| Children’s Literature Global and Local: Oslo: Novus, 2005. Review by Jennifer Sattau, University of Wales, Aberystwyth Based on the proceedings of the sixteenth biennial congress of the IRSCL in 2003, Children's Literature Global and Local comprises a collection of critical essays on contemporary children's literature theory, examining texts from all over the world- from Denmark to South Africa to Taiwan. By combining new and exciting approaches to children's literature with an international scope, Children's Literature Global and Local invites readers to broaden the horizons of their research within the field to take account of both global patterns and the similarities and differences between the western classics most people are familiar with and their counterparts in other countries. Furthermore, the careful arrangement of the collection ensures an easy way in for potentially difficult perspectives. The collection is arranged in four sections. The first, Genre and Historical Development, is by far the least focused of the four, and the broadest in scope. It covers a wide variety of topics and texts. Although it feels at first as though there is little common ground between the essays selected for this section, it serves as a whole to give a comprehensive overview of the genre of children’s literature and its development. It focuses on aspects of the most important sub-genres and their historical development, as well as the most contemporary re-workings and re-evaluations. It furthermore serves to help the reader build up a wider global picture of the characteristics of and critical approaches to the genre of children's literature. For me, a number of chapters stood out in particular. The first chapter, Marina Warner's Knowing Your Daemons, is notable for the way it shows the development of an old literary tradition into both its twenty-first century usage and its position in the genre of children's literature. Although it contains a few factual errors (mostly to do with the plots of the Harry Potter books), it is nevertheless a good introduction to generic and historical issues in children's literature. Chapter three, Margarita Slavova's The Earliest Printed East Slavonic Primers as a Field of Intercultural Communication, is the first essay in the collection to deal with a non-western, non-English language set of texts. Slavova's approach allows the reader to consider the similarities and differences between eastern and western European genre development through children's educational materials, and the associated printing and publishing phenomena. Finally, the fifth chapter, Lindsey Myers' Writing the Past, Righting the Future, examines the relationship between politics and the development of fantasy literature for children from the opposite side of the post-World War II axis-divide from that which we in Britain and the US are usually accustomed. The second section in the collection, entitled Youth and Sexuality, comprises only three chapters compared with the seven chapters of the preceding section and is weighted in favour of contemporary western texts. Nevertheless, all three chapters present a fresh and evocative reading of the popular topic of sexuality in children's literature. The first chapter, Chie Mizuma's Performativity and Queerness in Peter Pan, takes the refreshing step of challenging the usual Freudian Oedipal reading of Peter Pan, choosing instead to examine the text through the lens of Queer Theory. Victoria Flanagan's Emerging Identities, the second chapter in the section, examines the difference between cross-dressing in adult texts and cross-dressing in children's texts, and the ways in which children's texts tend to de-sex the act. Having explored the implications of this de-sexing, Flanagan then goes on to examine two young-adult texts in which the act of cross-dressing is re-sexed, and the affects of this reworking of the trope. Finally, in the third chapter, Sharyn Pearce explores sexuality in a particular piece of young-adult fiction: Nick MacDonald's Twelve. The third section, also comprising seven chapters, is Identity Politics. The seven sections are concerned with all aspects of the relationship between identity politics and children's literature, including political influences on publishing practices, the ways in which texts help to construct or reconstruct national identity, issues of translation and cross-cultural exchange, and postcolonial theory. Especially interesting is Mieke K. T. Desmet's discussion of the Taiwanese Grimm Press, which examines the exchange imbalance of translated material between western and non-western countries, and particularly Taiwanese and western publishing companies. The final section of the book, Orbis Pictus, deals with the ways in which concepts of literature are changing as technology advances in the information and communication age. Hans-Heino Ewers' A Meditation on Children's Literature in the Age of Multimedia examines the changing methods of disseminating information, and particularly stories, in the twenty-first century, and Elise Seip Tonnessen gives a similar analysis of changing reading practices in a multimedia world. Elwyn Jenkins, by contrast, discusses a South African novel's use of non-linguistic modes of communication which are far removed from the technological innovations of the previous two chapters. Again, the section seems weighted in favour of modern western or English-language texts, but nevertheless serves to provide some intriguing perspectives on the ways the genre of children's literature is continuing to develop even as we read. Jennifer Sattau |