk explores the much-discussed difference in engagement with printed and digital literature from a posthuman perspective. It suggests that the implications of the new medium goes beyond multi-literacy skills but affects storytelling as such, and that the (im)balance of cerebral hemispheres is gradually changing toward the dominance of the right hemisphere. As a result, the postmillenial generation's brains are going through a major cognitive change that both reflects and adjusts to digital storytelling, including its aesthetic, social and neurological aspects.
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Fiction portraying disabled protagonists invites readers to use their imagination to consider a human condition beyond their own life experience; a condition so fundamentally different from their own that there are hardly any common... more
Fiction portraying disabled protagonists invites readers to use their imagination to consider a human condition beyond their own life experience; a condition so fundamentally different from their own that there are hardly any common points to identify or empathise with the characters. This talk will discuss how texts targeting young audiences may potentially enhance their cognitive and emotional literacy by activating and stimulating imagination, attention and memory. Advocates of cognitive literary theory that underpins my research claim that it is not merely a new direction of inquiry, but a completely new way of thinking about literature. The talk will demonstrate how, by using the cognitive toolkit, we can think in a new way about representation of disability, and by extension, about representation of other themes and issues in literature. While most cognitive literary studies work on the assumption that readers possess cognitive skills required to engage with fiction, this may not be the case with young readers whose cognitive skills are in the making. The predominantly theoretical argument will be supported by examining three recent young adult novels: The White Darkness, by Geraldine McCaughrean, She is Not Invisible, by Marcus Sedgwick, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon. I will focus on two mutually dependent questions: firstly, how disability is represented, and secondly, how the texts are constructed narratively to optimise readers' cognitive and affective engagement.
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The twenty-first century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn, in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. While cultural theories have generated... more
The twenty-first century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn, in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. While cultural theories have generated fruitful approaches to children's fiction through the lenses of gender, class, race or sexual orientation, and while psychoanalytically oriented theories have explored ways of viewing/representing childhood as a projection of (adult) interiority, the physical existence of children, albeit in their fictional worlds, has been obscured by constructed social and psychological hierarchies. Recent directions of literary studies, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism and cognitive criticism, bring back the scholars' attention to the physically of a child's body and the environments within which this body exists, functions and develops. This trend, however, does not simply take scholars of children's literature back to essentialism, but reflects the complexity, plurality and ambiguity of our understanding of childhood and its representation in fiction produced ams marketed for young audiences. The talk will examine some of the current trends in international children's literature research with a particular focus on body and place.
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The 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for identifying the spot in the human brain responsible for spatial orientation. While not discovered yet, there is doubtless a mechanism in the brain that allows readers to orientate within... more
The 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for identifying the spot in the human brain responsible for spatial orientation. While not discovered yet, there is doubtless a mechanism in the brain that allows readers to orientate within fictional worlds. Such orientation is possible through life-to-text projection, when readers transfer their experience of real places onto fiction; and through text-to-life projection, when they learn how to navigate real worlds through reading experience. This talk will explore the affordances of fictional texts written and marketed for young readers, which enhance their understanding of fictionality and stimulate attention, imagination, memory, and other aspects of cognitive activity. The talk will bring together recent research within cultural geography, cognitive criticism and children's literature.
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In his study of brain laterality, The Master and His Emissary (2008), Iain McGilchrist proposes a hypothesis about historical periods' preference for different art forms and directions as a result of interplay between cultural development... more
In his study of brain laterality, The Master and His Emissary (2008), Iain McGilchrist proposes a hypothesis about historical periods' preference for different art forms and directions as a result of interplay between cultural development and the evolution of the human brain. One of his observations points at the tangible trend toward the dominance of the left cerebral hemisphere over the right one, beginning in the fifteenth century in the Western world, when written language gradually gained supremacy over oral and visual communication. Based partially on McGilchrist's book, Hugh Crago's Entranced by Story (2014) offers a fascinating exposé of readers' engagement with fiction, connected to individual rather than historical brain development, in particular the varying dominance of right or left cerebral hemispheres at different age. A combination of these two approaches has far-reaching consequences for general thinking about multimodality and learning. While we should be cautious about making definite statements before we have reliable experimental research, it is gratifying to speculate how brain laterality potentially affects young learners' preference for visual or verbal narratives; how the cerebral hemispheres process visual and verbal information in different manners; and how multimodal narratives can be used to enhance learners' cognitive and emotional literacy.
