Articles de revues sur le sujet « Imagination in children – Juvenile fiction »

Some people cannot love even their family members, while some seemingly normal people have few paradoxical qualities. Is there a connection between their strange behavior and their childhood experiences? What is the role of childhood in the character development of a person? The psychologists consider childhood experiences as the building blocks of a person’s personality. Freud believed that the child’s bond with the parents is the key to his/her psyche. Erikson divides a person’s life into eight stages of development. Every child faces a crisis or a challenge at each stage. The resolution of the crisis would lead to the acquisition of virtue, while failure caused maladaptive. Karen Horney also puts forth similar views. If the child’s basic need is not met, he/ she would either move towards people or move against or move away from people. This article examines the portrayal of children, their challenges, idiosyncrasies, and impact of their experiences on their psyche in the fiction One Amazing Thing, written by famous Indian American author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni from a psychoanalytical perspective. She has written a few children’s novels also. A master storyteller, she weaves reality, imagination, and psychology together and creates both adult and juvenile characters who are true to life.

Numerous studies have appeared in recent years that deal with the reasons and rationalizations that accompanied America's overseas acquisitions in 1898. This article uses juvenile series fiction to examine how the nation's youth—boys in particular—became targets of imperial boosterism. In the pages of adventure novels set against the backdrop of American interventions in the Caribbean and the Philippines, Edward Stratemeyer, the most successful author and publisher of youth series fiction, and other less well-known juvenile fiction producers offered sensationalistic dramas that advocated a racialist, expansionistic foreign policy. Stratemeyer and others offered American boys an imaginative space as participants in and future stewards of national triumph. Young readers, the article argues further, became active participants in their own politicization. An examination of the voluminous fan mail sent to series fiction authors by their juvenile admirers reveals boys' willingness, even eagerness, to participate in the ascendancy of the United States.

Referring to fiction by Charles Dickens and Henry James, this essay considers the moral psychology of counterfactual narratives, studying pressures that invite the imagination of alternate lives. Such "optative" narratives, characteristic of realism, typically become important within particular environments of attention; glancing at economic and ideological factors, the argument focuses on marriage and the loss of children.

This critical content analysis examines representations of race and ethnicity in three young adult speculative novels: Children of Blood and Bone, The Black Witch, and Carve the Mark. This study utilizes Critical Race Theory to closely analyze texts to find and critique elements of bias and highlight counter-stories. Three major themes emerged from the analysis: BIPOC characters as dark aggressors, the construction of systems of oppression in worldbuilding, and the transformation of characters encountering racism. In the discussion and implication, the author argues for supporting counter-storytelling and provides questions for analyzing representation in speculative fiction.

The article presents a cross-sectional view of the impact of the translations of English-language juvenile literature of the Golden Age on Polish literary production for young readers. This panorama of infl uences and reception modes is presented in three comparative close-ups, dealing with characters and recipients (English ‘girls’ novels’ and their Polish equivalents), literary convention (adventure novels), and fairytale quality, imagination, and fantasy (Polish literary works inspired by English classic fantasy books). The study shows that Golden Age children’s literature transferred into Polish by means of translation brought new trends, motifs, genres and themes to Polish juvenile literature, signifi cantly contributing to its development.

This paper discusses the concept of fantasy. There is much in the word of fiction today so that the number of writers on imagination is increasing. After people have come to realize that romance is serving as much as a sea in the intellectual development of children, most of them have started to encourage their children to like more reading fantasy books. Some parents have even made it a great deal by deciding to build a small home library of fantasy books for children.The paper’s purpose is to discuss the role of fantasy literature in children’s intellectual development by including different forms of fantasy and its various advantages. The latter include creativity, entertainment, imagination and language skills improvement, the schematic knowledge, enjoyment, strategies applied for problem-solving, knowing the do’s and don’ts of the society, etc. Some Critics have made assertions on children’s ways of learning. This paper incorporates some of the claims and discusses them with some excerpts of illustrative stories related to fantasy.Enhanced by the fact that fantasy is the roadmap to the child thinking ability development, the paper will finally show why parents should motivate their children to get interested in fiction, which has a lot to do with children’s learning process.

