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.

The Swedish illustrator and author Eva Lindström is an explorer of relationships – between human beings, animals, and the outside world. Her relational storyworld is inhabited by a host of humans and animals and things. No essential difference can be seen in her work between human and animal characters in terms of agency and subjectivity, yet the animal-human nexus allows Lindström to explore relational themes in depth and with great economy. The theoretical framing of my reading of two of her picturebooks – Musse (My Dog Mouse, 2016) and Lunds hund (Lund’s dog, 2013) – derives from Martin Buber’s classic work of relational theology, I and Thou (1923), and from a few passages in Jacques Derrida’s foundational work in Animal studies, The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997). These seminal works in Animal studies are, furthermore, discussed and nuanced with the help of John Berger’s and Donna Haraway’s contributions to the field. My thesis is that Lindström’s visual representations offer a complement and posthumanist corrective to Buber’s and Derrida’s fundamentally human-centered systems of thought. The pictures – as well as the sparse, precise words – decenter the human and focus on animal-human relationships. In so doing, Lindström peels away “the crust of thinghood,” to use Buber’s term. Finally, the animal-human gaze is essential to my discussion; the way in which Lindström’s characters (human and animal) look (or avoid looking) at each other is revelatory. And while the human and animal gaze for both Buber and Derrida is a sign of human power and indicative of self-recognition/revelation, the direction and meaning of the gaze in Lindström’s art also points towards the reciprocity of common creaturehood.

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.

Review/Recension