Wondering About Rapunzel: Reading and Responding to Feminist Fairy Tales with Seventh Graders Abstract Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Nathan Hale’s graphic novel set Rapunzel’s Revenge (2008) and Calamity Jack (2010) features fractured fairy tales that take up the issue of ‘the damsel in distress,’ questioning and complicating traditional gender roles in fairy tales. Throughout both graphic novels Rapunzel’s character challenges traditional representations of being feminine within the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 2006). And, in many instances, Rapunzel does this by blending masculine and feminine traits, rather than trading one for the other. However, she also falls back into traditional fairy tale tropes that maintain boundaries around who women are and what they can do in these narratives. Because of the opposing narratives of femininity in these Rapunzel-influenced graphic novels, there were openings for seventh grade students reading these texts in their English Language Arts class to notice, critique, and question the texts and their messages. By exploring both the texts and students’ responses to them in detail, this article focuses on textual tensions around gender representation that offer opportunities for young people to critique and analyze reading a “wonder tale.” These young readers wondered and re-imagined how gender and femininity could be represented, not only in fairy tales, but also in their worlds beyond the text. Ultimately this article seeks to advocate for books that take up a more complex and fluid portrayal of what it means to be human and reading practices that support that complexity and fluidity.

The Influence of the Arab Spring on Arabic YA Literature Abstract This study explores the impact of the political uprisings in the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring, on Arabic YA literary books. It is based on a content analysis of the Etisalat Book Award’s shortlisted entries for the period 2012–2016. It is argued that both children’s and YA literature of the Arab World subsequently became more open about discussing political and social events. While it could be argued that warfare and political instability have proved fruitful in providing material for stories, generally this fiction represents an optimistic trend, advocating peace as a healthy alternative to war. The findings of this article should enable all those interested in both children’s and YA literature to discover more authentic, literary, Arabic YA books.

Children’s Literature and Nation Building: The Basque Case Abstract The Basque Country is a stateless nation located in the western part of the Pyrenees, divided between France and Spain. The romanticist nationalist trend that emerged in Europe throughout the nineteenth century gave rise to a nationalist feeling in the Basque Country that has been fed, among others, by children’s literature. Children’s literature written in Basque throughout the twentieth century in many cases had a clear educational intentionality. The need to create a Basque community, a tradition and customs of their own during Francoism resulted in the production of a literature with a clear nationalist profile. Nevertheless, the political change after the end of the Franco dictatorship, with greater freedom and autonomy for the Basque Country, gave rise to a literary production in which those aesthetic values prevail. A literature that, from the local perspective, encompasses universal subjects in which emphasizing the specificities of the Basque is no longer necessary, as today it aims to present individual and universal conflicts.

Femininity and Gender in Contemporary Chinese School Stories: The Case of Tomboy Dai An Abstract School stories in contemporary China, which target a pre- and early-adolescent readership, frequently evoke representations of girlhood and boyhood in normative gender terms. The present article considers issues of femininity and gender in Tomboy Dai An(Jia Xiaozi Dai An), one among a series of commercially successful school stories by the popular female author Yang Hongying. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and sexuality with a primary focus on Judith Butler’s work, the article examines critically the text’s representations of femininity, its construction of ideal womanhood, and the strenuous labour invested in correcting gender deviations. It is posited that, on the one hand, Yang’s text, written with the overt intention to enhance children’s gender awareness, serves to guide female children into traditional feminine roles, and as such, risks reaffirming gender stereotypes and perpetuating patriarchal values. On the other hand, by revealing the contingency associated with gendered identities, and by acknowledging that deliberate—and sometimes even violent—efforts need to be made to preempt and correct gender deviations, the text sets out to question, paradoxically and inadvertently, the very stability and authority of gender as a natural fact, calling attention instead to its improvisatory and performative nature. Despite its effort to shape the thinking of young readers, the text nonetheless presents the pre- and early-adolescent years as a potentially deviant site where different possibilities of gender play out.

From Representation to Participation: Rethinking the Intercultural Educational Approach to Folktales Abstract In multi- or intercultural educational contexts, folktales from around the world are often approached as representative of diverse cultures and used to transmit knowledge and understanding of the literary, social and cultural heritage of those cultures to children. In this article, I present contemporary critical literary, folklore and cultural studies’ perspectives to argue that this approach is conceptually problematic, risks reifying reductive notions of cultural difference, and does not take into account children’s active role in meaning-making processes. As an alternative, I suggest an understanding of the potential intercultural educational benefits of folktales from diverse cultural traditions in terms of children’s intercultural participation. Drawing on qualitative empirical data from a large-scale reading intervention program in Dutch kindergarten and second grade groups, this article illustrates how children from diverse cultural backgrounds use their diversity of knowledge and experience to interpret folktales from diverse cultural traditions. Based on these preliminary findings, I identify several possible intercultural benefits to be gained from valuing children’s culturally diverse contributions in today’s culturally diverse classrooms. While several limitations need to be taken into account, I argue that further research into the potential intercultural benefits of folktales should not only focus on issues of textual representation, but also on children’s active intercultural participation.

