Geography and Memory in Children's and YA Literature
*Deadline: March 15, 2014*
Investigating the conference theme of "Negotiating Sites of Memory," this panel considers the ideological and spatial implications of physical places depicted in children's and young adult literature. The geographies of these texts demonstrate that constructions of places and people are related processes. In works for young people, the material and the social are mutually constitutive, shaping and reflecting environments that depend on the discursive and/or physical participation of child characters and child readers alike. Importantly, these geographies as produced through literature are imagined representations rather than tangible locations, a gap that explicitly invites the contributions of memory, nostalgia, and fantasy.
Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:
*Deadline: March 15, 2014*
Investigating the conference theme of "Negotiating Sites of Memory," this panel considers the ideological and spatial implications of physical places depicted in children's and young adult literature. The geographies of these texts demonstrate that constructions of places and people are related processes. In works for young people, the material and the social are mutually constitutive, shaping and reflecting environments that depend on the discursive and/or physical participation of child characters and child readers alike. Importantly, these geographies as produced through literature are imagined representations rather than tangible locations, a gap that explicitly invites the contributions of memory, nostalgia, and fantasy.
Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:
- Place's role in the development of a children's literature canon
- The role of nostalgia and/or memory in shaping depictions of place in writing for children
- The relationship or interplay between material places and literary representations (for example, Prince Edward Island and Avonlea)
- The function of maps and illustrations in children's texts
- The sustained hold of specific places in children's and YA literature on cultural imaginations and memory, including the Hundred Acre Wood, Toad Hall, the Four-Story Mistake, Mr. Brown's antique shop, Hogwarts, Panem, the Island of the Blue Dolphins, and many others
- Regionalism in children's and YA literature
- Virtual places and spaces in digital literature and/or media for young people
- The geographies of books themselves as physical artifacts of material culture
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Sites of Memory in Children’s Literature
*Deadline: March 15th, 2014*
Remembering, remembrance, memory, and forgetting shapes children’s literature: authors’ personal memories of childhood that inform their texts or are preserved in cross-written texts or memoirs; larger cultural memories adults wish to pass down to future generations; and events, incidents, and topics elided or “forgotten” in the canon. Indeed, the genre of children’s literature relies on the remembrance, reinterpretation, or revision of past works. This panel invites papers considering all aspects of memory in children’s and young adult literature (historical, literary, nostalgic, patriotic, personal, repressed, traumatic, etc.) as well as papers that explore how literary memory shapes the canon of children’s and YA literature through intertextuality, another site of memory.
Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:
Remembering, remembrance, memory, and forgetting shapes children’s literature: authors’ personal memories of childhood that inform their texts or are preserved in cross-written texts or memoirs; larger cultural memories adults wish to pass down to future generations; and events, incidents, and topics elided or “forgotten” in the canon. Indeed, the genre of children’s literature relies on the remembrance, reinterpretation, or revision of past works. This panel invites papers considering all aspects of memory in children’s and young adult literature (historical, literary, nostalgic, patriotic, personal, repressed, traumatic, etc.) as well as papers that explore how literary memory shapes the canon of children’s and YA literature through intertextuality, another site of memory.
Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:
- Adult memories of childhood mined from archives, letters, diaries, memoirs, libraries, school classrooms, or childhood reading practices
- Cultural and historical events remembered, forgotten, elided, or revised in works of children’s and young adult literature
- The role of remembrance and nostalgia in canon formation: forgotten texts that are making a comeback (e.g., Henty’s novels in the homeschooling community) or texts that should be remembered
- How intertextuality functions to challenge, negotiate, or reinterpret ideas of youth, children’s literature, and/or YA literature
- Genre: historical, theoretical, or institutional practices of remembering and forgetting what constitutes children’s literature
- Traumatic memories: how they’re represented in individual works as well as how they’re presented to younger readers
- Iconic texts about remembrance: anything to do with war, but also “holiday” books and texts about important historical events
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