Academic literature on the topic 'Sisters – death – juvenile fiction'

Introduction: Aicardi-Gouteres syndrome (AGS) is a monogenic interferonopathy characterized by early onset, dysregulation of skin (chilblain lesions), brain, and immune systems (fever, hepatomegaly, glaucoma, arthritis, myositis, and autoimmune activity). The disease looks like TORCH (Toxoplasmosis, Others, Rubella, Cytomegalovirus, Herpes) infection with early-onset encephalopathy resulting in severe neuropsychological disability. Case description: A six-year-old girl has been suffering from generalized seizures, fever episodes, severe psychomotor development delay, and spastic tetraparesis since the first year of her life. Her two elder brothers died at a young age from suspected infantile cerebral palsy (ICP). Other siblings (younger brother and two elder sisters) are as healthy as their parents. The girl was diagnosed with juvenile dermatomyositis at 5.5 years. Basal ganglia, periventricular, and cerebellum calcifications; hypoplasia of the corpus callosum; and leukodystrophy were detected on CT. The IFN-I score was 12 times higher than normal. The previously not described nucleotide variant c.434G > C (chr 20:36935104C > G; NM_015474) was detected in exon 4 of the SAMHD1 gene in the homozygous state, leading to amino acid substitution p.R145P. Aicardi-Goutières syndrome 5 was diagnosed. Her treatment included corticosteroids, methotrexate, and tofacitinib 5 mg twice a day and it contributed to health improvements. The following brain CT depicted the previously discovered changes without the sign of calcification spreading. Conclusions: Early diagnosis of AGS is highly important as it allows starting treatment in a timely manner. Timely treatment, in return, can help avoid the development/progression of end-organ damage, including severe neurological complications and early death. It is necessary to spread information about AGS among neurologists, neonatologists, infectious disease specialists, and pediatricians. A multidisciplinary team approach is required.

The research deals with applying to innovative approaches to literary text. Inclusive books for children and ways of working with them at pedagogical faculties are considered. In our research, we will demonstrate the work with such books “Cripple Bunny and his brave mother” by Oksana Drachkovskaya, “Trustees for the Giraffe” by Oksana Luschevska and Yevhenia Haydamaka, “Just because” by Rebecca Elliott, “Magda and her Wind” by Iryna Morykvas, “Planet Willi” by Birta Müller, “Yes! I can!: The girl and her Wheelchair” KendryJ. Barrett, Jacqueline BiuToner, Kler A. Friland, Violet Limey and the trilogy on Pearl of Tuuli Pere. The main heroes of these books are children with disabilities and special educational needs. Narrators mostly are their elder or younger brothers or sisters. The reason of the choosing children’s literature on inclusion is that it is modern important literature, which demonstrates the world of children with disability and highlights such serious topics as decease and death. Its aim is to show that variety makes world wonderful and grate. The introduction of holographic design of vita technologies (calligarm, creative games, the pyramid of hero and author) is considered as well, the application of methods of critical thinking (mind-mapping, swot-analysis, six hats, Bloom’s taxonomy) in the analysis of fiction is substantiated. Potential online resources helping work with literature are examined. In addition, the possibilities of online resources (rebus, comics’ generator, the creating of mind maps, crosswords on different platforms) are determined as important part of the work with text. It has proved that such innovate approaches help to develop creative potential of students, allows analyzing literary text in a new way. Such approaches will be helpful in professional activity of teachers in primary school.

