Oxford Children's Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium

Hilary 2012 Termcard

2012-01-17T07:31:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Our first offerings for 2012 are as diverse as ever. Same location (Seminar Room A in the English Faculty Building) and time (5.15pm). All welcome.

Please contact me if you have any questions or would like to present in the future.

30 January (Week 3): ‘Edward Lear’s Origins’. Dr James Williams, Brasenose and Jesus Colleges
Lear was a writer of and for children, people at the beginning of their life: he is also considered, rightly or wrongly, as a starting-point, the originating ‘Father of Nonsense’. This paper considers Lear’s concern with origins (both a private fascination and a Victorian cultural obsession): where we come from, how we begin to speak, how to make new starts. It also gives some thought to the origins, and originality, of his nonsense, in the context of a Romantic inheritance of writing about children. The paper is part of on-going work towards the first critical monograph on Lear in over thirty years.

13 February (Week 5): ‘Encountering the Arabian Nights’. Melissa Dickson, King’s College London
The Arabian Nights, never adequately situated in historical time, was often first encountered in childhood and became a powerful memory for many individuals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Knowledge of this protean collection of Persian, Arabian, and Indian folk tales cannot stem from a first text or clearly identifiable source, but from a series of individual encounters with illustrations, concepts, characters, and stories drawn from different and even contradictory versions of the work. In this paper, Melissa Dickson, a PhD candidate at King’s College London and fellow of the Australian Federation of University Women, will explore the circumstances surrounding childhood exposure to the tales and the potential return to childhood offered by rediscovery of the work across various media in later life.

27 February (Week 7): ‘“The Soul Has No Sign”: A Prosthetics of Pain in the Child Soldier Novel’. Tamara Moellenberg, Brasenose College
Examining recent novels by Uzodinma Iweala, Chris Abani, and Delia Jarrett-Macauley concerned with the experience of the child soldier in regions of West Africa, Tamara Moellenberg, a second-year DPhil candidate at Brasenose, considers the instrumentalisation of the child-body as a vehicle for human rights, bearing witness to physical atrocity. Focalizing her analysis through the representation of pain, Tamara will look at wounded child bodies as ‘narrative prostheses’ for concepts of discursive immediacy, psychic trauma, and the act of impugning blame in international contests of culpability.

Margaret Kean on 'The Young Inferno'

2011-12-07T05:04:00.000-08:00

In our last session for 2011 - how time flies! - Dr Margaret Kean (St Hilda's) presented on a children's lit-related element from her wider project charting cultural responses to Hell: the picture book The Young Inferno, written by John Agard and illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura. Beginning with the premise that much of children's literature depends on either the child saving the adult or the child being saved by the adult (an interesting dynamic where depictions of Hell are concerned), Dr Kean positioned The Young Inferno as a renewal of Dante couched in Agard's own cultural milieu (the damned are updated to include various twentieth-century figures of note, for example) and fully conversant with the picture book's unique techniques for 'making meaning' through word and image. Dr Kean's many pictorial examples showed Kitamura himself visually 'reading' Dante and Dante's illustrators, updating, for example, the bone landscapes Blake used to illustrate the work in the nineteenth century with his own chilling and beautiful piles of skulls and fish skeletons. Kitamura's stark black and white illustrations become a visual pun on Agard's text, which questions the binary between black and white, good and evil (from canto 2: 'neither beast nor man / can be divided into black and white'). Darkness and vivacity, what Dr Kean called the 'double energy' of updated versions of Dante's Inferno for children (she also touched on Dale Basye's Circles of Heck series), generate a rich, multilayered quality in both text and illustration.

Happy holidays, everyone! Next term's programme, as well as a number of special events associated with the new centrally-taught children's literature paper for Oxford finalists, will be posted here early in 2012.

Anna Caughey on Lewis and Tolkien

2011-11-08T04:12:00.000-08:00

Beginning with Philip Pullman’s incendiary critique of the Chronicles of Narnia in The Guardian in 1998 (online here), Anna Caughey posed the question why, if the Chronicles and the compositions of C. S. Lewis’s fellow Inkling Tolkien are as disempowering as Pullman and others have suggested—a reading that Anna doesn’t dispute—they experience such enduring popularity with all sorts of readers. Anna’s paper built upon Peter Hollindale’s concept of 'childness' (as a state in which the child continuously negotiates his or her own subject position in dialogue with various messages from the external world) to propose the idea of 'compulsory childhood': a state in which the external world imposes limitations on the child subject, preventing this negotiation from taking place. She demonstrated the ways in which Lewis and Tolkien, in both their critical writing and their fiction, dispute the 'pigeonholing' of the child as either an idolised or denigrated Other of the adult, suggesting that despite suspect gender, race, and class politics, Lewis and Tolkien actively empower the child (and the child’s analogue, the small person) in their stories. Rejecting the idea that children should be contained and protected, both authors depict a masculinity in which there is a level of emotional freedom absent from, say, the boys' school story: one in which moments of vulnerability are permitted to even the strongest of Lewis’s male heroes (Peter crying post-battle isn’t at all a ‘girlish thing’ for him to do). Moreover, Anna suggested that in the character arcs of Merry and Pippin, as well as Peter, both authors represent a liminal space between childhood and adult masculinity: an opportunity for characters to shift back and forward between the respective pleasures and responsibilities of adulthood and childhood, rather than the straightforward opposition between these categories entailed in ‘compulsory childhood’. Of course, female characters are not given such an opportunity to shift between adult and child selves—Susan’s famed fate in The Last Battle being a case in point—and Anna proposed ‘circumlegation’, or reading around, as a possible solution to the problem of why, considering the portrayals of femininity in these books, they continue to draw so many female fans.

Katherine Rundell on Writing (and Publishing) for Children

2011-10-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

Katherine Rundell became a Prize Fellow at All Souls around the same time she finished the manuscript for her first children's novel, The Girl Savage, which was subsequently published by Faber. Since then, these two seemingly antithetical occupations have existed in parallel. At CLYCC's first session for 2011/12, Kate took us through her thoughts about writing in general and writing children's books in particular. Kate's hilarious, erudite talk challenged the perception that writing children's literature is akin to painting watercolours of cats (an opinion that she has encountered in her time), as she touched on, for example, reading as one of the few private activities allowed to the child, the children's book as an apotropaic against the tawdrier products of children's culture, and the robustness of children's publishing throughout the recession. Her talk was also a practical exploration of the vicissitudes of children's publishing, literary agents, writing schedules, etc—meaning that her talk offered perspectives on children's books both idealistic and pragmatic.

Read more about The Girl Savage here, and stay tuned for Kate's new book, also published by Faber and provisionally entitled Across the Rooftops.

Michaelmas 2011 Termcard

2011-10-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

Welcome back, everyone! Our first paper is only a week away....

All talks in Seminar Room A of the English Faculty Building (directions) at 5.15pm - and all welcome.

Also please add Matthew Grenby's talk 'Wilkes in Lilliput: On the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Children's Books' on Wednesday 9 November to your diaries. The talk will take place at five o'clock in the Memorial Room at Worcester as part of the Graduate Seminar in History 1680-1850.

Exciting times for children's literature at Oxford!

24 October (Week 3): Advances and Submissions: Hope and Compromise in Today’s Publishing Industry. Katherine Rundell, All Souls College
Katherine Rundell is an Examination Fellow of All Souls and is about to send her second children’s book to press. (Her first children’s novel, The Girl Savage, was published by Faber earlier this year.) She will be speaking about the publishing industry, about the writing process, and about why, sometimes, it is necessary to tie yourself to the desk with a skipping rope.