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The article, based on a crossdisciplinary framework of cultural geography and children's literature theory, discusses three children's novels set on islands: Kensuke's Kingdom (1999), by Michael Morpurgo, Gullstruck Island (2009), by... more
The article, based on a crossdisciplinary framework of cultural geography and children's literature theory, discusses three children's novels set on islands: Kensuke's Kingdom (1999), by Michael Morpurgo, Gullstruck Island (2009), by Frances Hardinge, and Midwinterblood (2011), by Marcus Sedgwick; all of which operate within ambiguous fictional worlds and use ambiguous narrative perspective. While the island topos and the presence of maps are prominent features in children's literature, the three texts illustrate different approaches to the employment and function of maps. In each text, the issues of belonging/not belonging, othering, time/space connections and interactions, mythical and contemporary world, nature/culture, displacement and spatial marginalisation are emphasised through the maps that acquire a substantially more prominent part of the narrative than in most conventional children's novels.
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This paper will explore the impact of digital books on the formation, maintenance and ongoing change of literary canons. The easy availability of e-books with expired copyright is one kind of evidence of certain books' status as... more
This paper will explore the impact of digital books on the formation, maintenance and ongoing change of literary canons. The easy availability of e-books with expired copyright is one kind of evidence of certain books' status as classics. The existence of various versions (at various prices) of the same book confirms this status. The digital revival of once popular books that have fallen into oblivion demonstrates the power of digitalisation in retrospective re-configuration of canons. The emergence of digital epitexts, such as websites, social network pages, educational sites and fan sites, add to this process. The selection principles, or absence thereof, for producing picturebook apps from existing picturebooks, is yet another indication of their canonical position.
In contrast, the immediate availability of newly published books in digital editions affects current canon formation, since the existence of a digital version contributes to the commercial value of the book, its circulation to a maximum of readers, and, albeit to a lesser degree, the attention it receives from the critics and practitioners. By extension, texts that only appear in digital versions, may in the future create a specific, parallel canon of their own. (The vast area of self-publishing will not be discussed).
The paper does not aspire to offer a comprehensive overview of the area, since it is not only immense, but changing day by day. Instead it will raise some fundamental questions about re-conceptualising canons, including national canons, academic canons, school canons, and popular canons, in the age when the role of the audience in canon formation is more prominent than at any other time in human history.
In contrast, the immediate availability of newly published books in digital editions affects current canon formation, since the existence of a digital version contributes to the commercial value of the book, its circulation to a maximum of readers, and, albeit to a lesser degree, the attention it receives from the critics and practitioners. By extension, texts that only appear in digital versions, may in the future create a specific, parallel canon of their own. (The vast area of self-publishing will not be discussed).
The paper does not aspire to offer a comprehensive overview of the area, since it is not only immense, but changing day by day. Instead it will raise some fundamental questions about re-conceptualising canons, including national canons, academic canons, school canons, and popular canons, in the age when the role of the audience in canon formation is more prominent than at any other time in human history.
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The works of Mikhail Bakhtin have been widely employed in international research on children's literature since the late 1980s when they became available outside Russia. The research community not only seized the various parts of... more
The works of Mikhail Bakhtin have been widely employed in international research on children's literature since the late 1980s when they became available outside Russia. The research community not only seized the various parts of Bakhtin's theoretical framework as fruitful tools for examining texts produced and marketed for young audience, but in the first place realised the significance of Bakhtin's theory of the novel for holistic approaches to children's literature as an art form. Firstly, children's literature is inescapably heteroglot, since it is built on the coexistence of and conflict between the adult and the child discourse. This is not merely reflected in the text through the cognitive discrepancy between the adult and child narrative subjectivities, but also in the inevitable asymmetical power positions, reminiscent of other heterological discourses, such as feminist, queer and postcolonial, where Bakhtin's ideas have similarly been creatively utilised. However, secondly, children's literature is also inherently carnivalesque, since it allows temporary empowerment of the disempowered (children), sanctioned by those in power (adults). While the social norms disrupted by carnival in children's literature are typically re-established, the carnivalesque structure has a strong subversive and transformative potential, textual as well as extratextual. Thirdly, children's literature is consciously and consistently dialogical because of its integral eclecticism, drawing on folktales, mainstream literature and popular culture, apart from its own rich intertextuality. Children's literature, more than any other kind of literature, is transnational and transgenerational. Finally, the specific chronotope of childhood, with its restricted spatiality and temporality and its focus on futurity, reflects Bakhtin's concept of incompleteness as the foremost characteristic of the polyphonic novel. Bakhtin-inspired research of children's literature has produced a substantial body of work, some of which will be introduced in this panel.
