This article presents contemporary Judeo-Spanish poetry for children in the context of the postvernacular mode (when the language is not used any more in everyday communication) of the language. It discusses the poetry collections of three authors who have published Judeo-Spanish poems in the twenty-first century: Ada Gattegno-Saltiel, Avner…

Ted Hughes is one of the most important poets in English literature of the last century and his huge volume of work (including his poetry, prose, plays, translations, letters and critical essays) has received a great deal of critical attention. Hughes was, of course, much more than just a writer. Throughout his life he was deeply engaged with…

Love, beauty, and the good are three key concepts of Platonic aesthetics, which frequently appear in the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, a classical scholar deeply influenced by Plato and his philosophy. Plato's views on music, as a part of his aesthetics, were championed by Wilde, who regarded music as "the perfect type of art." It is…

In Hollindale's "Signs of Childness in Children's Books" (1997), the idea that adulthood is continuous with childhood co-exists with the idea that it is forever separated. Far from being self-contradictory, this reflects the complex reality represented within children's literature. Focusing on the case of children's poetry, in which the…

This article reflects on insights gained from a larger study that explored how a class of ten- and eleven-year-olds read and responded to David Almond's hybrid novel, "My Name is Mina." Through focusing on the children's performances of the poems contained within the text, the discussion examines embodied aspects of the children's…

This article analyses texts intended for child audiences--picturebooks, a poetry book, and a film--that deal with the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990). The memorialization practices within children's media appear to be modelled on the difficulties of finding a national consensus regarding the events that transpired during the dictatorship and the…

This article considers alternatives to the established constructivist approaches to children's literature, exploring instead the potential of two relatively recent areas of inquiry, cognitive poetics and evolutionary literary criticism. The article questions the assumption, implied if not directly expressed by Peter Hollindale in "Signs of…

This article explores how adult writers of children's literature are implicitly positioned as translators between "adult" and "child" culture. Adopting the lens of metaphor theory, it traces the conceptual correspondence between adult metaphors of childhood (e.g., the child-savage analogy) and the metaphor of the adult…

Amongst the wide variety of poetic forms found across children's poetry, the list is strikingly prevalent. Drawing on Umberto Eco's theory of lists, the article examines how the poetic list plays out in the work of a number of children's poets, distinguishing four sub-categories, each of which operates in a slightly different way. After a brief…

This essay suggests a queer reading of the poem "My Japanese Fan" by American children's writer Laura Richards. Published in 1890, the poem stands out as conspicuously queer even today. While describing a Japanese figure of ambiguous gender, the poem outlines for its young readers terms for defining sexual identity that lie outside…

This paper draws on two forms of cognitive studies to examine how a minority language literature cultivates feelings of in-group belonging. The minority in focus are the Tornedalingar: Swedish nationals who live near the Torne River which marks the border with Finland. The official language of the Tornedalingar is "Meänkieli" which…

Modern children's literature in China has largely been dominated by narratives of the nation and nationalism. The present article sets out to question the dominance of that nationalist stance as the country transitioned into the modern era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining poetic children's literature, the author…

This paper examines the domestication of children literature through the comparative study of two translations of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Zakhoder. "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" has a reputation for being difficult to translate into foreign languages due to its strong linguistic…

Between 1961 and 1984 the renowned New Zealand writer, Margaret Mahy, wrote over seventy-five pieces for the "School Journal" (a graded reading book provided free to New Zealand primary schools since its inception in 1907). It was a liberal humanist period in New Zealand education during which the 1940s' and 1950s' rolling reforms…

An increasingly prevalent and accessible form of hybrid nonfiction picture books blends factual information with poetry or poetic devices to create literary nonfiction. This important form of hybrid text has been sparsely examined. This article addresses three questions about poetic nonfiction picture books: first, how might we categorize picture…