The aim of the article is to comprehend the specifics of the infernal image of the litavets (perelesnyk) in Ukrainian romantic prose. In order to achieve this goal, the following systemic unity of research methods was used: typological, biographical, comparative, genetic, method of analysis and synthesis, mythopoetic approach to the interpretation oftexts. The article on the material of folk poetry and literary texts, as well as folklore studies of V. Hnatiuk, O. Kononenko, E. Onatsky and other scientists characterizes the infernal image of the litavets. It is determined that the litavets (perelesnyk, fire snake, nalitnyk, litun, obaiasnyk, perelet) is an anthropomorphic infernal character. Its main function is to enter into intimate relations with women, which subsequently mostly turn into death. The image of the perelesnyk is quite popular in folk tales and legends. Thus, in fairy tales he often appears as an antagonistic hero who kidnaps girls, which is mentioned in such works as «Ivan the King, his sister and the snake», «Kotygoroshko», «How snakes kidnapped three sisters», «Snake winner and the dragon», «The Tale of Ivan Golyk and his brother», etc. In these works, along with the motif of kidnapping women, there is also the motif of snake-fighting. Note that the motif of victory over the insidious serpent is leading in folk legends, in particular in stories about the serpent shaft, the terrible serpent defeated by Boris and Gleb, in the story of Kozhumyak (mentions of these legends are also found in the early edition of the first historical novel in Ukrainian literature «Five Chapters from P. Kulesh's New Novel ”Black Council”», 1845). Interpretation of the mythical nature of the fire snake has become widespread in fiction, especially in the prose of the Romantic period. A striking example of this is the work of P. Kulish (the stories «About what in the town of Voronezh dried up Peshevtsov Pond», 1840; «Fire Snake», 1841) and I. Barshchevsky (the story «Nobleman Zavalnya»), where the image of a perelesnyk is available in the chapter «On the Warlock and the Serpent Hatched from the Egg of a Rooster», 1844). P. Kulish instory «About what in the town of Voronezh dried up Peshevtsov Pond» the image of an incubus who came to his beloved every night, and in the story of the fire snake the writer presented the image of a perelesnyk-seducer, who did not suck, but gave a beauty his chosen woman. In I. Barshchevsky's story about the nobleman Zavalnya, the serpent turned into a young man, but he could not seduce the belle, as sincere prayer and a saving cross stood in the way.

In its anonymous reviewof Christina Rossetti'sSpeaking Likenesses(1874), theAcademynotes rather hopelessly: “this will probably be one of the most popular children's books this winter. We wish we could understand it” (606). The reviewer – who later dwells on the “uncomfortable feeling” generated by this children's tale and its accompanying images – still counts as the most generous among the largely puzzled and horrified readership of Rossetti's story about three sets of girls experiencing violence and failure in their respective fantasy worlds (606). While clearly such dystopic plots are not out of place in Victorian literature about children, something about Rossetti's unusual narrative bothered her contemporaries. John Ruskin, for instance, bluntly wondered how Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, who illustrated the story, together could “sink so low” (qtd. in Auerbach and Knoepflmacher 318). In any case, the book still sold on the Christmas market, and a few months later, Rossetti would publishAnnus Domini, a benign pocketbook of daily prayers that stands in stark contrast to the grim prose ofSpeaking Likenesses.It is therefore tempting to cast this work of children's fiction as a strange anomaly in Rossetti's oeuvre, which from the 1870s, beginning withAnnus Domini, to her death in 1894, became almost exclusively dominated by devotional prose and poetry. In contrast, I argue in the following essay thatSpeaking Likenessespoints to a widespread interest throughout Rossetti's writing – but especially in her most well-known poems fromGoblin Market and Other Poems(1862) andA Prince's Progress(1866) – in alternative modes of sociality that refract a conceptual preoccupation with likeness, rather than difference. Following traditions of critical thought that have paid increasing attention to relations that resist oppositional logic – Stephanie Engelstein and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's late work comes to mind here – I establish the primacy of a horizontal axis of similarity in bothSpeaking Likenessesand Rossetti's most canonical poem, “Goblin Market.” For Rossetti, the lure of similarity, or minimal difference, manifests itself most often in siblinghood and more specifically, sisterhood, the dominant kinship relation throughout her lyrics fromGoblin Market and Other Poems. Sisterhood anchors the title poem I will examine in this essay, as well as shorter verses such as “Noble Sisters” and “Sister Maude.” At issue in such relations of likeness is the discreteness of a (typically) feminine self. For Rossetti, shunning oppositional structures of desire and difference that typically produce individuation (exemplified in the heterosexual couple form and the titles of her uneasy lyrics “He and She” and “Wife to Husband”) allows for a new (albeit perilous) space to carve out one's particularity as a gendered being.