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As seen clearly from the very existence of this recurrent conference as well as an avalanche of publications, picturebooks not only have become a legitimate object of academic pursuit, but have also generated a whole theoretical field.... more
As seen clearly from the very existence of this recurrent conference as well as an avalanche of publications, picturebooks not only have become a legitimate object of academic pursuit, but have also generated a whole theoretical field. Paradoxically, while there are still heated debates concerning the nature and scope of children's literature, the international picturebook scholars' community seems to be in agreement about the major postulates of picturebook theory, including the interdependence of word and image, materiality, and sequentiality. Picturebook theory has produced a wide range of concepts and terms for the analysis of the various aspects of pictirebooks. Seemingly, like with natural science in the end of the nineteenth century, “everything has been discovered”. Yet as we know, scientists were wrong, and subsequent research found more questions than answers. As picturebooks are rapidly entering the digital age, there is an urgent need to keep picturebook theory up to date. The multimodal nature of picturebooks, that so far has predominantly implied a combination of the verbal and the visual modes, is expanding to include auditory, tactile and perfomative dimensions.
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Memory of the present: empathy and identity in young adult fiction Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new stimulating approaches to literary texts and neuroscientists with new... more
Memory of the present: empathy and identity in young adult fiction
Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new stimulating approaches to literary texts and neuroscientists with new insights about human emotions, empathy and memory through evidence from fiction. What has so far been largely neglected is the implications of cognitive criticism for the study of literature targeting a young audience, whose theory of mind and empathic skills are not yet fully developed. The imbalance of the cognitive and affective competences of the sender and the receiver makes children's and young adult literature a unique study object. In addition, the representation of a young protagonist's consciousness and emerging empathy poses specific demands on the writer as well as the reader. Thus a cognitive approach to children's and young adult literature has to meet several challenges less relevant in general fiction. Firstly, how is a young fictional character's consciousness represented by an author whose cognitive and affective skills are ostensibly superior? Secondly, how do texts instruct their young readers to employ theory of mind in order to assess both the young protagonist's emotions and their understanding of other characters' emotions (higher-order mind-reading)? Thirdly, how can fiction support young people's development of their theory of mind? The paper will discuss these issues with a particular focus on memory and identity, expressed textually through tense and narrative perspective. While the frequent employment of a present-tense first-person narration in contemporary young adult fiction obviously attempts to convey a strong sense of here and now, it does not allow for the heteroglossia created by the separation between the narrating and the experiencing self, which in children's fiction is the foremost device to explore identity formation. Drawing on the work by Lisa Zunshine (2006) and Blackey Vermeule (2010), the predominantly theoretical argument will be illustrated by a contemporary young adult novel, Slated (2012) by Teri Terry.
Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new stimulating approaches to literary texts and neuroscientists with new insights about human emotions, empathy and memory through evidence from fiction. What has so far been largely neglected is the implications of cognitive criticism for the study of literature targeting a young audience, whose theory of mind and empathic skills are not yet fully developed. The imbalance of the cognitive and affective competences of the sender and the receiver makes children's and young adult literature a unique study object. In addition, the representation of a young protagonist's consciousness and emerging empathy poses specific demands on the writer as well as the reader. Thus a cognitive approach to children's and young adult literature has to meet several challenges less relevant in general fiction. Firstly, how is a young fictional character's consciousness represented by an author whose cognitive and affective skills are ostensibly superior? Secondly, how do texts instruct their young readers to employ theory of mind in order to assess both the young protagonist's emotions and their understanding of other characters' emotions (higher-order mind-reading)? Thirdly, how can fiction support young people's development of their theory of mind? The paper will discuss these issues with a particular focus on memory and identity, expressed textually through tense and narrative perspective. While the frequent employment of a present-tense first-person narration in contemporary young adult fiction obviously attempts to convey a strong sense of here and now, it does not allow for the heteroglossia created by the separation between the narrating and the experiencing self, which in children's fiction is the foremost device to explore identity formation. Drawing on the work by Lisa Zunshine (2006) and Blackey Vermeule (2010), the predominantly theoretical argument will be illustrated by a contemporary young adult novel, Slated (2012) by Teri Terry.
