Camping and tramping, Swallows and Amazons (2025)

British Children's Adventure Novels in the Web of Colonialism (PhD Dissertation as a Book)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018

This book appeals to undergraduates, lecturers and academicians who are interested in Victorian England, British imperialism and children’s literature. It provides an understanding of the Victorian children’s adventure novel genre and its association with the British imperialist ideology. The work asserts that the nineteenth-century British children’s adventure novels are products and perpetuators of the imperialist ideology. It examines three children’s adventure novels, i.e. Roland Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, William Henry Giles Kingston’s In the Wilds of Africa: A Tale for Boys and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, from a postcolonial perspective. The study focuses on the postcolonial theories of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial approach.

Review: The 1930s: a decade of modern British fiction (Hubble, Seaber and Taylor, eds.)

English Studies, 2023

This is a review of "The 1930s: a decade of modern British fiction", edited by Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber, and Elinor Taylor.

Towards Active Citizens: Landscape, Nationalism and Politics in 20th Century British and Australian Children's Literature.

2008

This paper compares and contrasts different approaches to the landscape as heritage as expressed by selected writers for children. This paper contrasts some English attitudes and values in writers in the 20th century, selected for their particular concern for landscape issues and certainly not homogenous. This is contrasted with the political sensitivities brought about by colonialism in Australia, in particular about portrayal of Aborigines and use of their stories in publications for children, stories which focus on their intimate relationship with their heritage landscape. Stories encourage children to be environmental activists and hold the promise of inclusion and social equity.

The End of Empire? Colonial and Postcolonial Journeys in Children's Books

2001

Nature Trauma: Ecology and the Returning Soldier in First World War English and Scottish Fiction, 1918-1932

Through analysis of fictional representations of trauma during the First World War, beginning with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), this paper addresses the ways in which interwar writers understood how PTSD affected connections with the natural world, and sought more sophisticated and ecologically grounded ways of depicting the difficulties of returning to rural environments and reconnecting with known and natural places.

Transforming Narratives of Colonial Danger: Imagining the Environments of New Zealand and Australia in Children’s Literature, 1862–1899

Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World: Historical Perspectives, 2015

Nineteenth-century British children’s literature set in Australia and New Zealand fixates on the dangers of colonial environments. This chapter examines four British novels of the period, observing the ways in which they manifest elements of ecological imperialism and environmental racism in order to depict successful settlement. It compares these novels with fantasy fictions by Australian and New Zealand children’s authors that constitute more complicated attempts both to understand and co-exist with the natural environment. The chapter proposes that by the 1890s earlier British anxieties had dissipated in popular Australian and New Zealand fiction, in which child protagonists were newly charged with the ability to interpret and control nature.

Children’s Literature of 1922: Historicity and Modernism in Margery Williams’ Velveteen Rabbit and Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle

The year 1922 also known as 'Annus Mirabilis of Literary modernism' contributed significantly to a new reform in literature by instilling the traumatic memory and disillusionment of World War I. The corpus of Children’s Literature is denied space among the literary works which are considered as ‘modern’. The main features of Literary modernism like individualism, alienation, symbolism, and innovative writing techniques are also reflected in the children’s literature of 1922. Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit represents a non-materialistic view of death and can be looked at as a coming-of-age/bildungsroman for the toy kingdom. It also talks about selfhood, death, love, loss, technological progress, survival, and renewal. Likewise, Hugh Lofting’s Dolittle is one of the most radical characters in 20th-century literature. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle include themes like alienation, individualism, pro-animal rights, anti-war and colonialism. This work advocates for animal rights and critiques a culture that goes to war. The paper attempts to look at these two Children’s books of 1922 from the perspective of Modernism by unraveling the themes, symbolism, and experimentation employed in writing. Keywords: Children’s Literature, Modernism, 1922, Velveteen Rabbit, Doctor Dolittle

Political and Cultural Battles in a Postcolonial Picture Book from Wales

International Research in Children's Literature, 2008

Nationalistic projects and bloody conflicts around the world testify to the nation's determination to fight the forces that threaten its sovereignty. The present discussion reads Cantre'r Gwaelod (1996) – a Welsh book from the European Picture Book Collection – as an attempt to defend the idea of national identity. The colonial and postcolonial cultural battles that have been taking place in Wales, and elsewhere, for the duration of centuries have not left children, or children's literature, unaffected. When the Welsh picture book is situated in its local environment, it becomes apparent that it advocates resistance to `foreign invasion'. The waves that drown the glorious ancient history of Wales are the waves of English colonialism. Younger generations are expected to amend this historical discontinuity and reclaim their nation's glory. The subjective positioning of both child-protagonist and child-reader is designed to facilitate national regeneration. I find r...

The 1940s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew and Glynn White, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, (PDF) x + 347 pp., ISBN ePDF: 978-1-3501-4303-6. £117

Crossroads A Journal of English Studies

Britons, Beasts, and Benighted Savages: British Superiority in Nineteenth Century Children's Periodicals

An intrepid British explorer outwits and escapes a horde of bloodthirsty African cannibals. The Royal Navy defeats a fleet of merciless Arab slave traders. A cabal of Indian thieves plots to rob a British official but fails because the thieves are too untrustworthy to cooperate. Stories like these frequently appeared in British children's magazines during the nineteenth century. Meant to entertain child readers and teach them moral lessons, these stories also reinforced popular racial and ethnic stereotypes, as well as the belief that white, Protestant Britons were superior to other peoples. By studying the stories published in nineteenth-century periodicals, I have illuminated the ways in which British children learned to conceive of race, ethnicity, and national identity.