7 November (Week 5): Hard, Bold, and Wicked: Masculinity and Liminality in Lewis and Tolkien. Dr Anna Caughey, College Lecturer in Old and Middle English, Keble College
In Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the boundaries between adult and child identities are at once blurred and reinforced. Childhood, and boyhood in particular, is presented as a state that can be both transcended and retreated to when necessary, while full physical/social adulthood is generally marginalised. Using Peter Hollindale’s theory of ‘childness’ as a base, this paper examines the ways in which both texts use their fantasy settings to provide younger readers with access to material that emphasises the capability and autonomy of child/child-substitute protagonists while privileging the state of childhood.

21 November (Week 7): Hoodies in Hell. Dr Margaret Kean, Helen Gardner Fellow in English, St Hilda’s College
This talk will consider the recent revision of Dante’s Inferno undertaken by the poet John Agard in The Young Inferno (illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura). Agard’s upbeat renewal of Dante can be usefully compared with Dayle E. Basye’s irreverent take on authority in his Circles of Heck series (Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go is the first volume; illustrator Bob Dob). This talk will contrast the approach of contemporary writers towards Dante with that taken by Kingsley in The Water Babies.

Josephine Rout on Dress for Female Students in Japan

2011-06-15T03:08:00.000-07:00

Josephine discussed recent research she has undertaken as part of the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum’s joint Master’s programme. Josephine focused on the development of dress for female students, or jogakusei, in Japan’s Meiji Period (1868-1912). In this epoch, a concern with modernisation and ‘catching up with the West’ often played out in terms of women’s education, and Josephine used a particular garment, the hakama (a sort of culottes worn over kimono) to illuminate the history of Meiji jogakusei. Associated with state functions, hakama were a garment typically worn by men prior to this period. Josephine suggested that the adoption of hakama by female students reflected an identification with the figure of the student, rather than gender travesty: the only grown-up students prior to this period were male, and as they wore hakama, so did the new breed of jogakusei. Regardless, the short hairstyles and supposed masculinisation of female students were castigated in the media, and there was a more general distaste symbolised in, for example, the magazine serial from 1905 entitled ‘Tales of Degenerate Schoolgirls’. Josephine illustrated her talk with modern-day hakama (the piece remains popular as graduation garb for female students), as well as a wealth of images that included some from children’s books of the period.

Diane Purkiss on Children's Literature at Oxford

2011-06-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

Dr Diane Purkiss began by assuring the group that there is nothing more traditional to the children's book than being soaked to the skin: highly apposite, of course, as most members of her audience were in that very state on the wet Bank Holiday Monday of this talk!

Diane discussed the new special topic option for third-year Oxford undergraduates, which involves centralised teaching in children's literature: a milestone for a university that has sometimes dismissed the subject out of hand. This dismissal is rather perplexing, of course, as Oxford (more so even than the 'Other Place', in Diane's august opinion) has produced a slew of phenomenal children's books, and also holds one of the best collections of children's literature in the world (the Opie Collection at the Bodleian). The special topic programme legitimates Oxford as a cultural centre of children's literature, while also legitimating students' interest in studying and researching children's literature at Oxford.

To this end Diane ranged over authors including Carroll, Lewis, Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, and Matthew Skelton, and topics including the effect of both Oxford's built environment and its pastoral surrounds on children's books written here, or about here. She also spoke to the broader issues involved in the discipline: the relationship between adult author and child reader, and the perhaps less acknowledged relationship between adult and (remembered) child selves for any one individual. Her talk was an exciting taste of the programme, and I'll update you all on its progress as classes get up and running next academic year.

Alice and the Mouse swimming in the Pool of Tears: May weather in Oxford isn't quite that wet, but still....

Alice Nuttall on Pocahontas

2011-05-23T04:16:00.000-07:00

Last Monday Alice discussed the depiction of Native Americans in a film for children which touts an overt anti-racist message: Disney's Pocahontas (1995). Despite the direct engagement with issues of race, racism, and cross-cultural interaction in Pocahontas—which Alice reads as in part an apology for previous Disney characters such as Tiger Lily in the 1953 Peter Pan—the film holds some problematic subtexts beneath its worthy surface message of tolerance and anti-colonialism. Elements of the production, such as Pocahontas' signature costume (a skimpy buckskin mini-dress) and the division between 'good Indians' (those who assimilate to European culture) and 'bad Indians' (those who fight it), make free use of prevalent stereotypes of Native American culture. When the important character Grandmother Willow, a spirit guide, encourages Pocahontas to learn English, the film even seems to tacitly suggest divine approval of colonialism. Alice also discussed 'Savages', the controversial song which appeared toward the end of the original version of the film (it was cut upon video release). The song depicts Native and European parties calling each other savages, ostensibly to show that both sides hold erroneous conceptions about race, and can be violent and hate-filled. However, racist slurs incorporated in the song were on occasion used to taunt Native children after the film's release—despite the diegetic emphasis on the wrongheadedness of such language and behaviour.

CLYCC wishes Alice all the best for her upcoming field research.

Trinity Term 2011 Programme

2011-05-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

An exciting programme for the new term! Events held in Room 11 of the English Fac at 5.15pm as usual (directions if you need them...).
Looking forward to seeing both familiar and unfamiliar faces!

May 16th (Week 3): Problems with Pocahontas. Alice Nuttall, Oxford Brookes University
Alice, a doctoral student at Brookes who works on the portrayal of American Indians in children’s literature and culture, returns to CLYCC with a presentation on Disney’s thirty-third animated feature, the immensely popular Pocahontas (1995). Alice will examine problems with the portrayal of race and gender issues in the film, and ask whether it is successful as an anti-racist work.

May 30th (Week 5): Teaching Children’s Literature for Paper Eight. Dr Diane Purkiss, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow, Keble College
This Centrally Taught Special Topics (CTST) introductory lecture, held in conjunction with CLYCC, concerns the new stream of children’s literature-oriented Paper Eight seminars and classes which will be run through the English Faculty from next year. Dr Diane Purkiss, who will teach the 2011/12 series along with Professor Elleke Boehmer (Wolfson) and Dr Margaret Kean (St Hilda’s), leads a discussion of her own research interests in children’s books, projects undertaken by former and current students (particularly finalists), and her vision for the programme.

June 13th (Week 7): The Meiji Material Girl: Developing the Image of the Female Student through Literature. Josephine Rout, Royal College of Art
Josephine currently studies Asian design and material culture at RCA and will shortly act as curatorial assistant for a display at the Victoria and Albert Museum examining the influence of British design and culture on Japanese street fashion. In this session she will focus on her recent research into the development of Japanese school uniforms. In particular, Josephine is interested in the appearance of these garments before the adoption of now-ubiquitous items inspired by nineteenth-century British children’s dress, such as the sailor suit. She will also consider the depiction of the schoolgirl in Japanese literature, including some children's books.

Clive Hurst on Children's Books in the Bod

2011-03-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

On February 28th Clive Hurst, Head of Rare Books and Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, presented a personal selection of early children's books from collections at the Bod. Clive matched each image of a Bodleian treasure with a witty excursus on its significance: the squirm-inducing descriptions of the 'brands of Hell' in Janeway's Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children, for example, were popular enough to warrant a 'further account', while even the subscription lists for the Gigantick Histories contained jokes (apparently the Vatican Library was a faithful subscriber). Tracing representations of learning and play in illustration and word throughout his talk, one of Clive's most fascinating examples confirmed the connections between Oxford and the children's book. The earliest known printed horn-book (circa 1620) was found in the foundations of Brasenose in 1882 during excavation works there. Of course, this volume did not have far to move once it resurfaced: it was deposited just across Radcliffe Square in the Bodleian, where it remains to this day.