Redeeming the Medusa: An Archetypal Examination of Ted Hughes’ The Iron Woman Abstract For decades, feminists have tried to dismantle and argue against the image of the Medusa as a figure of female monstrousness. This paper claims that the celebrated British author and poet Ted Hughes, in his novella for children, The Iron Woman, redeemed the Medusa and presented her in a new light that revealed her as a victim, a healer, and a generator of lives. The Iron Woman is an eco-fable that aims at creating environmental awareness amongst teenagers and adults alike. Reading the work of Ted Hughes reveals that he is a staunch believer in the necessity of shocking his readers into truly fathoming the dangers of a deteriorating Mother Nature. This paper will develop two arguments: one concerns global environmental issues, while the second is related directly to the personal life of Ted Hughes. The first argument proposes that Hughes made extensive use of the myth of the Medusa in order to convey a universal message, that Mother Earth cannot be redeemed from humanity’s insistence on destroying her unless all human beings are able to delve deep down into their psyche, stare fear in the face and own up to the fact that they are responsible for the decay that has come upon her. The Medusa here is a metaphor for humanity’s fear of encountering its own dark deeds. The second argument puts forward a theory that Ted Hughes the man is also implicated in this redemption process, which cannot take place unless he too stares fear in the face and acknowledges his partial responsibility for his wife’s suicide. In the second argument, the Medusa becomes a metaphor for a defiled, victimized woman—for Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide shortly after she discovered that Ted Hughes had committed adultery. In much the same manner that Hughes used to “drive through Sylvia’s poems”, as his poem “The City” reveals, this paper proposes that Hughes appears to have “co-authored” The Iron Woman with Plath by invoking her presence at every turn—that she was his Medusa, and that the Medusa was his muse for this particular novella. More than a muse, the Medusa was a magical healer for Hughes, who believed in the medicinal power of myths.

Rewriting American History in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry : Metahistoricity, the Postcolonial Subject, and the Return of the Repressed Abstract Writing as an African American woman existing at the margins of American society in the mid 1970s, Mildred D. Taylor demonstrated a postmodern awareness of fictionality and history in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976). Reworking African American history from the point of view and voice of a black subaltern female child, Taylor succeeds in recovering a silenced and repressed history of African Americans, and in adding that history to the larger American experience. Instead of reinforcing and perpetuating negative stereotypes of blacks—individual or collective—that are historically produced by and distributed in a white society, and taking their passive, marginalized, and violated status for granted, Taylor represents African Americans as active agents, who can employ strategic resistance—”trickery” and “disidentification”—in order to reappropriate dominant, repressive discourses for their own purposes to survive in a racist society. In doing so, Taylor does not make her historical fiction merely serve as a record of conventional history. Instead, she creates a meaningful place in which the once ostracized, discriminated against, and marginalized voice not only can be heard, recognized, and respected, but also the formerly voiceless Others can be transformed into historical subjects or agents able to challenge master narratives and hierarchies.

Contesting Controlling Images: The Black Ballerina in Children’s Picture Books Abstract Though critics have debated the gendered ideologies at work in the ballet book genre, discussion so far has overlooked how race shapes the meanings of such stories and the ways that stereotypes about black females have caused them to be excluded from representation in both the world of classical dance and ballet stories. This essay provides a close textual analysis of seven recent picture books about black ballerinas that counter this history and employ the figure of the ballerina in ways that challenge social constructions of black female embodiment. While stories about black ballerinas share with the larger ballet book genre a sometimes troubling construction of femininity, they simultaneously embody the affirmative tradition of African American literature by asserting the beauty and competency of black girls and challenging what Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images” of black femininity.

Children’s Magical Realism for New Spatial Interactions: Augmented Reality and the David Almond Archives Abstract This article draws on a multi-disciplinary project based on the David Almond archives at Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The project combined archival research, augmented reality (AR) technology, Almond’s magical realist writing and experimental workshops to explore whether AR can enhance young people’s engagement with archives and literature. In the process it highlighted the extent to which Almond’s fiction is itself a form of augmentation that represents a particular geographical location—the North East of England—in ways that challenge official accounts of that place. This aspect of Almond’s writing corresponds to what Michel de Certeau describes as tactical spatial practice and is closely associated with some forms of AR.

“I Am the Eternal Green Man”: Holistic Ecology in Reading Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls Abstract Holistic ecology considers nature and society as a whole, viewing humans and the environment as interdependent and interconnected. This article takes the lens of holistic ecology to examine the representation of human–nature relationships in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls (2011) and explores how the novel guides the child reader to an environmental mind-set beyond overt didacticism. The article focuses on two aspects of the bond between the magical tree and the human characters in the novel: how the powerful tree empowers humans and how the human characters contribute to the tree’s expressions of power. The eternal Green Man—as the tree introduces itself—embodies this bond by being simultaneously tree-like and human-like, a complex merger of “the Green” (nature) and “the Man” (humanity). The monster-tree fulfils several powerful and empowering roles, such as monster and storyteller, destructive force and powerful healer, savage and philosopher, nightmare and escape. Importantly, it always keeps the shape of a yew tree. As such, A Monster Calls can contribute to children’s environmental education by illustrating the connection between the natural environment and humans: the eternal bond between “the Green” and “the Man.”