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Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature
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Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2023) | Viewed by 19422

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Neil Cocks

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of English Literature, School of Literature and Languages, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6UR, UK
Interests: psychoanalysis; children’s literature; education theory; film theory; visual culture; literary perspective; the uncanny; C 19th literature; physics and literature

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

According to a recent article in The Guardian, the ‘questions of representation that have upended Hollywood, television and politics in recent years are now hitting the world of children’s literature hard’. We agree and agree also with the article's subsequent celebration of the increased diversity of representation in texts for children, as well as their growing willingness to engage with an expanded range of political issues. We would also suggest, however, that this achievement ironically brings with it a narrowing of debate: mainstream contemporary discussion tend to focus on 'representation', while overlooking issues of literary perspective and textual difference that might question this operation. Likewise, texts are regularly judged on their ability to raise consciousness, but the notions of audience and knowledge that this ability calls upon can be neglected. Furthermore, when a particular political intervention is praised, certain aspects of its history are often left outside the frame.

We invite article submissions that move away from thinking about Children's Literature and the political in an instrumental fashion and turn instead to the question of how both the political in general and the political subject in particular are constructed within Children's Literature texts. Articles might address the framing of debates, their constitutive antagonisms, or their occluded histories.  

Submissions that engage with the construction of political issues in Children’s Literature through detailed textual analysis are particularly welcome.

Research Questions:

Suggested topics include, yet are not confined to, the following:   

  • How are political debates framed within Children's Literature, and how might the frame impact upon notions of the political?    
  • What authority or law is required within narratives of rebellion or resistance?  What are the limits of subversion? 
  • What are the excesses of or supplements to identity within narratives of identity?  
  • How can narratives of political agency be questioned in and through Children’s Literature?   
  • What are the implications of historicizing a political debate addressed within contemporary Children’s literature?  
  • What structures are called upon or go unrecognized in political narratives for children?   
  • How might notions of consciousness-raising be questioned?   
  • How might questions of political economy be returned to a reading of Children’s Literature?  

Dr. Neil Cocks
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • children’s literature
  • identity politics
  • resistance
  • narration
  • consciousness-raising
  • historicism
  • agency
  • children
  • environmentalism
  • race
  • nationalism
  • disability
  • religion
  • queer
  • political economy