At left, an illustration from Punctuation Personified, or, Pointing Made Easy, published by J. Harris. The Bodleian holds an 1824 copy from which Clive showed us images.

A facsimile version is available from the Bodleian bookshop.

Shira Wolosky on Harry Potter

2011-03-13T03:50:00.000-07:00

This from Alice Nuttall on the CLYCC talk which took place on February 14th:

In our second talk of the term, Professor Shira Wolosky discussed the ethical principles and paradigms in the Harry Potter series which are the subject of her recent book The Riddles of Harry Potter: Secret Passages and Interpretive Quests. Beginning by noting the series’ use of political allegory, such as its references to the Second World War and modern conflicts, Shira then went on to explore how the series’ central focus is the dichotomy of love (represented by Harry and his allies) and power (represented by Voldemort). Shira noted that the characters in Harry Potter either seek power, which makes them dominant but leaves them isolated, or love, which brings strength in the form of friends and family. She read the prophecy ‘Neither can live while the other survives’ as suggesting that no-one can pursue both love and power, and that characters who try, such as Snape, must ultimately commit to one or the other. Shira also spoke of the series’ secondary ethical paradigms: that people should be treated as an end, not a means, and that one’s moral choices are more important than one’s abilities. Judging by the questions and discussion following the talk, Shira’s presentation inspired many readers to go back to the series on interpretative quests of their own.

For more information on Shira's book, published last year by Palgrave Macmillan, visit http://us.macmillan.com/theriddlesofharrypotter. Our thanks to Shira for presenting this term while at Oxford as the Rothermere Institute's Drue Heinz Visiting Professor.

Sarah Iversen on Children's Dictionaries

2011-01-31T12:06:00.001-08:00

This term I'm going to post a little summary of each presentation for those who were unable to attend on the day. Here goes...

In our first talk Sarah Iversen from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, presented on one aspect of her research into children’s dictionaries. Looking at a number of historical examples including Anna Murphy’s A First or Mother’s Dictionary for Children (c.1813) and Wilby’s Infant School Spelling-Book (1844), as well as Maria Edgeworth’s glossary appendix in Early Lessons (1801), Sarah demonstrated that children’s dictionaries of the period teach not just words, but also broader moral attitudes. Many of these relate to gender, with boys and girls constructed in different ways: playing with different toys, exhibiting different virtues (or vices), and destined for different social roles. Indeed, as Sarah explained, even when word definitions were gender-neutral, the accompanying pictures frequently gendered, say, pat as a masculine verb (and activity), pet as a feminine one. Sarah also gave a fascinating account of contrasting definitions of particular words across individual lexicographers and across dictionaries for children as opposed to adults. Thanks, Sarah, and best of luck for your upcoming viva!

At right, an example from Sarah's presentation: an illustration for the word strut from Wilby's Infant School Spelling-Book, and Pictorial Dictionary (1844).

Image copyright British Library Board, shelfmark RB.23.a.1641.

Hilary 2011 Times

2011-01-27T03:25:00.000-08:00

So sorry for omitting times in my earlier post!

We are meeting at 5.15pm for each session this term.

Hope to see many of you there.

Hilary Term 2011 Programme

2011-01-10T21:31:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year, and welcome to a fresh batch of CLYCC offerings! Still meeting in Room 11 of the St Cross Building on Manor Road, and all are still welcome.

Week 3 (January 31^st): ‘“To Teach Little Boys and Girls What It Is Proper for Them to Know”: Gendered Education and the Children’s Dictionary’. Sarah Iversen, Lady Margaret Hall

Sarah Iversen, a DPhil candidate at LMH, will explore the role of nineteenth-century children’s dictionaries in the gendered education of children. Children’s dictionaries are widely regarded strictly as mid-twentieth-century phenomena. Pre-twentieth-century lexicography has also been traditionally regarded as an exclusively male pursuit. Contrary to these assumptions there were, in fact, many dictionaries specifically written for children in the nineteenth century, several of which were compiled by women. This paper will demonstrate that both dictionaries compiled by women and men aimed, not simply to impart the meaning of words, but also to teach ‘little boys and girls’ how to behave and prepare them for their future roles as men and women. These gender ideologies, encoded in dictionary definitions, example sentences, and pictorial illustrations, often varied according to the background of individual lexicographers, as Iversen will show.

Week 5 (February 14^th): ‘The Riddles of Harry Potter: Secret Passages and Interpretive Quests’. Professor Shira Wolosky, Drue Heinz Visiting Professor at the Rothermere Institute and Professor of English and American Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Professor Wolosky will discuss her recent book on the Harry Potter series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, in which she argues that Harry Potter’s wild popularity ultimately relates to its literary depth and power: its symbolic meanings, psychological experience, moral reflection, word revelation. Harry Potter offers a literary world of psychological and political allegories, moral fables and paradigms, wordplay, and sudden plots. These together form a web of riddles and secrets—hidden and then discovered meanings—where objects, creatures, events, and words themselves are all filled with significances that have to be deciphered, and whose meanings unfold through constant interpretation and reinterpretation, as earlier books take on new senses in light of later ones. Harry Potter as literary experience thus emerges as one of interpretive challenge and adventure through unfolding patterns of psychological, historical, and moral meanings.

Week 7 (February 28^th): ‘Children’s Books in the Bodleian Library’. Clive Hurst, Head of Rare Books, Bodleian Library

In the late 1980s, following a massive fundraising appeal, the Bodleian Library acquired Peter and Iona Opie’s personal collection of around 20,000 children’s books (including many early books, as well as archival materials like Peter Opie’s accession diaries, which document the genesis of the collection). The preservation of the Opie Collection in the Bodleian, along with other significant children’s book holdings in the Douce Collection among others, makes Oxford the home of some of the world’s most significant resources for the study of children’s books and culture. The head of the Bodleian’s Rare Books division, Clive Hurst, who has written on the Opie Collection and curated exhibitions of children’s books from the Bodleian, will discuss the important children’s book resources at the Library and introduce the group to some of the most extraordinary examples across collections.

Michaelmas Term 2010 Programme

2010-10-05T03:43:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to the new academic year at CLYCC! We are still meeting in the English Faculty (directions here), though we've switched rooms (now in Room 11). Details of our exciting programme this term below:

October 25 (Week 3): Reading Other People's Minds: Literary Cognitivism and Children's Literature. Prof. Maria Nikolajeva, Professor of Education and Director of the Cambridge/Homerton Research and Teaching Centre for Children's Literature, University of Cambridge

Literary cognitivism is a relatively recent direction of inquiry that pursues the question of whether works of literature can convey knowledge, and if so, how this happens. Children's literature has throughout history been employed as an educational vehicle, yet its actual mechanism of providing knowledge has not been properly discussed. The epistemic value of children's literature can be considered on different levels, including knowledge of the world, knowledge of society, knowledge of other people, knowledge of self, aesthetic knowledge, ethical knowledge and metaphysical knowledge. Professor Nikolajeva will in this talk focus on the issue of whether fiction can be used as a source of knowledge and understanding of other people's minds, taking as a point of departure some recent studies at the crossroads of literary theory and cognitive science.

November 8 (Week 5): Words of Violence: Savages, Monsters and (Neo)colonial Writing. Alice Nuttall, Oxford Brookes University

Alice will present on her doctoral research at Oxford Brookes, which considers the portrayal of American Indians in children's literature and culture. Her paper examines the establishment of the savage stereotype in colonial children's literature about American Indians, and how that stereotype has continued into children's literature in the postcolonial period.