CairnsIn Denmark, the term stenkast (a ‘stone throw’) is used for cairns – stone heaps that have accumulated in places where it was the tradition to throw a stone. A kast (a ‘throw’) would actually be a more correct term, as sometimes the heaps consist of sticks, branches, heather, or peat, rather than stones – in short, whichever was at hand at that particular place. A kast could also consist of both sticks and stones.The majority of the known Danish cairns were presented by August F. Schmidt in 1929. Since then, numerous new ones have been discovered, and we now know of around 80 cairns, cf. the list on page 264 and map Fig. 3. It appears from the descriptions that the majority – a total of 65 – are actual cairns, 14 are heaps of branches, whereas two are described as either peat or heather heaps.Geographically, the majority – a total of 53 – are found in Jutland, with most in North and Central Jutland (Fig. 3). Fifteen are known from Zealand, four from Lolland, four from Funen, and five from Bornholm.Topographically, they are found – naturally – where people would normally be passing: next to roads and in connection with sacred springs, chapels, and places of execution. However, they also occur in less busy places, in woods, along the coast, on moors, and on small islands.A few cairns have been preserved because they are still “active” as reminiscences of customs and habits of past times. This is the case of the cairn called Røsen (“røse” being another Danish term for a cairn) on Trøstrup Moor (no. 45, Fig. 1-2), of Heksens Grav (“The Witch’s Grave”) (no. 27, Fig. 4), and of the branch heap in the wood of Slotved Skov (no. 14, Fig. 5), which was recently revived after having been almost forgotten. Other cairns are maintained as prehistoric relics, as is the case of the branch heap by the name of Stikhoben (“The Stick Heap;” no. 10, Fig. 6) and Kjelds Grav (“Kjeld’s Grave,” no. 59, Fig. 7). Although heaps of stones and branches are included in the Danish Protection of Nature Act as relics of the past worthy of protection, so far merely the two latter have been listed.Whereas the remaining ’throws’ of organic material have probably disintegrated, it is still possible under favourable conditions to retrieve those made from more enduring materials – unless they have been demolished – even if they have practically sunk into oblivion (Figs. 8-10).The oldest known cairn is almost 500 years old. It was situated by the ford Præstbjerg Vad in Vinding parish near the Holstebro-Ribe highroad. Tradition says that the stone heap came into existence as a memorial of a priest in Hanbjerg, who died in the first half of the 16th century following a fall with his horse.Such legends of origin are connected with most of the Danish cairns. They usually tell of some unhappy or alarming happening supposed to have occurred at the place in question. However, they are often so vague and stereotype that they can only rarely be dated or put into a historical context. Indeed, on closer examination several of them turn out to be travelling legends. Apart from the legend of the murdered tradesman, they comprise the legend of the exorcised farmhand and that of the three sisters, who were murdered by three robbers, who turned out to be their own brothers. The latter legend, which is also known from a folksong, is connected to the so-called Varper on the high moor in Pedersker parish on Bornholm (no. 7). Until the early 20th century, it was the custom to maintain these cairns by putting back stones that had fallen down and adorn them with green sprigs. Early folklorists interpreted this as a tradition going back to an old sacrificial ritual, although the custom also seems to have had a pure practical purpose, as these stone heaps were originally cairns marking the road across inland Bornholm.A special group of the Danish cairns are connected with the tradition that someone is buried underneath them, such as a body washed ashore, a murdered child from a clandestine childbirth, a murdered person, several persons killed in a fight, an exorcised farmhand, a suicide, a murderer buried on his scene of crime, or witches and murderers buried at the place of execution. In all these cases, the throwing of a stone was supposed to protect the passers-by against the dead, who was buried in unconsecrated grounds and thus, according to public belief, haunted the spot. Another far less frequent explanation was that the stone was thrown in order to achieve a good journey or luck at the market. In some places, the traveller would throw the stone while shouting a naughty word or in other ways showing his disgust with the dead witch, criminal, or infanticide buried in that particular place. In rather a lot of the cases, as explained by the context, the cairn was merely a memorial to some unhappy occurrence, and the stone was thrown in memory of the deceased.In an article on Norwegian cairns written by the folklorist Svale Solheim, the author attached importance to achieving a clear picture of the position of the cairns (kastrøysarne) in the landscape. A closer examination showed that almost all were situated by the side of old roads – between farms and