A work of fiction made by a child is an extraordinary gift. The child's ability to imagine and put that imagination into a series of stories is an invaluable value of the archipelago's wealth. A work made by children aged 6-12 years became one of the riches of Indonesian literature which eventually developed and was called children's literature. Children's literature is rich in values and messages. Children's literature is also rich in directive functions. This study found that in children's literature there are many directive functions conveyed by the author through his work. The various directive functions contained in children's fiction are representations of real life experienced by characters or writers in their daily routines. The richer the directive function in children's fiction, the richer the message conveyed by the author, implicitly or explicitly

This article argues that historical fiction functions as a collective memory: it provides a social framework for recollections that speak of a national agenda often through personal experiences. Taking as its examples three Australian and New Zealand fictions for children and young adults, from the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century, the article examines texts that focus on how we remember the past and what aspects of that past should be remembered: Memorial (1999), a picture book by Gary Crew (author) and Shaun Tan (illustrator), The Divine Wind (1998) by Garry Disher, and The Swap (2004) by Wendy Catran. Close analysis of these texts suggests that, like memory itself, historical fiction tends to eulogise the past. In historical fiction, for children especially, whilst power relations of cultural significance can be perpetuated, they can also be re-positioned or re-invented in order to re-imagine the past. Shifts in the present understanding of past power relationships contribute towards the reinvention of race relations, national ideologies and the locus of political dissent. The article concludes that historical fiction, because of its simultaneous claim to fact and imagination, can be a powerful and cunning mode of propaganda.

This study investigates a novel entitled Northern Lights (1995), authored by Philip Pullman as a fantasy fiction in the context of popular literature. The aim of this study is to reveal the significance of children and myth characters as the formula and the intrinsic formulation of this novel as an adventure story. As a textual study, this study uses a narrative analysis method that can help to explore the intrinsic elements of prose fiction. The relevant data collected and analyzed in this study are narrations or dialogues that refer to particular acts and speech of characters, settings of place, theme, and plot in the novel. All data are analyzed to disclose the conception of children and myths used as the basic formula of this novel. At the end of the analysis, the investigation reveals the significance of children and myth characters in this novel. They are seemingly used to attract readers’ interest and concern in transcending their imagination boundaries in their daily lives. Besides, this study can also explicate how they are intrinsically formulated in an adventure story.

This paper discusses the playworlds of the Playworld of Creative Research (PWCR) research group. Play¬worlds are created from a relatively new form of play that can be described as a combination of adult forms of creative imagination (art, science, etc.), which require extensive real life experience, and children’s forms of creative imagination (play), which require the embodiment of ideas and emotions in the material world. In playworlds, adults and children (or teenagers or seniors) enter into a common fantasy that is designed to support the development of both adults and children (or teenagers or seniors). The PWCR understands play¬worlds and the study of playworlds as ways of being. In this paper we present unique, individual playworlds that we truly love from the perspective of researchers, artists, teachers, children, administrators, and imagi¬nary characters, who participate in playworlds. We use a master fiction writer’s words on the love of literature to frame our discussion of playworlds, focusing on truth, time, human magic, infinite possibilities, fun, and the enriching and intensifying (and so, creating) of the real in playworlds in Japan, Finland, Sweden and the US.