November 22 (Week 7): Do-It-Yourself Drama: Nineteenth-Century English Boys and Toy Theatre Play. Dr Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Associate Professor of Education and Women's Studies, Pennsylvania State University

In early nineteenth-century England, toy theatres (known as juvenile drama) were one of the most popular toys with middle-class children, especially boys. Toy theatres are elaborate paper artifacts that enable a child to stage a complete theatrical production in miniature by providing paper sheets of characters, scenes, wings, as well as a model stage and play script. In this talk Dr Reid-Walsh will discuss several boy consumers of the artifacts in terms of their purchasing and play strategies. She will examine first-person retrospective accounts and one child’s toy theatre set reassembled by a young Victorian boy in relation to the emerging consumer culture of the period.

Trinity Term 2010 Programme

2010-04-18T04:33:00.000-07:00

We're meeting 5.15pm odd Mondays in the History of the Book Room again this term; directions to the faculty can be found here - and here's what we have to look forward to:

Week 1 (April 26): Play, Edwardian Empire, and Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. Prof. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Wolfson College
Professor Boehmer will explore some of the many contradictions inherent in Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, a highly ideological text that expounds imperial values yet also promotes the creative and non-directed aspects of play and performance. She will question whether empire at its height in fact opened these contradictions, and if that might begin to explain why this period of literary history produced an outpouring of children's literature.

Week 3 (May 10): Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Secret Garden. Prof. Gretchen Gerzina, George Eastman Visiting Professor, Balliol College
Professor Gerzina will discuss the life and works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, especially with regard to her present-day reputation as an author primarily for children. Her most famous works for a child audience (The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy) were greatly overshadowed during her lifetime by the wealth of other material she produced, including 53 novels and thirteen plays written primarily for adults. The highest paid woman author of her time, Burnett's life and work will be re-examined in light of images, biographical materials, and new textual interpretation, reviving and reinterpreting the image of The Secret Garden's author that we have today.

Week 5 (May 24): Mirrors and Windows: Diversity and Children's Publishing. Ms Laura Atkins, Lecturer, National Centre for Research in Children's Literature (NCRCL), Roehampton University
Ms Atkins will look at recent controversies in the children's publishing world around race and representation, drawing partially from her own experience editing multicultural picture books in the United States. How are non-white characters represented in books published in the US, and how are these representations directed by the editorial and publication process? Recent discussion around this topic on the blogosphere will be shared before the floor is opened up for questions. With the election of a black president some have said the US is now a 'post-racial' society, but Ms Atkins will suggest just the opposite.

Week 7 (June 7): 'The Simple Creed / Of Childhood': Poetic Progeny and the Early Romantics. Amelia Greene, University College
Amelia's research for the M.St. focuses on issues of abandonment, illegitimacy, and independence as they relate to the status of children and ideas of childhood during the early part of the Romantic period. Examining the autonomous, non-social, foraging, 'natural' child found in both Wordsworth and Coleridge, and revisiting the Blakean representation of the dependent, socially and politically contingent, often urban, youth, Amelia will explore the ways in which Romantic poetry serves to simultaneously celebrate the literary ideal of the abstract 'Child' and to repress, neglect, or de-emphasise the troubled social status of British children during the period.

Hope to see many of you there!

Review: Wishing for Tomorrow, by Hilary McKay

2010-02-11T09:20:00.000-08:00

105 years on, Hilary McKay has produced a sequel to Francis Hodgson Burnett’s 1904 classic A Little Princess. Rising above its vague, sentimental title, Wishing For Tomorrow fleshes out the female characters that provide the backdrop to Sara Crewe’s story and gently raises serious questions about the class- and gender-based assumptions that are complicit in Sara’s restoration to privilege in the original. The inside cover of Wishing for Tomorrow calls the dire Miss Minchins’ school for girls a place where ‘fairytale endings do happen’, referring certainly to Sara’s rescue from the life of a scullery maid in A Little Princess but also, subversively, to the various ‘rescues’ of women by other women in this new sequel.

Sara’s friend Ermengarde serves as the protagonist of the sequel, and it is through her experiences that the reader discovers the tragedies behind the lives of many of the girls and women in A Little Princess. The icy headmistress Maria Minchin and the bully Lavinia emerge as particularly sympathetic characters, as McKay explores how poverty, neglect, and limited options might have strangled and embittered intelligent women in Edwardian England. Over the course of this generally lighthearted novel McKay re-imagines the plot that Burnett uses for Sara’s release from the Minchins’ and applies it to Lavinia: where the Indian Gentleman recognizes Sara’s inherent nobility and seeks to restore it to her by secretly furnishing her attic room with luxuries in A Little Princess, in Wishing for Tomorrow the new next-door neighbor swiftly grasps Lavinia’s intelligence and hunger for knowledge, and secretly gives her lessons to prepare her for university entrance exams to an Oxford college. McKay implicitly critiques the elitist, patriarchal, and even colonialist terms of Sara’s ‘fairy tale’ through this rewriting, but she does so—as she does with all of her critiques in this sequel—without overtly denouncing or overturning Burnett’s much-beloved novel.

 Various female characters from the original receive critical attention in McKay’s sequel, and perhaps the most interesting is Ermengarde’s appraisal of Sara Crewe after seeing a production of Peter Pan. Ermengarde asks herself, “[w]ho was Sara? If she, Ermengarde, was Wendy, forever staring from the window, surely Sara was the heartless person who had left her stranded there?” This likening of Sara to Peter Pan problematizes the idealization of Sara’s character in A Little Princess and raises questions about who it ultimately serves. Meanwhile, it encourages us children’s literature critic types to turn Jacqueline Rose’s famous question about the “impossibility of children’s literature,” the “case of Peter Pan,” onto Burnett’s novel and then in turn onto McKay’s. How and, crucially, why do these texts, written over 100 years apart, model childhood and adulthood in the way that they do? To what ends? McKay’s conclusion is a little bit too neat and convenient for a work that raises so many complex issues, but it agrees with the bright tone that the novel attempts to maintain from the original, while offering a very different view on what magical happy endings for girls and women might look like.

Wishing for Tomorrow: The Sequel to A Little Princess
By Hilary McKay
Illustrated by Nick Maland
Hodder Children’s Books, 2009
ISBN 978-0340956533
Now also out from Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 2010
ISBN 978-1442401693

Update: Next Seminar

2010-01-29T08:57:00.001-08:00

Professor Elleke Boehmer's talk on Scouting for Boys, initially advertised for week 3, will take place in week 4 due to scheduling conflicts. Same time (5.15pm), same place (History of the Book Room in the English Faculty), different date (Monday 8th February). Please see the term card for more information on Professor Boehmer's topic.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Hilary Term 2010 Schedule

2010-01-11T03:42:00.000-08:00

This term we're meeting on even Mondays at 5.15pm in the History of the Book Room, English Faculty Building. Click here for directions to the faculty.

18 January (Week 1): ‘Exemplified in a Series of Dresses: The Nineteenth-Century Paper Doll Book.’ Hannah Field, Somerville College.
Between around 1809 and 1830 the publishers and print-sellers S. and J. Fuller produced a number of what they billed as ‘esteemed and much admired JUVENILE BOOKS, with Figures which dress and undress’. These paper doll books consisted of a small black-and-white storybook, a number of separate coloured cut-out images of different costumes and a single cardboard head that was inserted into each costume to produce a complete illustration. Referring to examples from the Opie Collection at the Bodleian, DPhil student Hannah Field will discuss the ways these dress-up ‘figures’ generate an inordinate focus on clothing and fashion—as well as on the material properties of these books more broadly—that undermines the accompanying moralistic stories.