Children's Literature-Comparatively Reading. Thinking about the Pink Bits: A Consideration of the Influence of English Children's Literature

1996

This paper examines the state of children's literature by tracing some of the side effects of nineteenth-century English children's literature. During their early histories, the British colonies, including America, were economically unable to produce their own children's books. Reading materials were imported from the home country, and, likewise, the ideological forces of imperialist England accompanied them. The dynamics of nineteenth-century capitalism compelled literary expression in America and England to take diverse directions. At the end of the twentieth century, capitalist pressures are enclosing the publishing worlds of America and England within the same whirlpool of market demand and creation. The mass culture engendered in this literary world results in the "imperialist" domination of the reading space, and therefore what is and what is not being published for the multinational market becomes a vital area of consideration. Restriction and segregation are arising from commercial reasons and are in danger of enclosing the literary experiences of children and channelling their reading into particular cultural knowledge. As with America, South African children's literature written in English reflects the ideologies of imperialist England. Not only do cultural tensions remain in the substance of the narrative, the action, characterization, and plot, but also in the ways that the narrative is constructed. In Australia, there are also problems with the mismatch between the natural narrative of the culture and the required narrative forms of the dominant literacy, which is again Eurocentric. Thus, in the twentieth century, English children's literature continues to be a radical influence. (AEF)

North-east childhoods: regional identity in children's novels of the North East of England

2009

This thesis explores how children's writers have participated in the process of representing and constructing the identity of the North East of England. It argues that there exists a dominant NorthEast aesthetic which has become deeply embedded within British children's fiction, and that several of its key motifs (labour, industry and decline; traditional gender roles and landscape) recur frequently within portrayals of the region in writing for the young. This aesthetic contributes to a perception of the region as both marginal and marginalised, and masks realities about the North East. Following an overview of children's literature set in the region, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, the focus moves to the work of Robert Westall, a major children's writer who was born in Tyneside and set much of h'is fiction within the region. The Westall chapters draw on the Robert Westall Collection at Seven Stories: The Centre for Children's Books. The more recent work of NorthEast writer David Almond is considered in the closing chapters which also draw on unpublished material and interviews for this thesis.

If they ask us why we died": Children's Literature and the First World War, 1970-2005

The Lion and the Unicorn, 2007

'Critical Constructions of British Fiction since 1945'

1 Overlapping generations of writers with diverse ambitions, backgrounds, and commitments have ensured that British fi ction since the Second World War evades neat portraits of affi liation or progression, in mode as well as in matter. Classifi cations become hard to justify, because of the multiple ways in which late twentieth-and twenty-fi rst-century writers have imaginatively responded to the era's changing social realities, and because '[c] reativity itself', as British-Guyanese writer Fred D'Aguiar observes, 'cannot be contained for long in any fashion or vice-hold which the process of naming and compartmentalizing seeks to promote'. 1 Moreover, the very construction of this fi eld faces one obvious logistical consideration: the ever-expanding end-dates for 'post-1945' as a periodising rubric make comprehensive accounts of so many decades of cultural transformation seem increasingly unviable. Still, undaunted, this Companion provides its own atlas of an era whose unwieldy temporality and perpetually moving horizon do nothing to discredit its usefulness in framing some of the most signifi cant developments in British fi ction.

Twentieth- Century Children's Literature

A review of English and Irish Children's Literature of the 20th Century.

Katharine Cockin and Jago Morrison, eds., The Post-War British Literature Handbook

2010

Book Review of Katharine Cockin and Jago Morrison, eds., The Post-War British Literature Handbook

Empire's Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books (review)

The Lion and the Unicorn, 2002

Claiming Perry Nodelman's and others' pioneering work in postcolonialism and children's literature as inspiration, Empire's Children is a broadranging and thoughtprovoking study that promises to

Domesticating the Frontier: Gender, Empire and Adventure Landscapes in British Cinema, 1945-59

Gender <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> History, 2003

Literary Constructs of African American Childhood in the 1930's in American Children's Literature

2006

This literary study presents an analysis of literary constructs of African American childhood in the 1930s in American children's literature. The purpose for such a study is to determine, identify, and analyse the constructions of African American childhood offered in such books.

Ch 5. Rethinking materiality in Victorian adventure writing

Imaging the Subcontinent: Colonial Realism and the Ethnographic Writing of British India, 2020

Summarising the primary observations of each preceding chapter, this concluding chapter answers the founding premise girding this thesis. Written, literary texts such as travelogues, reports, and novels were important sources of metropolitan familiarisation and cultural contact, but for a society of disproportionate literacy such as Victorian Britain it is important to remember that visuality and corporeality played a much more impactful role in informing notions and stereotypes of cultural selfhood. Britons’ imagination of India inevitably aestheticized—Orientalised—it in predictably racial and cultural terms, but their conceptions of the subcontinent were nonetheless informed crucially by a growing corpus of ethnographic knowledge and a nascent yet exponential commodity culture. The chapter argues that the resultant accessibility to India did not translate into greater accuracy in its depictions because the kind of realism at play in novelistic texts—and on the theatrical stage—chose to foreground the just legitimacy of British rule in the subcontinent. Apart from written texts, metropolitan Britons were exposed to a plethora of avenues which rendered colonial dominions such as India tangibly familiar—to see, to touch, to smell, to eat—on a regular, even daily, basis. As close textual analysis of the primary texts under consideration demonstrates, the affective charge of this contact in terms of its material footprint is what lent a ready and easy intimacy—known, yet not experienced—to metropolitan notions of India throughout this period.