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 259 KiB  
Article
“Education Is a Cultural Weapon”: The Inner London Education Authority and the Politics of Literature for Young People
by Karen Sands-O’Connor
Humanities 2023, 12(5), 109; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050109 - 28 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1936
Abstract
The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was founded in 1965 to manage education in London’s inner boroughs; by the early 1970s, it was held up as one of the most progressive education experiments in British history. One of the marks of this progressiveness [...] Read more.
The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was founded in 1965 to manage education in London’s inner boroughs; by the early 1970s, it was held up as one of the most progressive education experiments in British history. One of the marks of this progressiveness was its attention to London’s Black child population and its attempts to connect with Black culture through multiculturalism. However, while the ILEA prided itself on its anti-racist, multicultural education methods, its publication arm often provided mixed messages about the value and place of Black students in the education system and society. Multiculturalism, which the ILEA used to guide the production of reading materials, often resulted in a lack of cultural specificity and an avoidance of issues facing Black students, such as racism. Partnering with Black educators allowed the ILEA to offer more culturally specific and anti-racist material, but doing so also brought the ILEA to the attention of critical governmental authorities, who would eventually disband the ILEA out of fear of Black radicalism. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature)
13 pages, 238 KiB  
Article
‘The Swallowed Beloved’: Corporeality and Incorporation in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book
by Kristina West
Humanities 2023, 12(5), 97; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050097 - 14 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1802
Abstract
In keeping with the focus of this special edition of Humanities on the political child, this article builds on investigations into constructions of the child body in literature and society to examine how portrayals of the child body in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard [...] Read more.
In keeping with the focus of this special edition of Humanities on the political child, this article builds on investigations into constructions of the child body in literature and society to examine how portrayals of the child body in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book repeatedly slip under the varying perspectives of the adults; that is, how adult politics are always at play in understandings of children and childhood both within and outside of the text. In taking this approach, this article focuses on two key texts in literary discussions of spectrality, bodies, and signification—Hamlet and ‘Fors’—to consider how the paradoxical child body in Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is both constructed within the adult perspective and constantly slips from it, and how Gaiman approaches the issue at the heart of this analysis: that of who gets to decide who or what a child is, should be, or can be. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature)
15 pages, 1505 KiB  
Article
What Is a Child in What Is a Child?
by Yuna Nam
Humanities 2023, 12(3), 49; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030049 - 13 Jun 2023
Viewed by 1906
Abstract
This paper is an extended analysis of the English translation of Beatrice Alemagna’s picture book What is a Child? By extended analysis, I am referring to sustained engagement with the constitutive textual framing and narrative perspective of the picture book. Through this approach, [...] Read more.
This paper is an extended analysis of the English translation of Beatrice Alemagna’s picture book What is a Child? By extended analysis, I am referring to sustained engagement with the constitutive textual framing and narrative perspective of the picture book. Through this approach, my aim is to draw out the specific antagonisms necessary to its concept of ‘child’. The child, for What is a Child?, is never quite a self-evident and isolated identity. Rather, it is (to take just three examples): constituted by a perspective on it, and other to it; other to itself, because of the various contradictions in its pictorial and textual constructions; split between name and being. The understanding of the child that emerges runs counter to Marah Gubar’s subtle critique of the child as a contradictory identity, knowable, but only in a piece-meal fashion. My understanding of what Jacqueline Rose calls the ‘impossibility’ of the child is rooted, instead, in an understanding of it as self-cancelling, unavailable as an in-itself identity shorn of its constitutive others, an identity, I argue, that can be addressed only through an approach that is non-essentialist and narration-focused. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature)
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16 pages, 329 KiB  
Article
On the Tolerance of Children’s Literature Criticism: Psychoanalysis, Neighborliness, and Pooh
by Neil Cocks
Humanities 2023, 12(3), 45; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030045 - 6 Jun 2023
Viewed by 1743
Abstract
This article challenges David Rudd’s recent criticism of ‘The Reading Critics’ school of children’s literature criticism, which he takes to be problematic in so far as it is intolerant towards traditions that stray outside its own narrow concerns. Rudd forwards in its place [...] Read more.
This article challenges David Rudd’s recent criticism of ‘The Reading Critics’ school of children’s literature criticism, which he takes to be problematic in so far as it is intolerant towards traditions that stray outside its own narrow concerns. Rudd forwards in its place an approach that is generous and dynamic. Through a close reading of Rudd’s analysis of both Winnie-the Pooh and psychoanalysis, this article understands the politics and poetics of tolerance to open some difficult questions. What are the limits of tolerance? Is what Rudd forwards merely a tolerance of the tolerable? Is his forgiving attitude to the work of ‘The Reading Critics’, as he mourns their passing, tolerance also? What if these critics were to object to such tolerance, or read violence or erasure within it? Most significantly, this article is interested in how such tolerance, and the celebration of open community, fits within the ‘broadly Lacanian framework’ that Rudd elsewhere champions. As Lacan has, at best, an ambivalent attitude to the politics of neighborliness, this article argues that the defense of a ‘broad’ and tolerant approach to theory that calls upon his work is only made possible by arguments that neglect the specifics of Lacan’s writing. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature)
15 pages, 764 KiB  
Article
Coming-of-Age of Teenage Female Arab Gothic Fiction: A Feminist Semiotic Study
by Zoe Hurley and Zeina Hojeij
Humanities 2023, 12(1), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12010019 - 14 Feb 2023
Viewed by 3568
Abstract
This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in the context of children’s and young adults’ Arab Gothic literature. Across the Middle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oral storytelling who, in diegetic terms, can [...] Read more.
This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in the context of children’s and young adults’ Arab Gothic literature. Across the Middle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oral storytelling who, in diegetic terms, can manifest as the Gothic figure of an aging female, deranged older woman or succubus (known as sa’lawwa in Arabic). In this study, a novel feminist semiotic framework is developed to explore the extent to which the Gothic female succubus either haunts or liberates Arab girls’ coming-of-age fictions. This issue is addressed via a feminist semiotic reading of the narratives of Middle Eastern woman author @Ranoy7, exploring the appeal of her scary stories presented on YouTube. Findings reveal tacit fears, ambivalences and tensions embodied within the Arab Gothic sign of the aging female succubus or jinn. Overall, the research develops feminist insights into the semiotic motif of the female jinn and its role in constituting Arab females as misogynistic gendered sign objects in the context of the social media story explored. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature)
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11 pages, 235 KiB  
Article
Constructing the ADHD Child in Historical Children’s Literature
by Xiaoyu Hou
Humanities 2023, 12(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12010003 - 21 Dec 2022
Viewed by 2258
Abstract
In this article, debates around ideas of childhood and disability will be engaged through the close reading of the retrospective diagnosis of a child with ADHD in an early work of German children’s literature (also widely translated, including into English in 1848), Heinrich [...] Read more.
In this article, debates around ideas of childhood and disability will be engaged through the close reading of the retrospective diagnosis of a child with ADHD in an early work of German children’s literature (also widely translated, including into English in 1848), Heinrich Hoffmann’s poem Struwwelpeter. ADHD is one of the most widely diagnosed and medicated childhood developmental disorders of the present day. At the same time, recent debates have raised questions about the diagnostic criteria, the potential side effects and efficacy of medication, and the impact of the current political context on the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s classic arguments about bio-power (2008), as well as the most recent work of critical psychology on childhood developmental disorders, the article draws out both how retrospective diagnoses of ADHD and other disorders, including Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), are defined by current criteria within the political context of the current psychological, cultural, and medical controversies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature)
15 pages, 2791 KiB  
Article
Letting Go, Coming Out, and Working Through: Queer Frozen
by Neil Hayward Cocks
Humanities 2022, 11(6), 146; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060146 - 24 Nov 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3925
Abstract
This article builds on an already established understanding of Disney’s Frozen as a queer text. Following Judith Butler, however, it works against a notion of ‘queer’ that is locatable in the intrinsic truth of plot, imagery, and character, and removed from questions of [...] Read more.
This article builds on an already established understanding of Disney’s Frozen as a queer text. Following Judith Butler, however, it works against a notion of ‘queer’ that is locatable in the intrinsic truth of plot, imagery, and character, and removed from questions of performance and narration. In taking this approach, and in keeping with the focus of this Special Edition of Humanities, the article undertakes an extensive, fine-grained reading of ‘Let it Go’, the stand-out song from the first Frozen film. Rather than argue for or against the idea that ‘Let it Go’ is a Coming Out song, issues of textual perspective and textual difference are foregrounded in a way that challenges claims to the stability of identity. The pressing question, for this article, is not whether the lead character of Frozen truly is ‘out’, but the possibility of fixing identity in this way, the precise nature of the reversals and antagonisms that being ‘out’ and ‘letting it go’ require in this particular text, and how such determinations might impact on a wider understanding of ‘queer’. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature)
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