CFP. Issue 24. History in children's literature

2023-01-20

Dear colleagues,

we invite you to take part in the 24th issue of the "Children's readings" magazine.

We want to devote the 24th issue of Children’s Readings to the theme of history and the representation of the past in children’s literature. Historical themes in children’s literature appeared at the same time as children’s literature itself as a special branch of fiction—during the Enlightenment. Since then, the representations and interpretations of historical epochs, events, and personalities have constituted a significant part of fiction, popular science, and educational literature.

Modern researchers do not study the inclusion of historical material in children’s literature as often as might be expected, given that the issue of “dealing with the past” has been quite popular in academic research in recent decades and has recently increased rapidly in public relevance. Of the foreign studies, let us mention the collective work The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature, edited by Ann Lawson Lucas (Praeger, 2003), in which history and collective memory in books for children are examined in the material of various national literatures, and regarding works on Russian literature, Marina Balina’s article On the Genre Specificity of Historical Prose for Children (Children’s Readings, 2018, 13(1)).

The aim of the announcement of this issue of Children’s Readings is to attract to this topic the attention of a wide range of scholars from different disciplines. First, the range of possible research questions is related to the social and political contexts of children’s writers’ references to history, the conditionality of which may differ. Here, an essential role is played by the imperative of enlightenment, in which historical erudition is perceived as an obligatory component of one’s cultural capital. Equally important is the didactic orientation of literature for children, which determines the use of historical figures and events as material for moral evaluations. Children’s literature is also actively included in ideological education projects, which determine the actualization of some historical epochs, events, and persons and the silencing of others. In times of sociopolitical shifts, children’s literature is in demand in processes of revision of the past, for example, participating in the transformation of imperial narratives into Soviet or postcolonial ones, of heroic into traumatic ones, and vice versa.

The second line of research on the representation of history in children’s literature involves addressing questions of poetics and literary pragmatics. How is the representation of history organized in the texts of different authors, trends, and eras? In what cases and in what ways, beyond the historical genres themselves, do writers resort to the use of “historical settings”? How have the forms and modes of working with “historical material” changed and varied over the course of the history of children’s literature, from didactic essays like Alexandra Ishimova’s Russia’s History in Stories for Children to the use of historical narratives in Olga Lavrentieva’s Survilo?

In the 24th issue of Children’s Readings, we suggest discussing mainly (but not exclusively) the following questions:

  • History for children’s reading: Fiction vs. non-fiction.

  • Texts for children about world and national history in the context of educational, upbringing, and propaganda projects.

  • History in children’s literature and historical science: Points of intersection.

  • National and world history in educational books and school reading.

  • Representations of history in children’s literature: Pedagogical and political contexts.

  • Historical narrative in children’s text: Peculiarities of stylistics and pragmatics.

  • Techniques of depicting the past in children’s literature: Events, language, and everyday life.

  • Children’s literature in periods of social catastrophe (wars, revolutions, etc.): The formation of historical narrative.

  • Heroic and traumatic narratives of the past in children’s literature.

  • Dealing with the “uncomfortable past” in literature for children and related discussions.

  • The theme of historical memory in children’s literature and didactic discourse.

  • The Soviet in post-Soviet children’s literature: Points of interest, principles of representation, and ideological paradigms.

  • Historical figures and biographical texts in children’s literature.

  • Historical plots in poetry for children.

  • Historical themes in different genre contexts: Adventure novel, travelogue, fantasy, autobiography, etc.

  • History in pictures: Illustrations of stories from the past in children’s books.

In addition to articles submitted to the main block, we welcome submissions to the following sections of the magazine: Reviews, Archives, and Interviews.

Recommended length: Up to 40,000 characters.

Submission deadline: July 15, 2023.

The deadline for submitting the article’s final version after passing the blind double-review process is September 30.

The issue is scheduled to appear in December 2023.

Please email submissions to the editorial board: detskie.chtenia@gmail.com.

We are grateful for your cooperation,

DCh Editorial Board