Imperial and colonial juvenile literature is assumed to be ‘an excellent reflector of the dominant ideas of an age’ (Mackenzie). This article by contrast argues for a less mimetic view through close rereading of Mrs R. Lee's Playing at Settlers, or the Faggot House (1855) , particularly its unfinished critiques of high colonialism from within. The actions of its enlightened British juvenile protagonists to educate their peers, and adult interlocutors, makes this text ‘settler’ and ‘Robinsonade’ fiction with a difference, as much for Britons at home as for those overseas. The tensions, cultural specificities and multi-colonial dimensions of the text explored in this article then suggest avenues for further research on juvenile works of the period, whether British or other European. Recovery of other similar, yet forgotten, works for children not only invites more informed reappraisal of them, but also of over-zealous postcolonial readings of the ‘civilising mission’ that have denied vociferous counter-colonial voices in juvenile, next-generational form.

Author Julia Golding reflects on her process for writing historical fiction for children. She wants to leave readers with an image that will encourage their young minds to turn on to history: The popularity of the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series shows that huge numbers of children love fantasy, perhaps best summed up as going-through-the-wardrobe to other worlds. I enjoy this, too. Yet the pleasure of writing historical novels is similar in my experience to writing fantasy: the past is one place to which my imagination/wardrobe leads. If a young writer gathers just enough information to map a few steps beyond the door, then they have a whole new world to explore, which, if they give it a chance, will be just as exciting as anything a magician or half-blood could experience.

Purpose of the study: This study aims to explore how fantasy probes the embedded meanings of creativity and communication. It also seeks to reiterate the role of fantasy and imagination in confronting contemporary issues in real life. Methodology: This study uses an interpretative approach using J.R.R Tolkien's theory of fantasy to analyze the text as an allegory. Through close reading and textual analysis, the text is analysed, relating the events to a personal and political context, which it allegorizes. Online scholarly materials on fantasy and storytelling, collected from various digital sources and libraries were explored to assist in analyzing the role of fantasy in dealing with the contemporary issues in the real world. Main Findings: The study has found that the power of imagination has brought fantasy into existence and fantasy is analyzed as a tool to resist the contemporary issues regarding the freedom of thought and speech in the real life. The study has also found that storytelling brings a union in the community to build an egalitarian society. Applications of the study: This study can be helpful in children’s literature, to prepare the children for their adulthood by equipping them with problem-solving skills and creative skills by empowering their power of imagination. It can also facilitate the children to empower be aware of their the sense of right to information and expression in their life. Novelty/Originality of the study: The study proves the text as fantasy fiction, not just for fun with the supernatural features, but has embedded messages in the symbols and metaphors, revealed through the storytelling technique. Fantasy and creativity draw a link between the imaginary world and the real world as it is an outlet for repressed desires and also a tool to resist the contemporary issues of real-life through creativity.

AbstractDuring the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, thousands of middle-class youths published their own amateur newspapers. These periodicals were printed using the so-called toy (or “novelty”) press, a portable tabletop device that helped democratize word processing. Children often used their presses to compose miniature novels and short stories. They then shared their prose with a national community of fellow juvenile writers collectively known as “Amateurdom.” Adolescent fiction explored an array of subjects, but the frontier, territorial expansion, and empire in the West became some of its particular fixations. All that imperial storytelling, however, possessed a rich subtext. Boys and girls, reacting to late-nineteenth-century changes in the lived experience of childhood, used their printing presses to challenge various constraints imposed upon them. But in so doing, they both perpetuated and reinforced a pernicious culture of settler colonialism that celebrated the subjugation of American Indians. Ultimately, the amateur publications of children remind us that fiction is not exclusively an adult enterprise. The creative output of young people provides important insight into an underexplored realm of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s literary world.

