Representing childhood and atrocity / edited by Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Nesfield, Victoria, 1984- editor.

Smith, Philip, 1983- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Atrocities in literature.

Children and genocide.

Children in literature.

Genocide in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (329 unnumbered pages) : illustrations

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2022]

Summary:

"Atrocity presents a problem to the writer of children's literature. To represent events of such terrible magnitude and impersonal will as the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, or the Rwandan genocide such that they fit into a three-act structure with a comprehensible moral and a happy ending is to do a disservice to the victims. Yet to confront children with the fact of widescale violence without resolution is to confront them with realities that may be emotionally disturbing and even damaging. Despite these challenges, however, there exists a considerable body of work for and about children that addresses atrocity. To examine the ways in which writers and artists have attempted to address children's experience of atrocity, this collection brings together original essays by an international group of scholars working in the fields of child studies, children's literature, comics studies, education, English literature, and Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies. It covers a broad geographical range and includes works by established authors and emerging voices."--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction / Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith

Part 1: Late twentieth-century genocides

Children’s humanitarian arts and the genocide in Darfur: drawing loss and atrocity / Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba

Framing the unframeable : Deogratias and the horror of genocide / Kaitlyn Newman

Tracing trauma: childhood, innocence and memory in Cypriot children’s literature since 1974 / Maria Chatzianastasi

Part 2: The Holocaust

Beyond the ovens : the changing nature of Holocaust children's literature / Barbara Krasner

Gendered behavior in Uri Orlev’s and Kathy Kacer’s literature about the Holocaust for children / Rosemary Horowitz

A sonnet of atrocity: a consideration of a poem written by a child at the Terezín concentration camp / Mary Catherine Mueller

Part 3: Dictatorships

Communism for children : fiction mediation and representations of past wrongdoings / Simona Mitroiu

The uses of allegory to tell youth disappearance and mortality under Spain's dictatorship in Ana María Matute's 1956 Los niños tontos (The foolish children) / Lora L. Looney

Confronting atrocity through geometry : Franco's first illustrated biography / María Porras Sánchez

Part 4: Institutions and domestic structures

Picture books and parrhesia : Canadian residential schools and answering the TRC’s calls to action / Caroline Bagelman

Hidden atrocities in the cinematic representation of Chinese girlhoods / Chengcheng You

Nursery atrocities : the Australian children's classic The magic pudding / Jayson Althofer and Brian Musgrove

Freedom in fiction : trickster tales and enslavement in the United States / Megan Jeffreys.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781438490762

1438490763

OCLC:

1348488409