settlements, through forests, or across mountains – in short, where people would often walk. “The cairns follow the road as the shadow follows the man,” Solheim writes and gives an example of an old road, which had been relocated, and where the cairns had been moved to the new road. Furthermore, the position of the cairns along the roads turned out to not be accidental; they were always found at places that were in one way or other interesting to the travellers. This is why Solheim thought that the stone heaps mostly had the character of cairns or road stones thrown together at certain places for a pure practical purpose. “For instance,” he writes, “we find stone heaps at places along the roads where there is access to fine drinking water. These would also be natural places for a rest, and numerous stone heaps are situated by old resting places. And so it came natural to mark these places by piling up a stone heap, and of course it would be in every traveller’s interest to maintain the heaps.”The older folklore saw the tradition as a relic of pagan rituals and conceptions. As a reaction to this, Solheim and others took a tradition-functionalistic view, according to which most folklore, as seen in the light of the cultural conditions, was considered rational and the rest could be explained as pseudo beliefs, for instance educational fiction and tomfoolery.However, if we turn to our other neighbouring country, Sweden, it becomes more difficult to explain away that we are dealing with sacrificial rites, as here, the most used dialectal term for the stone and branch piles were offerhög, offervål, or offerbål (“offer” is the Swedish word for sacrifice), and when someone threw stones, sticks, or money on the pile, it was called “sacrificing.” An article from 1929 by the anthropologist Sigurd Erixon is especially interesting. Here, he documents how – apart from the cairns with a death motive (largely corresponding to the Danish cases mentioned above), Sweden had both good luck and misfortune averting sacrificial stone throwing (Fig. 13).Whereas the sacrificial cairns connected to deaths were evenly distributed across the whole country, Erixon found that the “good luck cairns” occurred mainly in environments associated with mountain pasture farming or fishing. Based on this observation and desultory comparative studies, Erixon formed the hypothesis that the “good luck cairns” represented an older and more primitive culture than the cairns associated with sacrifices to the dead. “The first,” he writes, “belong rather more to the work area of hunting, fishing, and animal husbandry, roads, and environments, whereas the death sacrificial cairns seem to be closer related to the culture of agriculture.”The problem with the folkloristic material is that most of it is based on reminiscences. In order to study the living tradition, one must turn elsewhere. However, as demonstrated by James Frazer in “The Golden Bough,” this is no problem, as the custom of throwing stones in a pile is known from all over the world, from Africa, Europe, and Asia to Australia and America (Fig. 14).Customs last, their meanings perish – the explanation why, for instance, one must throw a stone onto a stone pile, may be forgotten, or reinterpreted, or get a completely new explanation. The custom probably goes back further than any known religion. However, these have all tried to tally the stone throwing with their “theology.” In Ancient Greece, the stone piles by the roadsides were furnished with statues of Hermes (in the shape of a post with a head and sometimes a phallus). As an escort for the dead, Hermes became the god of the travellers, and just as the gods had thrown stones after Hermes when he was accused of murdering Argus, people could now do the same.With the introduction of Christianity, the throwing of stones was denounced as superstition, and a standard question for the penitents in the so-called books of penance was: “Have you carried stones to a heap?” All across Europe, crosses were planted in the stone heaps – which must have caused problems as it was considered a deadly sin to throw stones after a cross. In the culture connected with pilgrimage, the cairns got a new meaning as markers of important places. For instance, enormous stone piles outside Santiago de Compostela mark the location where pilgrims first spotted the towers of the city’s cathedral (Fig. 15). At many places, the cairns were consecrated to saints, so that now people would carry stones to them as a sacrifice or a penance. The jews also adopted the custom. The Old Testament mentions stone heaps gathered over murdered persons or placed around a larger stone, as the “witness dolmen” built by Jacob and his people to commemmorate his pact with Laban, his father-in-law. However, there is no mention of throwing new stones onto these heaps. However, the latter occurs in the still practiced Jewish custom of placing stones on the gravestones when Jews visit the graves of their dead (Fig. 16).Stone throwing in a Muslim context is illustrated by Edward Westermarck’s large investigation of rituals and popular belief with the Berbers and the Arabs in Marocco in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, it