AustLit

Halliday locates a gap in Kerry Mallan's study concerning discourses of death and dying in children's literature, and claims, 'A curious omission is death in war, from the legal killing of and by soldiers, to the horror underlying the euphemism of 'collateral damage'' (90). Halliday suggests that despite a 'proliferation of discourses [on the] manifestations of death... there is a lingering taboo in dealing with death in war stories, especially for older readers' (90). The essay refers to some of the strategies and narrative techniques used to represent war in children's fiction from an array of novels, including several Australian children's texts by contemporary authors, Morris Gleitzman, Sonya Hartnett, Anthony Eaton, Serpil Ural and David Metzenthen. Strategies discussed include discourses of hope, the use of metaphor, reader-subject positioning and setting with Halliday concluding that, 'When death is present and brutally explicit...cultural pressures about the appropriateness of reading material and consequent censorship occur' (94).