Mind is influenced by socio-cultural religious belief systems, experiences and attributions in the development of psychophenomenology. Film viewing is a common entertainment among young adults.ObjectivesInfluence of repetitive watching of films of fiction and horror genres on onset phenomenology in young adults.MethodTwo case reports on onset of psychotic features and mixed anxiety depressive phenomenology were seen in two patients aged 16 and 20 years respectively and based on the fantastic imagination created by films. The 28-year-old female patient diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder had onset at 16 years of age and the course of phenomenology was influenced by the fiction movie ‘Jumanji’ with partial response to medications over 10 years. The depressive and anxiety symptoms of less than 6 months duration of a 20-year-old male patient was influenced by film ‘Hannibal’ and responded to antidepressant and cognitive behavior therapy.ConclusionsHorror and fiction films can influence the thinking patterns and attribution styles of a young adult by stimulating fantasy thinking which if unrestrained can lead to phenomenology. Viewing films compulsively, obsessive ruminations on horror and fictional themes can lead to onset of psychopathology of both psychosis and neurotic spectrum. Further research on neurobiological, psychological correlates is needed. Parental guidance and restricted viewing of horror genre films with avoidance of repeated stimulatory viewing of same genre movies in children, adolescents, young adults and vulnerable individuals is required.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

AbstractAuthors may be understood as producing stories from their narrative idiolects. Narrative idiolects are sets of principles that enable the simulation of possible sequences of causally connected events. Such idiolects include prototypes that define classes of stories. These prototypes or proto-stories are complexes of cognitive and affective structures that guide the interpretation of real-world events as well as the production of fictions. Like everyone, Rabindranath Tagore had a range of proto-stories. But one was particularly important for him. This was a proto-story based on attachment, the sort of bonding that first of all characterizes the relations of parents and young children. This proto-story centers on the formation and violation of attachment relations, with the ethical and political issues that surround such violation. Specifically, Tagore’s ethical and political imagination was largely guided by the norm of securely developing attachment. It was elaborated into stories by reference to deviations from that norm. Those deviations are caused by attachment threat or loss. In connection with these points, Tagore’s attachment proto-story suggests two key ethical virtues – attachment sensitivity and attachment openness. These, in turn, may be disturbed by the social production of shame, often in relation to gender ideology. This essay examines Tagore’s attachment proto-story and its ethical and political consequences.

In the presented study, the authors raise the question of the need to include in the educational process of a preschool institution to familiarize children with some philosophical categories. The educational system in which the child is included, starting from preschool childhood, provides him with the opportunity to gradually and continuously enter the knowledge of the world around him. It is in preschool childhood that the child is exposed to various relationships, values of culture and health, diverse patterns in the field of different knowledge. This contributes to a broader interaction of the preschooler with the world around him, which, in turn, ensures the assimilation not of disparate ideas about objects and phenomena, but their natural integration and interpenetration, which means understanding the integrity of the picture of the world. The authors prove the idea that the assimilation of philosophical categories by children contributes to the understanding of the structure of the surrounding world. The analysis of research is presented, proving that children's fiction in an understandable and accessible language, life examples and vivid images is able to explain to children the laws of the functioning of nature and society, as well as to reveal the world of human relations and feelings. Fiction surrounds the child from the first years of his life. It is she who contributes to the development of thinking and imagination, enriches the sensory world, provides role models and teaches you to find a way out in different situations. Philosophical categories such as "love and friendship", "beautiful and ugly", "good and evil" are represented in children's literature very widely, and the efficiency of mastering philosophical categories depends on the skill of an adult in conveying the content of a work, on correctly placed accents.

There is a Chinese curse quoted in glib desk calendars that have a phrase for each day: ‘May you live in interesting times’. In fiction, maternity has not often been seen as terribly interesting, and in the real world having babies often stops a mother from writing, off and on and even for years. The story of mothers and babies seems elusive, not fit for the imagination, for where’s the story? The ‘maternal heroine’, a protagonist and main character whose actions and identity are closely bound up with her work and experience of herself as a mother of young and dependent children, is rare. How could she not be? She’s busy giving off strong whiffs of routine. Where’s the drama in that? And what are babies? They’re not thinking, arguing agents for change—hardly protagonists—even if antagonistic at the cocktail hour. At least, that is one way of opening up the question of the maternal heroine.