only comprises cairns connected to Muslim saints, but even with this limitation, the investigation gives an idea of the variety of applications. If the stone heap is situated near the grave of a saint, it may mark the demarcation of the sacred area, or it may have come into existence because the wayfaring have a habit of throwing a stone when they pass the grave of a saint, which they do not have time to visit. If the heap is situated on a ridge, it is usually an indication of the spot on a certain pilgrim route where the sacred places become visible for the first time. Other stone heaps mark the places where a holy man or woman is supposed to have been buried, or rested, or camped some time. By a large crossroads outside Andira, Westermark was shown a stone heap, which indicated that this place was the gathering place for saints, who met there at nighttime. The sacred cairns in Marocco are often easily recognized by the fact that they are chalked white at intervals. At some places, the cairns may also be marked with a pole with a white flag symbolising the sacred character of the place.Even Buddhism struggled against the stone heaps, especially in the form of the oboo cult, which was repeatedly reformered and reinterpreted by Buddhist missionaries. And in early 17th-century South America, the converted aristocratic Inca, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, made sarcastic remarks about Indians, who “even now” had preserved the bad habit of [sacrificing to] stone heaps (apachitas).”Historically, the Danish cairns can be documented from the 16th century, but the tradition may well be older. Seen in a larger, comparative context, heaps of stones and branches represent an ancient tradition rooted in the deepest cultural layers of mankind. Thus, as cultural relics, they are certainly worthy of preservation, and we ought to put a lot of effort into preserving the few still existing.Whereas it will probably be difficult to establish possible prehistoric stone heaps using archaeology, the possibilities of documenting hitherto unknown stone piles from historical times is considerably higher, if special topographic conditions are taken into consideration. In connection with small mounds on tidal meadows or stone heaps along stretches of old roads and by fords, old places of execution, springs, and grave mounds used secondarily for gallows, one should pay attention to such structures, which may well prove to be covering a grave.In a folklore context, the Danish stone heaps must be characterized as mainly “death sacrifice throws,” whereas only few were “good luck throws.” Due to the limited size of the country, and early farming, cairns and other road marks have not played the same role as a help for travellers and traffic as it did in our neighbouring countries with their huge waste areas.If the stone piles are considered part of a thousands of years old chain of traditions, they belong to the oldest human “monuments.” The global distribution of the phenomenon endows it with a mystery, which, during a travel in Mongolia, Haslund-Christensen caught with a stroke of genius: “We stood before an oboo, one of the largest I have ever seen...one of those mysterious places of sacrifice which are still secretly preserved, built of stone cast upon stone through many generations; a home of mystery which has its roots in the origin of the people itself, and whose religious significance goes much further back in time than any of the religions in the modern world.”Gustav HenningsenDansk Folkemindesamling Jesper LaursenMoesgård Museum Translated by Annette Lerche Trolle

Whenever a disease is widespread like an epidemic or pandemic its apocalyptic nature fails to escape the creative imagination of literary writers. Beginning from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man are some of the precursors of the literary fiction in English which captures apocalyptic events and their impact on the society. A pandemic affects not only elders but also children, not only rich but also poor, not only upper class but also the workers. A lot of literature focuses on the affliction of the first and their response to the pandemic. In addition to the epidemics like cholera and plague which recurred from time to time and afflicted a large section of the population, there was the pandemic scarlet fever which rarely made the adult population suffer as it primarily struck the children aged between five and fifteen. The number of works which focus on scarlet fever are few and one of the prominent ones which this paper intends to look at is by an American novelist. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69) captures influences that shape the lives of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March from childhood into womanhood. One such influence, scarlet fever which is said to have spread across Europe and America during the 19th and early 20th century victimising and causing death of several infants and young children affect the March family too. The paper attempts to capture the pandemic and tries to humanise disease and decay and its impact on the lives of the March sisters.

