Call for papers. Issue 19. Fairy tales and fantasy
Dear colleagues,
The 19th issue of «Children's Readings» will be devoted to the study of fairytales and the fantastic in children's literature. These aspects of literature for the young are immense due to the employment of fantasy and the fantastic in various genres in children’s literature. This narrative mode occupies an almost dominant place in modern children's literature, such as fantasy, fairy tale, thriller, vampire fiction, and science fiction.
Fairy tales and fantasy in literature addressed at children and/or included in children's reading became the subject of rigorous debates between Russian literary critics and pedagogues from the 1840s. These discussions have since reemerged repeatedly. At the center of controversies were issues such as the appropriateness of fairy tales and fantasies for the children’s consumption, the removal of fairy tales and fantasy from children's reading, as well as many other issues that would question and undermine the use of fantastic elements in literary works aimed at children. Another important issue that underlined these debates was the fact that thematic and genre varieties of fantastic narrative became a niche for those authors whose existence in the literature for adults was restricted or eliminated due to various (ideological, as well as aesthetic) reasons. One can state with confidence that writing the history of these debates equals the writing of the entire children’s literature history.
We would like you to focus on the following issues:
• the history of the origin of a fairy tale aimed specifically at children: the processing of folklore; development of the author's fairy tales; creation of the first per se “children's” fairy tales; various fairy tale translations;
• the fairy tale as children’s reading: issues of theory and critical discourse; discussion of the genre specificity in pedagogical and literary criticism;
• the figure of a writer/a storyteller; the trajectory of a transformation of the adult authors/storytellers representing the genre into the literature for the young;
• creative approaches in presenting the fabulous and the fantastic in children's literature;
genres and thematic varieties in the fantasy for children;
• the emergence of the fantastic in children’s fiction at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, translations and adaptations;
• pedagogical debates about the value of fantasy in children’s readings;
science fiction and fantasy as escapist genres in Soviet literature;
genre features of fantasy for children;
• fantasy in children’s and young adults’ reading.
We invite your participation and kindly ask you to notify your colleagues who may be interested in these issues. In addition to submitting an article to the main block of texts, we welcome submissions to the following sections of the magazine: «Reviews», «Archives», and «Interviews».
The deadline for submitting articles is February 1, 2021. The deadline for submitting the final version of the article after passing the blind double review process is April 30, 2021. This issue is scheduled to appear in June 2021. Please send the articles to the email address of the editorial board: detskie.chtenia@gmail.com.
We are grateful for your cooperation,
Editorial Board