1 February (Week 3): ‘Play, Edwardian Empire and Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys.’ Prof. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Wolfson College.
Professor Boehmer will explore some of the many contradictions inherent in Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, a highly ideological text that expounds imperial values yet also promotes the creative and non-directed aspects of play and performance. She will question whether empire at its height in fact opened these contradictions, and if that might begin to explain why this period of literary history produced an outpouring of children's literature.

15 February (Week 5): ‘The Wild and the Cute: Disney Animation, Childhood and the Poetics of Nature.’ David Whitley, University of Cambridge.
Given the wealth of high quality animated productions that have recently focused on environmentally sensitive issues, it is worth asking whether there may be a tradition within popular, mainstream feature animation that such films are able to draw on in selective and distinctive ways. In this talk David Whitley, who teaches literature and film in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, explores the possibility that such a tradition does indeed exist and that its origins (perhaps rather surprisingly given the benighted status that is often accorded to Disney’s ideological credentials in recent writing) lie in the experiments that Disney undertook with the animated feature form in the classic period of its development.

1 March (Week 7): ‘Youth's Lifeworlds between Official Doctrine and its Challenges: The Local Dimension of the Soviet Young Communist League in the 1950s and 1960s.’ Katharina Uhl, St Antony’s College.
Katharina Uhl, DPhil candidate in the History Faculty and Rhodes Scholar, will focus on the way the Young Communist League, the official Soviet youth organization, positioned itself in the so-called Thaw period in Soviet history: the 1950s and 1960s. Stalin's death in 1953 opened the space for social, cultural and political changes. One of the means to fill the emerging gap between Party-state and society was the revival of the communist project. This was on the other hand challenged by various phenomena, including religion and nationalism, Western influence, and the growing importance of the private sphere. The presentation will examine this space of tension, ambivalence and contradictions with regard to the Young Communist League’s role in the life-worlds of young people.

Review: Nineteenth-Century Paper Doll Books

2009-12-03T04:33:00.000-08:00

Modern-day paper dolls typically entail a cut-out figure (cardboard) and a set of costumes (paper) that are hooked onto this figure with tabs, but the nineteenth-century originators of the form, the publishers and printsellers S. and J. Fuller, utilised a different format. The basic elements of their paper doll books, produced from around 1805 to 1815 but available well after this period, were a small black-and-white book containing a moralistic children's story, a number of coloured cut-out images printed separately on card, showing costumes but sometimes framing these in a wider scene, and a single coloured cardboard head. Each costume had a small tab at its back into which the 'stem' of the head could be inserted to produce a standalone illustration to the storybook.

What I find most interesting about these early paper doll books is the tension between word and image. Moveable books, as has been observed by a number of critics, are characterised by the interplay between narrative and spectacle, expressly, the visual spectacle of both their illustrations and the mechanics of those illustrations. Paper doll books add another dimension to this picture book economy: they focus on clothing and costume, which are inherently spectacular topoi in and of themselves.

To explore this tension further - the titular heroine of the Fullers' History of Little Fanny (1810) is reproached by her mother for her desire to 'show off' her new clothes; her narcissism is the catalyst for the subsequent misfortunes which befall her. But the paper doll figures perform an exactly parallel move when they display Fanny's outfits for the delectation of the child reader. Lucinda of Lucinda, the Orphan (1812) visits a nunnery and idly expresses a wish to join the order. A nun's habit is then produced, and the narrator is at pains to remark, in a manner that throws the book's costume-proud features into relief, 'How much she eclipsed the sisters of the veil need not be told'. Lucinda's hazy admiration for religious belief is much less important than her pleasing appearance in the garments of a nun. More broadly, the drive to propel costumes into each tale, dictated by the formal focus on the paper doll as technical innovation, generates pictorial subtexts which undermine the purported textual morals.

Some images of the Fullers' paper doll books are reproduced here.

Review: Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child

2009-12-02T14:36:00.000-08:00

Eff, born the unlucky thirteenth child of her large family, is the somewhat troublingly meek protagonist of Patricia Wrede’s The Thirteenth Child. Exploring an emblematically American frontier filled with magic, mythological/prehistoric beasts, and an encroaching enchanted wilderness that her generation will be called upon to combat, Eff struggles to cope with the stigma of her birth, as well as the shadow cast upon her by a magically talented twin brother. After the family is relocated to a growing university town near the Great Barrier, built to keep the dangerous but alluring wilderness at bay, Eff finds herself in that opportunistic space between civilization and wildness where she can begin to develop her hidden talents.

The book has received a lot of attention in the blog-o-sphere this year on the topic of Wrede’s erasure of native populations in her fantasy retelling of the American frontier story. From what I’ve read, these incensed readers offer more of a general critique than a textual one (that is, there isn't a lot of actual close reading that illustrates how colonial or possibly racist themes are played out in the writing), but I do agree with the underlying sentiment, which is that Wrede makes a huge misstep in failing to acknowledge the much more troubling American story that lies beneath Eff’s New World. Wrede’s fantasy, while frequently funny and occasionally enthralling, relies on the American fantasy, or on the erasure of parts of the American story that are ugly, cruel, devastating, and deeply important to remember. Unfortunately, Wrede’s world building suffers as a result of this removal, and the story feels a little plain despite all of Wrede’s storytelling magic.

The Thirteenth Child

by Patricia Wrede

Scholastic Press, April 2009

ISBN: 978-0545033428

Review: L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, illustrated by Graham Rawle

2009-12-02T05:36:00.000-08:00

Collage artist and author Graham Rawle’s 2008 edition of The Wizard of Oz features his cut-out, constructed, borrowed, photographed, glued, and photoshopped illustrations, whose wild hybridity make them appropriate modern companions to L. Frank Baum’s original text. The novel was first published in 1900, but Rawle admits to knowing the story primarily through the 1939 film adaptation, which reached its current iconic status through repeated US television airings beginning in the late 1950s. So it seems fitting that Rawle combines household objects and bits of trash with more traditional collage elements in digital layers to create an Oz that is simultaneously nostalgic and new.

His Oz is, like the Technicolor universe in the film, lush and bizarre and dependent on contemporary technology for the shocking aesthetic that marks it as a true otherworld. But while Rawle uses photographs and other mixed media combinations for a number of minor characters, Dorothy and her travelling companions are all intact, poseable toys, each vintage or reconstructed to look old and worn. The expressions of these characters remain frozen, their gestures stiff, but as the reader accompanies the homely playthings on their adventures through the bright, fantastical landscape, they become increasingly familiar and imbued with personalities. These toys, especially Dorothy, with her matted, patchy hair and homemade doll’s clothes, evoke a wistful air of remembered (or imagined) childhood play in an ambiguous earlier era. And yet the settings against which they pose could not exist without the aid of digital manipulation, and for this reason Rawle’s images seem to be themselves a kind of multi-layered play: they revel in building a comprehensive make-believe world from ordinary objects, project complex personalities onto beloved toys, and delight in the possibilities of new technology, showing it off in images that can include up to 200 digitally arranged layers.

