Australian Children's Literature

I'm very proud of my latest edited collection with Kristine Moruzi,  Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods, which has just been published in Palgrave's Literary Cultures and Childhoods series. It was intellectually reinvigorating to think about the construction of the child in adult texts alongside of the development of children's literature and periodicals. Moreover, it was rewarding to assemble some of our favourite scholars in the field to think about this topic, including those who were heavily influential on our doctoral work about Victorian children's literature, such as Claudia Nelson, and those who are reframing the field as early-career researchers.  The volume includes chapters that consider the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. It examines how ...

I’ve been reading Australian children’s and young adult fantasy for a grant application, and this week came to Isobelle Carmody’s The Gathering (1993). It was joint winner of the CBCA Book Award for Older Readers in 1994. Unlike awards for adult fiction, which tend to marginalise genre fiction, the CBCA prize lists includes many fantasy titles among its young adult prize winners. As part of the project I’m planning, I’m interested in thinking about how Australian children’s and young adult fantasy replicates familiar tropes and conventions from British and American examples, but also in how it might depart from them. The Gathering struck me as unusual because it depicts an Australian small town that is overcome by forces of darkness. Protagonist Nathanial moves to Cheshunt with his mother and dog, The Tod, after a peripatetic childhood in the wake of his parents’ divorce. He discovers that there is a culture of surveillance surrounding teenagers in the town, and is soon pressured by ...