Kan man lära sig någonting av böckerna om Teskedsgumman? Kan man lära sig någonting av barnböcker över huvud taget? Det har alltid hävdats att barnlitteratur genom tiderna har använts som ett pedagogiskt redskap, men det finns ytterst... more
Kan man lära sig någonting av böckerna om Teskedsgumman? Kan man lära sig någonting av barnböcker över huvud taget? Det har alltid hävdats att barnlitteratur genom tiderna har använts som ett pedagogiskt redskap, men det finns ytterst lite forskning om exakt hur denna förmedling av kunskap egentligen äger rum. Även om skönlitteratur kan erbjuda faktakunskaper, skildra mänskliga relationer och förkunna världsåskådning och övertygelser är det inte skönlitteraturens primära syfte. Fungerar barnlitteratur annorlunda än allmän litteratur i sitt ändamål när läsaren förmodas ha en annan kognitiv nivå än författaren? Kan barnboksförfattare använda sig av sina texter för att förmedla kunskaper? Vilken bild av världen, samhället, människan, etik och värderingar förmedlar, medvetet eller omedvetet från författarens sida, böckerna om Teskedsgumman? Föredraget kommer att ha som utgångspunkt kognitiv litteraturteori, en tvärvetenskaplig riktning som förenar litterära och kognitiva teorier för att undersöka hur läsare engagerar sig kognitivt och känslomässigt med skönlitterära texter.
The paper will consider how basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear) and social, or higher cognitive emotions (love, jealousy, guilt) can be conveyed through the interaction of word and image in multimedial texts addressed to... more
The paper will consider how basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear) and social, or higher cognitive emotions (love, jealousy, guilt) can be conveyed through the interaction of word and image in multimedial texts addressed to young readers. The theoretical framework employed in the paper develops ideas from cognitive literary criticism (also known as cognitive poetics, cognitive narratology and literary cognitivism) that combines literary theory with the recent achievements of brain research. Although this direction of inquiry is a rapidly expanding field, little attention has been paid to young readers, fiction addressed to young readers, and still less multimedial texts, such as picturebooks, at least superficially addressed to very young, pre-literate readers. In my work, I adapt cognitive literary criticism to the specific conditions in which there is a significant difference between the sender's and the recipient's cognitive level. My focus is the reader's affective engagement with fiction, and in this particular paper I am looking at how verbal and visual information in a multimedial text enhances or occasionally hampers this engagement. The concept of emotional ekphrasis is used to demonstrate the various ways of representing emotions, and a special attention is paid to the issues of mind-reading, empathy, identification, projection, simulation, misattribution and other aspects of recipients' engagement. My argument is that picturebooks provide a perfect training field for pre-literate young readers to develop their empathic skills. The predominantly theoretical argument will be illustrated by a selection of classic and contemporary picturebooks.
The paper will explore the employment of time travel in Susan Cooper's novel King of Shadows (1999). The novel presents a strong educational project, introducing Shakespeare and his epoch through the eyes of a modern young man. My... more
The paper will explore the employment of time travel in Susan Cooper's novel King of Shadows (1999). The novel presents a strong educational project, introducing Shakespeare and his epoch through the eyes of a modern young man. My question is, however, whether the time-slip device subverts the perception of the historical events and the figure of Shakespeare, presenting them as fiction and reducing the impact of factual knowledge. With literary cognitivism as my point of departure, I will examine what kind of knowledge the novel offers its readers and how this knowledge is transmitted. This includes knowledge of facts as well as knowledge and understanding of fictional characters. Susan Cooper's reputation as a writer of fantasy fiction may contribute to the ambiguity of genre conventions. Time paradoxes, especially the conflict between the metaphysical concepts of tensed time and tenseless time, bring forward the issues of predestination, free will, and a higher authority, which in the novel are played out in a most ambivalent manner.