Books have long been recognized resources for health literacy and healing (Fosson & Husband, 1984). Individuals with health conditions or disabilities or who are dealing with illness, disability or death among friends or loved ones, can find solace and affirmation in fictional works that depict characters coping with similar health conditions. This study asked the question “If we were to select a new collection of children’s health-related fiction in mid-2014, which books would we select and what selection criteria would we apply?” The results of this study are a set of criteria for the selection of current English language literary works with health-related content for the pre-kindergarten to Grade 6 (age 12) audience http://hdl.handle.net/10402/era.38842, a collection of books that are readily available to Canadian libraries - selected against these criteria http://hdl.handle.net/10402/era.38843, a special issue of the Deakin Review of Children’s Literature - dedicated to juvenile health fiction, and book exhibits in two libraries to accompany the Deakin Review issue.

Intra- and inter-generational family singing is found throughout the world’s cultures. Children’s songs across many traditions are often performed with adult family members, whether simultaneously (in unison or harmony) or sequentially (as in call-and-response). In one corpus of printed children’s songs, however, such musical partnering between young and old was scripted, arguably for the first time. Children’s periodicals and readers in late eighteenth-century Germany offered a variety of poems, theatricals, riddles, songs, stories, and non-fiction content, all promoting norms around filial obedience, virtue, and productivity. Readers were encouraged to share and read aloud with members of their extended families. But the “disciplining” going on in this literature was as much emotional as it was moral. Melodramatic plots to dialogues, plays, and Singspiele allowed for tenderness and affection to be role-played in the family drawing room. And the poems and songs included in and spun off from these periodicals constituted, for the first time, a shared repertoire meant to be sung and played by young and old together. Duets for brothers and sisters, parents and children—with such prescriptive titles as “Brotherly Harmony” and “Song from a Young Girl to Her Father, On the Presentation of a Little Rosebud”—not only trained children how to be ideal sons, daughters, and siblings. They also habituated mothers and fathers to the new culture of sentimental, devoted parenthood. In exploring songs for family members to sing together in German juvenile print culture from 1700 to 1800, I uncover the reciprocal learning implied in text, music, and the act of performance itself, as adults and children alike rehearsed the devoted bourgeois nuclear family.

Children experience life crisis and normal developmental problems. This study is aimed at highlighting the role fiction can play in assisting children in coping with certain normal life crisis and developmental problems. A discussion on the nature of the bibliotherapeutic process indicated that fiction plays a major role in the success thereof. A model was designed for the selection process of fiction for the bibliotherapeutic process. Selection criteria were established for both the reader and the reading matter. Tables were designed consisting of selection criteria for both the reader and the reading matter. Stories about life crisis relating to death and divorce, as well as normal developmental problems about fear of peer group rejection and fear of the acquirement of skills, were evaluated against these criteria. This indicates that it is possible to select the right book for the bibliotherapeutic process with children.
Information Science
M.Inf.

Silence and rereading are key discursive practices of Miriam and Beatrice Sharpe, the sister protagonists of Falling Slowly. Their forms of absence and excess cause critics to herald the decline of Brookner’s powers in her early reception.The sisters also share a number of behaviours with the aesthetes and Decadents labelled degenerate in Max Nordau’s Degeneration including Joris-Karl Huysmans, Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Such behaviours include dullness, decline, ennui, inactivity, boredom, invisibility, anxiety, restlessness and absence. This chapter spins the hierarchical figure of the degenerate across the sister relationship of the domestic fiction to produce a queering of the domestic fiction. Rejecting the normative impulse of the figure, it instead engages its deconstructive capacity to render transparent the mechanisms of epistemological production and expose the way in which subjects and objects attain status as real or unreal, healthy or sick, visible or invisible, literal or figurative, heterosexual or lesbian. Inspired by Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, it mobilises a ‘no future’ narrative as the narrative form of the degenerate. The rhetorical form of syllepsis, which governs shifts between the literal and figurative, is reappropriated from the male canon to underscore the open-ended nature of signification.