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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Deceptively Simple: Eleanor Nilsson's Writing for Children,
single work
criticism
(p. 3-9)A range of Nilsson's works for young, developing and older readers are discussed, with a particular emphasis on The House Guest and There's a Crocodile There Now Too. Nimon examines the way in which Nilsson represents the world of children within picture books for children around twelve years old; a genre which has trouble drawing attention and popular acclaim. Nilsson also writes about 'writing for children', analysing how to read books and how to construct them (9) and is quoted as saying that fantasy 'can be way of presenting our human experience more effectively and memorably than it may be possible to do in realist fictions' (9).
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Postmodernism in Picture Books,
single work
criticism
(p. 15-25)
This paper looks at how postmodernism can be used as a discourse to theorise the picture book, by focusing on the 'self-conscious crossing of boundaries' which in postmodernist fictions 'problematises the truths of fiction and reality' (15). Far from being 'simple' texts, picture books contain two forms of signification (picture and text) and are frequently 'playful and subversive' despite the fact that they are rarely perceived as 'unconventional and exceptional creations' (16). Grieve discusses a large range of children's picture books from the United States, Great Britain and Australia, including the work of Allan Baillie (Drac and the Gremlin), Susanne Ferrier (Ned, a Leg End : A Thoroughly Misleading Account of His Life and Times; Lola : A Doubtful Documentary...) and Libby Gleeson (Where's Mum?). Her examination leads her to conclude that 'there is a growing body of picture books which utilize their complex pluralistic nature and their unique physical qualities to present self-conscious, parodic, intertextual, interrogative texts that can be described as postmodernist' (24).
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Cunning Passages: History in Gary Crew's 'Strange Objects',
single work
criticism
(p. 42-48)
Bourke analyses Gary Crew's Strange Objects using Michel Foucault's idea of 'history as archive' as a way of effectively 'decentering' subjectivity (42). Bourke suggests that Strange Objects 'does not tell one particular story so much as recreate an archive which contains a number of possible stories' and in which the reader's task is 'to recover the novel's various possible narratives. Describing the novel as 'postmodernist' (42), Bourke discusses the novel's subversive strategies which includes the readers possible interpretations of the various stories, cross-referencing and checking one story against another. While fantasy in novels - like Stange Objects - can be 'a politically conservative mode' (42), Bourke posits that the most subversive element in this novel is 'its use if history as the social ground for subjectivity' (42), which functions as a decentering device, '...dissolving the unitary subject into a collection of documents which together constitute the novel' (48).
