The Politics of Text and Image in Children’s Culture by Efimova, Svetlana; Balina, Marina;

Short description:

This edited volume proposes a new perspective on how children's literature interacts with politics: its chapters focus not only on politics and literature or politics in literature, but primarily on the politics of text and image. 

Long description:

This edited volume proposes a new perspective on how children's literature interacts with politics: its chapters focus not only on politics and literature or politics in literature, but primarily on the politics of text and image. Following Jacques Rancière's philosophy, the collection understands The Politics of Text and Image in Children's Culture as an aesthetic (re)configuration of world perception that shapes both the individual subjectivity of young readers/viewers and their sense of belonging to different communities. The volume's focus on Eastern Europe reflects the contemporary political realities of the region. It embraces new texts from Belarusian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian, independent Russian, and post-Soviet Russophone children's and young adult (YA) literature. The collection combines this unique focus on Eastern Europe with a broad, systematic, and global perspective. It includes chapters on transnational trends in contemporary children's literature and on the productive dialogue taking place between Eastern European, Central Asian, and North American cultural spaces. This volume brings together established scholars from Austria, Croatia, Germany, France, Lithuania, Poland, and the United States. It is intended primarily for scholars of children's literature and culture, educational studies, and Eastern European and Slavic studies.

“This volume brings together superb articles from an impressive group of international scholars who ask us to think deeply about how children’s and YA literature are harnessed to promote global citizenship, challenge grand historical narratives, build historical knowledge, and transgress identity politics. It’s a valuable contribution to the global field of children’s and YA literature scholarship.”

Sarah Minslow, Associate Professor of Children’s and YA Literature, California State University Los Angeles 

“The edited volume The Politics of Text and Image in Children’s Culture: Contemporary Eastern Europe and Beyond offers a theoretically rich and timely examination of visual culture and the politicization of modern life in children’s literature. It provides a highly welcome broadening of the scope of children’s literature analysis that extends across Eastern Europe, while its impressive array of detailed studies are anchored in productive scholarly and theoretical approaches to the politics of text and image. This verbal and visual analysis engages a rich vein of children’s literature scholarship and also applies its analysis to new areas and in new ways, while also making these aesthetic creations and their interpretive intricacies accessible for Anglophone audiences. In short, The Politics of Text and Image in Children’s Culture offers a valuable contribution to multiple fields and for varied audiences attentive to the place and impact of children’s literature and picturebooks within and beyond Eastern European culture, politics, and visuality.”

Sara Pankenier Weld, Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara

“The Politics of Text and Image in Children’s Culture is a deeply engaged collection of scholarship that speaks to some of the most pressing issues of the present moment through the lens of children’s literature, broadly understood (the articles address picturebooks, YA novels, graphic novels and more). Featuring contributions from highly regarded scholars of Eastern European children’s literature, this volume covers an impressive range of languages and cultural traditions, demonstrating both the diversity of contemporary Eastern European experience and the many intersections between these countries’ past and present realities. As the articles demonstrate, the task of children’s literature today is to help make sense of a rapidly changing and often overwhelming world, and to equip young readers with the capacity to understand, create and expand new spaces of collectivity both within and beyond national borders. By focusing on a region often associated with political conflict and violence, this collection emphasizes the ethical urgency of children’s literature’s capacity to teach empathy and engagement—an aim crucial to early education and equally relevant for older readers.” 

Ainsley Morse, Associate Professor of Comparative Slavic Literatures, University of California, San Diego

“The Politics of Text and Image in Children’s Culture is a long-overdue survey of trends and developments in contemporary children’s literature. Although it focuses primarily on books by Eastern European and Eurasian authors, the volume has global ambitions. Moving from Austria to Israel, Poland to the United States, and Ukraine to Central Asia, the book successfully demonstrates how major political, cultural, and environmental transformations of the last two decades have found their pictorial and narrative representations in literature for children and young adults. The contributors convincingly show that this socially engaged literature has become an effective platform for merging traditional Eastern European concerns about history, memory, and identity together with new political realities, caused by global migration, climate change, and military conflicts. Accessibly written and helpfully conceptualized, this illuminating volume provides a timely snapshot of the history of the present as seen through the lens of children’s literature.”

Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

Table of Contents:

Svetlana Efimova and Marina Balina: The Politics of Text and Image in Children’s Culture: Introduction



Section I. Working for the Future: Shaping an Engaged Reader through Image and Text

Marek Oziewicz (University of Minnesota, USA): The Politics of Climate Literacy in Picturebooks: Three Strategies for Shaping Ecocentric Attitudes with Text and Images

Carmen Sippl (University College of Teacher Education, Lower Austria): Decoding Picturebooks in/as a Futures Literacy Lab: Imaginings of the Future in Contemporary German-Language Picturebooks

Svetlana Efimova (LMU Munich, Germany): Individual Agency in Contemporary Belarusian and Russian Picturebooks: Empowerment and Critical Thinking

Karoline Thaidigsmann (University of Heidelberg, Germany): Concepts of Socially Engaged Polish Children’s Literature of the Twenty-First Century

Enikő Dácz (LMU Munich, Germany): The Realm of Tales and Poems as an Ideological Battlefield in Contemporary Hungarian Children’s Literature



Section II. The Politics of Memory: Visualizing Text, Textualizing Image

Daria Semenova (Vilnius University, Lithuania): Illustrated History for Pre-School Ukrainians: Stories About History and the Collective Memory Narrative

Mateusz Świetlicki (University of Wrocław, Poland): Politics of Memory and Present-Day Politics in Ukrainian-Themed American Historical Fiction for Young People

Anastasia Ulanowicz (University of Florida, USA): Haunted Memories: Representations of Eastern European Immigration in Vera Brosgol’s Be Prepared and Anya’s Ghost

Marina Balina (Illinois Wesleyan University, USA): The Presence of the Past: Transmitting War Memory in Contemporary Russian YA Literature

Laure Thibonnier-Limpek (Université Grenoble Alpes, France): War and Peace in Children’s Drawings: Visual Canon between the Leningrad Siege and Today’s Russia



Section III.  Textual and Visual Construction of Social Worlds in the Twenty-First Century

Maria Mayofis (Amherst College, USA): Imagined Social Worlds: Assembling Diversity in Contemporary Post-Soviet Children's Literatures

Larissa Rudova (Pomona College, USA): The Queering of Childhood in Mikita Franko’s Fiction: New Characters and New Parenthood

Dorota Michułka (University of Wrocław, Poland): From Liminality to Resilience: Migratory Experience in Contemporary Polish Literature for Children and Young Adults

Smiljana Narančić Kovač (University of Zagreb, Croatia): Leaving and Finding Home: War and Refugees in Croatian Picturebooks

Anne Hultsch (University of Vienna, Austria): “Where Is My Home?” Searching for National Identity in Czech Children’s and YA Literature

Bella Delacroix Ostromooukhova (Sorbonne University, France): “Home Is Where Your Books Are”: Children’s Literature for a New Wave of Russian Emigration