Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood
Edited by Heather Snell, Lorna Hutchison
Series Editor: Philip Nel
To Be Published October 1st 2013 by Routledge – 228 pages
Description
This book addresses the interplay between nationalism and cultural memory in a range of texts both for and about young people. The volume is concerned with how cultural memory is shaped, contested, forgotten, recovered, and (re)circulated, sometimes in opposition to dominant national narratives, and often for the benefit of young readers who are assumed not to possess any prior cultural memory. Cases studied include young adult novels aimed at providing a pro-nuclear message for a Cold War generation; East Germany’s 1960s ideologies neatly packaged in a text on architecture for children; and investigations on how children negotiate play, religion, and class during a crucial period of subjective development. A broad spectrum of text, film, and other cultural forms aimed at or about children help to shape nationalist ideas and values, and these in turn contribute to dominant discourses about citizenship. Childhood, as these papers insinuate, is an oft-imagined idealist construction based in large part on participation, identity, and perception; it is invisible and tangible, exciting and intriguing, and at times elusive even as cultural and literary artifacts recreate it. This collection is a valuable resource to scholars of children’s literature and culture, diaspora, and postcolonial studies.
Contents
1. "Does not happen": M.T. Anderson and Terry Pratchett Imagine the Nation Adrienne Kertzer 2. Ambivalent Doomsday for the Young: Nuclear Fictions for Children in the US and the UK of the ’80s Tamar Hager 3. "You Say You Want a Revolution": Sonia Sanchez’s It’s a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs and Black Nationalist Didacticism Jean-Philippe Marcoux 4. Modern Architecture, Competing Pasts and Ambivalent Internationalism: East German Architectural Children’s Texts Curtis Swope 5. "Infinnate Joy": Play, Performance and Resistance in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Lucy Hopkins 6. "They’re good with good girls": Constructions of Childhood in Coming-of-age Films about the Spanish Civil War Anindya Raychaudhuri 7. A Japanese History Textbook and the Construction of World War II Memory Aya Matsushima 8. "A Real True Merrican Like Us": Edith Wharton’s Past, Modern Children, and American Identity Jenny Glennon 9. "Saladin II": Saddam Hussein and the Cultural Memory of the Crusades in Texts for Iraqi Children since 2003 Brian Johnsrud 10. The Seductions of Good and Evil: Competing Cultural Memories in Steve Sanderson’s Superhero Comics for Aboriginal Youth Doris Wolf 11. Forging an Innocent Past: Childhood Innocence and the National Socialist Past in Two Recent German Novels for Adults Nora Maguire 12. Reading Canadian: Children and National Literature in the 1920s Gail Edwards
Author Bio
Heather Snell is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, Canada.
Lorna Hutchison is Visiting Assistant Professor in Children's Literature at Metro State College of Denver, USA.
Related Subjects
Name: Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood (Hardback) – Routledge
Description: Edited by Heather Snell, Lorna HutchisonSeries Editor: Philip Nel. This book addresses the interplay between nationalism and cultural memory in a range of texts both for and about young people. The volume is concerned with how cultural memory is shaped, contested, forgotten, recovered, and (re)circulated, sometimes in...
Categories: Children's Literature, Nationalism, Literature & Culture