Last
year the IRSCL board met in Dublin to prepare for the
2005 congress and participate in the conference and
launch of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's
Literature. The conference was outstanding, with lively
and informed contributions from a wide-ranging number
of perspectives. This volume, edited by two IRSCL members,
Celia Keenan and Mary Shine Thompson, contains selected
papers from the conference. Literature • Four Courts Press Studies in Children’s Literature, 1500-2000 CELIA KEENAN & MARY SHINE THOMPSON, editors Ranging from the fundamental question, whether a children’s literature is possible, or what its formal and contextual parameters might be, to the exigent issues of contemporary cultural studies – postcolonialism, gender, race and class – this essay collection inserts children’s literature into literary, theoretical and historical debate. From English renaissance children’s reading, it shifts to Shaw’s Castle Blair, an ambivalent metaphor for a nineteenth-century Ireland seeking postcolonial self-determination, and a study of wild Irish girls’ civilising education in England in De Horne Vaizey’s and Meade’s novels. The book interrogates Hodgson Burnett’s obsessions with childhood innocence and her problematic adultchild relationships; the golliwog transformed from a transgressive figure into a non-PC icon; and schoolboys from the Jennings series and Greyfriars to Huck Finn and Harry Potter. Blyton, Dillon, Frost, Lynch, Parkinson, Ransome, Thomas, and Whelan come under scrutiny, as does the link between food, class, national heritage, and innocence. How Frost’s and Thomas’s stories reflect evolving conceptions of childhood is scrutinised. Unpublished archival material complicates assumptions about Patricia Lynch and Talbot Press children’s religious publications. Dillon’s ‘nativist’ novels display transitional stages of post-colonialisation, and Whelan’s and Parkinson’s historiography is contrasted. Contributors include: Sandra Beckett (Brock U.), Robert Dunbar (CICE), Declan Kiberd (UCD), A.J. Piesse (TCD), Carole Dunbar (St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra), Professor Kimberley Reynolds (U. Surrey), David Rudd (Bolton Institute), Deborah Thacker (U. Gloucestershire), Ann Alston (Cardiff U.), Sebastien Chapleau (Cardiff U.), Margaret Burke (St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra), Jane O’Hanlon (Poetry Ireland), Mary Flynn (St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra), Victoria de Rijke (Middlesex U.), Howard Hollands (Middlesex U.), Pádraic Whyte (TCD), Áine Nic Gabhann (Coláiste Mhuire Marino), Mary Shine Thompson (St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra) and Ciara Ní Bhroin (Coláiste Mhuire, Marino). Celia
Keenan is Children’s Literature MA Director, St
Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. Publication date: 8 July 2004 234
x 156mm; First edition; Portrait; Literature, Children’s
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