This paper looks at the evolution of the girl's school story in "The British Girl's Annual" during the interwar period. The school story played a crucial role instructing young female readers about their gendered role within the school as a kind of microcosm for nation/empire. Most of these lessons focus on loyalty and leadership, topics…

The Japanese people's understanding of the Fifteen Years War (1931-1945) is still problematic. The problem of the war was commonly solved by transferring responsibility for the war to an obscure subject called the State, and by offering financial compensation to those who were directly affected. However, there has been no in-depth discussion of…

Over the past two decades children's picture books dealing with the Australian experience during the First World War have sought to balance a number of thematic imperatives. The increasingly sentimentalised construct of the Australian soldier as a victim of trauma, the challenge of providing a moral lesson that reflects both modern ideological…

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…

Written and published during World War II, Eleanor Estes's "Rufus M". (1943) is set during the time of American involvement in World War I, the war of the author's own childhood. Despite the fact that the book was named a Newbery Honor title, many critics have found it unsatisfyingly unstructured and episodic. I argue, however, that the…

The year 2017 will mark the 75th anniversary when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 or EO 9066 on February 19, 1942. EO 9066 led to the mass incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into ten racially segregated concentration camps throughout the U.S. This article discusses the educational and literary…

Histories of the First World War have regularly implicated children's literature in boys' eagerness to enlist in the first two years of that conflict. While undoubtedly the majority of children's books, comics and magazines did espouse nationalistic, jingoistic and martial attitudes, there were alternative stories and environments. Looking at the…

A recent controversy in the USA centres on classroom use of Yoko Kawashima Watkins's semi-autobiographical "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" (1986), a novel focused on the flight of Japanese settler families to Japan after the liberation of Korea at the end of World War II. Taught in a literary and historical vacuum under the thematic…

Examining six texts about the traumatic experience of the internment either in Canada or the United States during World War II, we focus not only on their stylistic shift from visualization to verbalization as targeted ages of readers increase, but also on the effects, both historical and personal, social and domestic, on children of their…

The intensifying globalization has made street survival more brutal and miserable for homeless children, especially in Third World countries. "Sanmao, the Vagrant" is a wordless picture book which tells of the adventures of a boy named Sanmao in streets of Shanghai during WWII. The essay analyzes how the artist's ingenious visual…