Meanwhile, the large, heavy format of the book and the mixed-font excerpts of text inset on the margins of most pages hint at who is meant to join in this play. Although it can be read straight through, Rawle’s edition feels more like a coffee-table book for adults to flip through, looking at the illustrations and skimming the enlarged quotations as if reading a magazine (indeed, Rawle has also written a novel composed entirely of collaged words from women’s magazines). Thus Rawle’s The Wizard of Oz is in many ways a celebration of a now-past childhood experience of that story. The more disturbing images in the book invite adult readers to consider what role the strange, frightening, and unsettling play in childhood, and to examine their current uses for and reactions to this edition in this light. Meanwhile, the accompanying text, ‘complete and unabridged’, offers the opportunity for this self-referential edition to serve as the defining experience of The Wizard of Oz for a new generation.

The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by Graham Rawle

London: Atlantic Books, 2008

Hardcover, 352 pages

ISBN: 978-1582434551

£25.00

New! CLYCC Pub Trips

2009-11-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

There will now be the opportunity for more discussion and socialising following each CLYCC talk, as we will move on to informal drinks at a nearby pub afterwards. This week (8th week) we will head to the Turf Tavern from 6:15. These offer a relaxed way to get to know other scholars and people with academic interests in children's literature and/or youth culture studies. We hope to see you there! As with all CLYCC events, all are most welcome, and feel free to drop in even if you can't make the talk. Directions to the Turf can be found here.

Michaelmas Term 2009 Schedule

2009-09-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

The Oxford CLYCC continues to meet on even Mondays in term for the 2009-2019 academic year, at 5:15 PM in Room 11 of the English Faculty Building. Directions to the Faculty can be found here.

19 October (Week 2): Start-of-Year Drinks and Informational Session.
Come meet fellow scholars of children’s literature and youth culture studies. As always, all levels (including undergraduates and those new to the field) are most welcome.

2 November (Week 4): ‘Telling Stories at Campfire: Trying out Graphic Novels in Globalised India’.
Dr. Malini Roy, Independent Scholar.
Roy, an alumna of Keble College, Oxford, looks at the Campfire graphic novels for young readers being currently produced in India, where the genre boasts few published titles as yet. This talk addresses the peculiar dynamics governing this avant garde publishing venture in India's post- globalisation context, where the culture of leisure reading in English, traditionally associated with social privilege, is changing and expanding rapidly yet retains discernible links to the past.

16 November (Week 6): ‘At the Back of George MacDonald: Romanticism, Fairy Tales and the Redemptive Child’.
Prof. Bill Gray, University of Chichester.
Professor Bill Gray discusses George MacDonald's nineteenth-century children's works in relation to Romantic ideas about fairy tales and the redemptive power of children. Gray, who studied literature, philosophy and theology at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Princeton, is an expert in children's fantasy. His publications include the books Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann and Death and Fantasy: Essays on George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman and R.L. Stevenson.

30 November (Week 8): ‘Playing Dangerously: Transformational Moments in Children's Play within a Global Television Culture’.
Abby Loebenberg, Hertford College.
Social anthropologist, Rhodes Scholar, and Hertford DPhil candidate Abby Loebenberg discusses the findings of her 12-month ethnographic study in Vancouver, Canada on the consumption of commercial Japanese animated television and toys with multi-ethnic children up to age 11. Her work includes a detailed look this material in terms of how we theorise childhood anthropologically, the dangers of space and morality, playing pretend, using play for emotional growth and transformative play.

Centre for the History of Childhood: Becoming a Person, 4 July 2009

2009-06-22T03:45:00.001-07:00

Summer Common Room, Magdalen College, High Street, Oxford UK
Orgainized by Professor Laurence Brockliss and Professor George Rousseau. The conference probes concepts of personhood and identity in history.

9:30 – 9:45 Registration in the Summer Common Room

9:45 Introduction and Welcome by Laurence Brockliss (Magdalen College Oxford)

10:00 Olympia Bobou (Brasenose College Oxford), ‘A pais is a pais is a pais: the language of growing up in ancient Greece'

10:45 Sophie Oosterwijk (St Andrews University), ‘Cleansing power: Baptism and the medieval child’

11:30 TEA BREAK

12:00 George Rousseau (Magdalen College Oxford), 'Is Tristram Shandy a Person? Notions and Counter-notions of Personhood in the Enlightenment'

12:45 LUNCH in the New Room, Magdalen College

2:15 Laurence Brockliss (Magdalen College Oxford) and Richard Brown (Dalhousie University), ‘Marks of Personhood: Are Feral Children Human?’

Guest Chairs: Diane Smyth (St Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare, London) and Lyn Fry (Psychologist)

3:00 Heather Montgomery (Open University), ‘Becoming a being: before or after birth? The anthropological evidence’.

3:45 AFTERNOON TEA BREAK

4:15 Dominic Wilkinson (Green Templeton and the Ethox Centre, Oxford): ‘Premature infants, late-term fetuses, viability and moral status'

5:00 Summing Up

5:30 CONFERENCE ENDS

The cost of attendance will be £30 for those who wish to take lunch in the New Room. For those simply wishing to attend the colloquium, there will be a charge of £10 to cover administration costs and tea and coffee. Cheques should be made out to ‘Magdalen College’ and sent to Laurence Brockliss at Magdalen College, Oxford, OX1 4AU

For more information, go to the Centre for the History of Childhood page.

Trinity Term Schedule

2009-04-01T04:01:00.001-07:00

Please note that our meeting day and time has changed to Mondays at 5:15 PM in order to prevent clashes with other seminars, in particular our friends at the History of Childhood seminars. We will still meet in Room 11 of the English Faculty Building. All are very welcome! A map and directions to the English Faculty Building can be found here.

Monday, 4 May (week 2):
Barack Obama, Superhero: U.S Presidents, Comic Books, and the Heroic Imaginary
Brian Johnsrud, Hertford College, Oxford
Hertford graduate student and Rhodes Scholar Brian Johnsrud discusses Barack Obama’s disproportionate coverage in graphic novels and superhero television programs such as Heroes and Smallville. This talk suggests that America’s election of President Obama may have revealed not only a new historical precedent, but also a glimpse of how the cultural view of heroes is evolving.

Monday, 18 May (week 4):
Dark Horses: The Lives of Anna Sewell and Black Beauty
Dr Adrienne Gavin, Canterbury Christ Church University
Canterbury Christ Church University Reader in English Literature and Sewell biographer Adrienne Gavin discusses the lives of metaphorical dark horse Anna Sewell and her dark horse creation, Black Beauty, which became a phenomenon in fiction.

Monday, 1 June (week 6):
Low-Rent Boyfriends and Social-Climbing Sisters: Class, Sexuality, and Transgression in Gossip Girl
Ryan Richard Thoreson, Hertford College, Oxford
Rhodes Scholar Ryan Thoreson, a graduate student at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, examines the concept of transgression in the teen television dramedy Gossip Girl. He focuses especially on the roles of class and sexuality in both establishing boundaries and providing ways to cross them.

Monday, 15 June (week 8):
Disney's Alice, Hello Kitty's Alice, and Carroll's Alice: An Aspect of Children's Cultures in the US, UK, and Japan
Yasuko Natsume, Tsuda College, Tokyo
This talk examines American and Japanese animated film adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a means of accessing children's cultures in the US, UK, and Japan. Natsume's paper focuses on Disney’s self-supporting, independent Alice (who stands in contrast to the majority of early Disney princesses) and Sanrio’s 1993 Hello Kitty™ version, in which Kitty, a Japanese symbol of cuteness, plays the part of Alice.

Place and Space Conference Begins!

