Lykke Guanio-Uluru

Nina Goga

Aslaug Nyrnes

Bjørg Oddrun Hallås

This volume presents key contributions to the study of ecocriticism in Nordic children’s and YA literary and cultural texts, in dialogue with international classics. It investigates the extent to which texts for children and young adults reflect current environmental concerns. The chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: Ethics and Aesthetics, Landscape, Vegetal, Animal, and Human, and together they explore Nordic representations and a Nordic conception, or feeling, of nature. The textual analyses are complemented with the lived experiences of outdoor learning practices in preschools and schools captured through children’s own statements. The volume highlights the growing influence of posthumanist theory and the continuing traces of anthropocentric concerns within contemporary children’s literature and culture, and a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction is reflected in the conceptual tool of the volume: The Nature in Culture Matrix.

Nordic Dialogues

Ecocritical Perspectives on Children's Texts and Cultures

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature is the first comprehensive study that investigates the representation of maps in children’s books as well as the impact of mapping on the depiction of landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes in children’s literature. The chapters in this volume pursue a comparative approach as they represent a wide spectrum of diverse genres and national children’s literatures by examining a wealth of children’s books from Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The theoretical and methodological approaches range from literary studies, developmental psychology, maps and geography literacy, ecocriticism, historical contextualization with both new historicist and political-historical leanings, and intermediality to materialist cartographies, cultural studies, island studies, and genre studies. By this, this volume aims at embedding children’s literature in a broader field of literary and cultural studies, thus situating children’s literature research within a general context of literary theory.

Nina Goga

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