This chapter argues that the production of Ukrainian children's war literature may be regarded as an act of resistance, in as much as it kindles hope for the future, nurtures solidarity between different groups in Ukrainian society, fosters resilience in the face of hardship, and in some cases even teaches practical survival skills. Significantly, it participates in creative resistance in part by regularly evoking the past in order to project an anticipated peaceful future. Thus, this chapter further demonstrates that Ukrainian war narratives valorize Ukraine's past - its history, traditions, folklore, and mythology - while linking it to the future. Thus, in a sense, Ukrainian (projected) identity is produced through books that play the role of metaphorical seeds of memory.

Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” stands as the most famous nonsense poem of all time. Frequently seen as untranslatable, it has nevertheless (or for that very reason) become a touchstone of translation. Yet, although there are several language specific studies of “Jabberwocky” in translation, a broader comparative approach has not been attempted before. With this companion volume we provide insights into the translation history of “Jabberwocky” from its 1871 publication in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass up to the present. The book includes articles by scholars, critics, translators and poets from across the world. For the first time, it will be possible to compare translation strategies and solutions between more than forty different languages, each contributor focusing on one or a few critically and poetically interesting translations of “Jabberwocky.”

Eating Cultures in Children’s Literature – National, International and Transnational Perspectives investigates how the child is positioned as the consumer/eater of cultural food. It also highlights some ingredients that are to be found on more than one national menu, so to speak. We interrogate what it means to serve a “cultural meal” to a young person, identifying the discourses that are inscribed in the recipe. By analyzing authorial or translational choices, the different chapters explore the thematic and ideological roots of the stories that authors, illustrators and translators offer their young readers. The essays in this collection are organized around three themes in children’s cultural and literary texts about food and eating. In the first section, the political dimensions of food narratives are explored. Food’s power to define “us” versus “them” is key to understanding food narratives in their national and political contexts. The second part is dedicated to inter/national and transnational nightmares, specifically narratives addressing the supreme threat lurking in young people’s literature: being eaten. Finally, the collection features a section on food fantasies in young people’s narratives, and addresses the disconcerting capability of food to transform, translate, transcend and become abundantly surreal, without ever losing the power to marvel and satiate, even when it conveys complex concepts and ideas.

This chapter aims to shed light on the discourse of skiing and Swedishness in three winter picturebooks and one illustrated book. The argument is that these books both reflect and create skiing as a national sport. A geographical setting can produce connotations to a specific climate and landscape, but for a nation-state to become a meaningful place—an “imagined community”—it will have to be associated with certain culturally coded ways of being and acting in response to the physical world. In a Swedish context, skiing provides the “Swedishness” of the place/nation. The main examples under scrutiny are Elsa Beskow’s Olle skidfärd (Olle’s Ski Trip) from 1907, a winter fantasy with strong nationalist connotations; further, Bertil Almqvist’s Barna Hedenhös Vinterresa (The Winter Journey of the Hedenhös Children) (1958), which rewrites the nationalist agenda as a story of technical and social progress; and finally Tove Jansson’s two related texts, Moominland Midwinter (1957) and the comic strip “Moomin’s Winter Follies,” in which Jansson subverts some of the prevalent skiing and winter sports stereotypes, are examined. While these narratives (and many others) are about skiing, layers of meaning are added over time (like snow), none of which vanish completely. In the three iterations we see in the chapter, skiing is associated with nationalist winter fantasy, utopian progress, and comic subversion. 

This chapter addresses the “where” of children’s literature – that is, the settings, the playworlds, the places and spaces of the fictional universe, and the maps and means by which stories make room(s) in the minds of readers. The underlying assumption is that a sense of place (the “where”) is central to the experience of literature. Drawing on examples from the international canon of children’s literature, we show how critics, from Bakhtin and Lewis to Tuan, Bachelard, and Lefebvre, have theorized literary geography (in a wide sense) and developed different critical approaches to it.

In this article I analyze Tove Jansson’s art of the miniature. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s conceptualization of the miniature and adapting it to the critical discourse of children’s literature and the miniature, I argue that Jansson’s verbal and visual art in general, and in the Moomin series in particular, can be understood in terms of a “miniaturizing imagination”. Thus, the miniature in Tove Jansson’s work – verbal, visual, artifactual – typically achieves condensation and enrichment rather than reduction, a “poetic space” to use Bachelard’s term. Tove Jansson’s “muminalism” serves to open up the fictional world of the Moomintrolls in an act of fictional world-building.

Dans cet article, j’analyse l’art de la miniature chez Tove Jansson. En m’appuyant sur la conceptualisation de la miniature de Gaston Bachelard et en l’adaptant au discours critique sur la littérature de jeunesse et la miniature, je soutiens que l’art verbal et visuel de Jansson en général, et dans la série Moomin en particulier, peut être compris en termes d’une « imagination miniaturisante ». Ainsi, la miniature – verbale, visuelle, artefactuelle – dans l’œuvre de Tove Jansson atteint généralement la condensation et l’enrichissement plutôt que la réduction, un « espace poétique » pour reprendre le terme de Bachelard. Le « muminalisme » de Tove Jansson sert à ouvrir le monde fictif des Moomins par un acte de construction d’un monde fictif.