2009-03-27T01:45:00.000-07:00

The Place and Space in Children's Literature Conference opens this evening with Philip Pullman's keynote speech in Keble College's O'Reilly Theatre. This weekend we will welcome over 100 delegates representing institutions in more than thirteen countries to Oxford, including some of the most eminent names in children's literature studies. Prof. Peter Hunt, Prof. Maria Nikolajeva, Dr. Farah Mendlesohn, and many other children's literature academics will be speaking and participating during what promises to be a very rich conference.

Conference Registration, Panelist List, and Programme Up!

2009-01-27T01:29:00.000-08:00

Conference registration for the Place and Space in Children's Literature Conference, organized by the CLYCC, is now open at http://placeandspace.org/. This conference will take place on 27 -28 March, 2009 in Keble College, University of Oxford, and will feature the work of established academics and young scholars from around the world. Panels range from the place of Oxford in children's literature to text/image interplay in picture books to themes of postcolonial identity and cultural displacement in works for young people. There will also be a special session on working in the field of children's literature studies. More information on the panels, panelists, and conference programme can be found at http://placeandspace.org/programme/.

Late registration fees will apply after 15 February, 2009.

*There are a limited number of individual tickets available for the keynote speech, which will take place at 17:30 on Friday, 27 March in Keble College's OReilly Theatre. For those people that would like to attend Pullmans talk only, these tickets are £3 each. For more information, go to http://placeandspace.org/registration/pullman-keynote/.

Hilary (Winter) Term 2009 Schedule

2009-01-12T06:08:00.000-08:00

Thursdays, 5:00 PM in Room 11 of the English Faculty Building. All are very welcome!

Thursday, 29 January (week 2):
Rogue Heroes in History: Tricksters in William Godwin's
Early-Nineteenth Century Children's Books
Dr. Malini Roy, Keble College Oxford
Recent graduate of Keble College Malini Roy discusses her doctoral work on Romantic-era political theorist William Godwin. Roy considers how underdog figures in Godwin's books for children challenge and undo structures of oppressive authority, reflecting his anti-establishment politics in the post-French Revolutionary context.

Thursday, 12 February (week 4):
Exploratory Play and the Bid for Freedom in Arthur Ransome's
Swallows and Amazons
Hazel Sheeky, Newcastle University and the National Maritime Museum
Responding to concept of play as a rehearsal for later life, AHRC Collaborative PhD student Hazel Sheeky considers how far play in Ransome's series challenges the notion of inevitable progression from child to adult.

Thursday, 26 February (week 6):
Big Book News or Big Bad Wolves?: 21st Century Children’s Publishing
Dr. Claire Squires, Senior Lecturer in Publishing,
Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University
Dr. Squires explores some of the key issues around children’s publishing today, including how publishers harness the powers of social networking, multimedia synergies and character licensing; concerns about literacy and reading enjoyment (particularly among boys); distaste about celebrity ‘authorship’; and anxieties that the sector has been hijacked by big corporate publishers.

Thursday, 12 March (week 8):
Dreaming the World: Mirror worlds in Neil Gaiman's
Coraline and Mirrormask
Iain Emsley, Independent Researcher
Independent researcher Iain Emsley considers how Neil Gaiman reworks and develops Carrollesque looking-glass worlds in the mirrors of Coraline and Mirrormask, focusing on the girl protagonists’ roles in constructing such universes through curiosity and imagination.

Hilary Term CLYCC CfP

2008-12-06T16:38:00.000-08:00

The University of Oxford CLYCC is now soliciting paper proposals for its Hilary (winter) term seminar series. The CLYCC is a welcoming, exciting community in which to present your current work on topics in children's literature and youth culture studies. Academics, graduates, and high-level undergraduates from Oxford and beyond are all very welcome to send brief (200-300 word) proposals or informal statements of interest in the body of an email to maria[dot]cecire[at]keble[dot]ox[dot]ac[dot]uk by 19 December 2009.

Areas of study may include (but are not limited to) literary criticism, children's / young adult publishing, youth culture, and media studies.

CLYCC talks take place on Thursdays at 5:00pm, and papers are usually 20-40 minutes long, followed by a discussion.

*Please note that the CLYCC seminar series is different from the CLYCC's Place and Space in Children's Literature Conference, which will run 27-28 March, 2009 at Keble College, Oxford. Abstract submissions to the conference is now closed. For registration information, see http://placeandspace.org*

Lecture: Children's Literature and the Academy

2008-11-14T01:54:00.000-08:00

On Monday, 17 November at 4:00PM, Keble Fellow and Tutor Diane Purkiss will give a lecture entitled "Children's Literature and the Academy" in Lecture Theatre 2 of the English Faculty Building. This talk is aimed primarily at undergraduates, and will discuss the place of children's literature in academia. The lecture will be particularly pertinent to those students that are interested in pursuing children's literature studies at any point during their academic career, including during their time at Oxford. DPhil candidate and Keble Lecturer Maria Cecire will also be on hand to weigh in on working in this unique field.

Mrs. Leicester and Ulysses

2008-10-22T06:19:00.000-07:00

The Charles Lamb Society presents a half-day seminar in London on December 4, 2008 at which CLYCC co-founder Malini Roy will be a key speaker. The seminar will especially appeal to anyone with an interest in eighteenth-century/Romantic/early nineteenth-century children's literature. For complete information, see http://mrsleicesterandulysses.blogspot.com/

(For those staying in Oxford, the CLYCC will also meet that day for Ryan Richard Thoreson's talk on the Disney Pre-Teen Empire--see termcard below for more information.)

Place and Space Conference

2008-10-08T01:26:00.001-07:00

The website for our March 2009 conference is now up and running: for the Call for Papers, registration information, and more, see www.placeandspace.org

Michaelmas Term 2008 Schedule

2008-10-07T05:46:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to another exciting term of talks and discussions with the University of Oxford Children's Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium. We meet every second week on Thursdays at 5:00 PM in Room 11 of the English Faculty Building. All are welcome!

WEEK 2 (October 23rd):
De-Gnoming the Garden: Colonialism, Xenophobia, and Little People in The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter
Maria Cecire, Keble College
Keble graduate student and CLYCC convener Maria Cecire presents a segment of her doctoral thesis on Oxford-based children’s fantasy and the medieval tradition, drawing from one of her chapters on race and multiculturalism.

WEEK 4 (November 6th):
Meet the New Boss....Same as the Old Boss: Narratives, Strategies, and the Children’s Literature Police
Dr. Diane Purkiss, Keble College
Keble Fellow and children’s author Diane Purkiss discusses how writing for children and young adults is increasingly directed by a central consensus among authority figures while being presented as liberal. Addresses the work of C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, and Jenny Downham.

WEEK 6 (November 20th):
Pullman’s Land of the Dead
Dr. Margaret Kean, St. Hilda’s College
St. Hilda’s Fellow and Milton scholar Margaret Kean considers Philip Pullman’s depiction of Hell in His Dark Materials.

WEEK 8 (December 4th):
Adolescence and Ideology in the Disney Pre-Teen Empire
Ryan Richard Thoreson, Hertford College
Hertford graduate student Ryan Richard Thoreson examines the ideology of the Disney Channel's pre-teen lineup, paying special attention to the way that programs like Hannah Montana, The Suite Life of Zach and Cody, and High School Musical develop and supplement traditional Disney themes for children growing into adolescence.

Name Change and New Term

2008-09-30T05:34:00.000-07:00

In order to befuddle and confound you (and, I suppose, to better reflect what it is we actually do) we have changed our name to the Children's Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium. This change takes into account our interest in young adult literature and media beyond the printed page, and also reflects the flexibility of age categories when it comes to the texts that we study and discuss. We are gearing up now for the start of an exciting new year, which will feature our conference in March at Keble College (stay tuned for more: Philip Pullman will deliver the keynote and confirmed speakers include Peter Hunt, Maria Nikolajeva, Diane Purkiss, and Margaret Kean) in addition to our biweekly seminar series.

CLRG Trinity Term 2008 Schedule

2008-04-23T02:45:00.000-07:00

Hello! Welcome to a new term. All CLRG meetings this Trinity will be on Wednesdays at 4:00PM in Room 5 of the English Faculty Building. They will last about an hour. No prior reading is required this term, although suggested reading may be sent out in advance via our mailing list. Each talk will be followed by a discussion as usual. The Oxford CLRG is open to undergraduates, graduates, and faculty with an interest in children’s literature or childhood studies from a literary perspective.

Week 2: Maria Cecire, Keble College
Harry Potter and Post-9/11 Paranoia

Week 4: Anna Weilberg, St. Peter’s College
Magical Books and Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart series

Week 6: Johanna Koljonen, St. Edmund Hall
(Author of Finnish comic book Oblivion High)
Comic Books and Manga as Children’s Literature

Week 8: Kavita Mudan, Linacre College
Young Adult Rewrites of Shakespeare

Week 10: Malini Roy, Keble College
Children’s Literature in the Early 19th Century

March News Update

2008-03-26T06:10:00.000-07:00

This month we had a small but interesting meeting on boys' spy literature just before the end of term. Stay tuned for our next meeting date and topic.

Johanna and Maria both gave papers at the Canons of Children's Literature Conference at UC Berkeley on March 15, and heard some really interesting talks. For a list of papers given, go here.

Historian Paula Fass was the keynote speaker, and wanted us (you!) to know that the new peer-reviewed Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth is soliciting submissions, and are interested in literary criticism as well. So definitely have a look at their site.

The Berkeley Children's Literature Working Group ran the conference and we had some good discussions with them about potentially holding a similar one-day conference in Oxford next year. Please do get in touch if you're interested in helping to brainstorm, plan, or be in any way part of such an event.

February Meeting

2008-01-28T03:25:00.000-08:00

13 February 2008
2:00 PM
Wednesday of 5th Week
English Faculty Building, Rm. 5

To read and discuss: Stephanie Meyer's Twilight.

After our last insightful meeting on what Johanna terms "clique lit" for adolescent/teenage girls, we agreed that it would be beneficial and interesting to spend the next few sessions focused on recent trends in children's literature. We identified these broad genres as big at the moment:

--Werewolves/vampires in high school (Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Series)
--Child/teen spy books (the Alex Rider series, Ally Carter's I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You)
--Post-Harry Potter fantasy
--Manga/Graphic Novels

We thought that since we just did Upper East Side princesses in high school, we'd move to vampires in high school and start with Stephanie Meyer's Twilight to have a look at this Buffyesque phenomenon.

ALSO:

We discussed the role of marketing on children's literature today, and the way in which they are being used as advertising space as well as tied up in larger money-making endeavors such as films, television shows, and lines of products. Check out this article on Scholastic's computer game-driven new series of books that will serve as a follow-up to Harry Potter:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/books/18scho.html

Jan 2008 Meeting

2007-12-12T08:06:00.000-08:00

January 23, 2008
2:00pm
English Faculty Building, Rm. 5

Gossip Girls and Shopping Princesses: How a production company created a genre.
Johanna Koljonen, St. Edmund Hall

Gossip Girl, The Clique, The A-List, The Au Pairs, Pretty Little Liars, The It Girl – the bestselling "clique lit" (high school chick lit) novels are published by different publishing houses, but they all originate in the same office at US production company Alloy Entertainment, which is also copyright holder of the novels. Alloy is a leading provider of target group research, innovative marketing and consumer contacts within the teen segment. I will be speaking about how the books reflect the business model, and ask what Alloy is ultimately selling – and consider the possibility that these books are being used as advertising space.

Suggested reading: any titles in any of the above-mentioned series; they are quick reads, but if you don't have time to read whole books, pick a random chapter or two.

For an article on Alloy, see:
http://www.azcentral.com/ent/pop/articles/0701girlbook01.html

In case you can't get enough

2007-11-01T18:26:00.000-07:00

Philip Pullman again, this time 7:00PM Nov. 17th at St. John's College, reading as-yet unpublished work and talking about his writing. It's a fundraiser for Pegasus Theatre, so it costs £35. For more info, click on the title of the post.

Pullman debate

2007-10-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

Philip Pullman, author of the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, will be in conversation with Brian Mountford on Monday 22 October 2007 at 7.30pm, preceeded by drinks at 7pm. The discussion will explore his views on faith and Christianity as well as his writing and forthcoming film, the Golden Compass, part of which was filmed at St Mary's.

Welcome!

2007-10-18T04:16:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who came to the meeting yesterday--it looks like this year is going to be really productive! We've decided to meet every three weeks, beginning with a brief (~20 min) presentation by one of our members on her/his work, followed by a discussion of a related book that we'll have read in advance.

Our first meeting will be on Wednesday, 31 October in the English Faculty (St. Cross) Building, Room 5 at 2:00pm, and the following will be on Wednesday, 21 November in the same room at the same time. We hope to have a third meeting before the Christmas vacation, but will schedule that closer to the time. Below are brief outlines of what we'll be doing at each meeting:

31 October 2007
Creole Childhoods: memory, autobiography, postcolonialism
Louise Hardwick, Trinity College, 3rd yr. DPhil in French

This presentation will examine two different approaches to childhood by two prolific authors from the Caribbean, Maryse Conde (from Guadeloupe) and Patrick Chamoiseau (from Martinique). Texts considered are Conde's Le coeur a rire et a pleurer (trans. Tales from the heart) and Chamoiseau's trilogy of novels, 'Une enfance creole' (trans. in English 'Childhood').

How do these authors appropriate the motif of childhood to portray the postcolonial condition? What is the relationship between autobiography and fiction in this literature? The French terms 'recit d'enfance' and Lejeune's 'pacte autobiographique' will be discussed. Moreover, does the quest to reconstruct memory assume metaphorical, politicised urgency in the Francophone Caribbean context? Both authors have also produced children's literature, and I will conclude with brief discussion of these works (and bring two texts to pass round the group).

Discussion reading: 'School Days' by Maryse Conde. The whole story is available in English translation on Jstor.

21 November 2007
A Very Powerful and Convincing Mistake:
Pullman's Althusser, via Blake
Anna Sproul, Corpus Christi College, MSt English 1900-Present

Philip Pullman updates William Blake's critique of institutional Christianity to attack the institutions (what Althusser would call the ideological state apparatuses) typical of a capitalist society and these institutions' role in shaping children's identities. Judith Butler notes that Althusser's concept of ideological interpellation resembles "a highly religious scenario of a nominating call that comes from God," and Sproul believes that Pullman's main target, like Blake's, is not so much Christianity as the capitalist greed that acts with the tyranny of a god. Pullman attempts to offer children an alternative model for development - he encourages them to embrace, rather than deny, their unstable identities and view their consciousness as part of a collective sea of Dust rather than something particular. But Sproul doesn't find his alternative model too compelling; the Dust idea is just too logically inconsistent.

Discussion reading: You guessed it--Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

Other dates to keep in mind:

27 November 2007
The Christmas Challenge and the National Home in the Oxford School of Children’s Literature
Maria Cecire, Keble College, 2nd year DPhil in English
8:15pm in Pusey House, St. Giles
(Talk for the Lewis Society)

Be sure to let us know if you have anything coming up!