Throughout reading short stories one realizes how the most fundamental stories of Indian culture also narrate tales of human existence. The Pañcatantra fables written in Sanskrit have also originated in India addressed to children that have stories that have been tailored distinctively to the evident needs of the child. Most of these stories are immersed in the Indian culture in which children grow up. Interestingly, Ruskin Bond as a story writer focuses on the epistemological foundation of the stories while incorporating fiction and personal experiences and, at the same time, with ecological concerns. His stories then become an assortment of experiences and anecdotes to understand the postulate in the story of humanity and the wilderness. This research paper is a study of Bond’s Dust on the Mountains that examines the stories as an expression of the narratives of civilization and wilderness. The aim of this paper is not only to read the book of stories that bridge different interdisciplinary subjects defining and describing wilderness but also to explore how the narrative speaks to readers with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. The study incorporates an ecocritical perspective to examine the metanarrative that frames both author’s and readers’ imagination, perception, and way of life.

This essay builds on the author’s previous work on the Left Behind novels for kids, arguing that while current socio-political conditions have certainly contributed to the success of the series, an earlier phenomenon informs its literary structure: the many novels and stories produced by the American Sunday School Union (ASSU). The numerous literary, cultural, religious, and historical details that connect ASSU fiction and the Left Behind: The Kids series demonstrate significant continuities in the projects of US evangelical Christianity over more than a century. The closing section discusses how the differences between the current crop of evangelical narratives and the historical ones are just as instructive as their similarities, for they demonstrate changing conceptions of children and childhood in the United States, and the place and purpose of religious-themed narratives for young readers on the eve of the new millennium and in the opening decade of the twenty-first century.

Objective – While storytime programs for preschool children are offered in nearly all public libraries in the United States, little is known about the books librarians use in these programs. This study employed text analysis to explore topics and genres of books recommended for public library storytime programs. Methods – In the study, the researchers randomly selected 429 children books recommended for preschool storytime programs. Two corpuses of text were extracted from the titles, abstracts, and subject terms from bibliographic data. Multiple text mining methods were employed to investigate the content of the selected books, including term frequency, bi-gram analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. Results – The findings revealed popular topics in storytime books, including animals/creatures, color, alphabet, nature, movements, families, friends, and others. The analysis of bibliographic data described various genres and formats of storytime books, such as juvenile fiction, rhymes, board books, pictorial work, poetry, folklore, and nonfiction. Sentiment analysis results reveal that storytime books included a variety of words representing various dimensions of sentiment. Conclusion – The findings suggested that books recommended for storytime programs are centered around topics of interest to children that also support school readiness. In addition to selecting fictionalized stories that will support children in developing the academic concepts and socio-emotional skills necessary for later success, librarians should also be mindful of integrating informational texts into storytime programs.

Crime stories for the youngest. About the current of Polish crime novels addressed to children and teenagers after 1989: ReconnaissanceLiterature intended for children and teenagers has got a specific character because of the specificity of the reader. What attracts our attention is first of all the didactic level of texts addressed to young concerning both age and literary knowledge readers and the instrumentalism, understood as a flow of particular information which aim is exerting a pedagogical influence. Therefore, the criminal intrigue is not in the centre of reader’s attention. It does, however, play an important role as the fiction mode, which enables genealogical instantiation of a particular text. This property draws the crime story for children and teenagers near to the novel of manner which is addressed to the juvenile reader; in this novel, the central theme point remains the closest setting of a protagonist, who is modelled on the assumed reader and his or her relationship with surroundings. The criminal thread is then fulfilling a function of a background which allows boosting the plot of the novel. However, reading texts for children and teenagers can be treated as an introduction to adult-oriented novels, especially when the reader has an opportunity to solve the mystery together with protagonists and outrun them in uncloaking the killer.

Anthropomorphism, the imposition of human traits on nonhuman objects and animals, is an ancient tradition in the art of storytelling. Existing studies on anthropomorphism in literature have mostly focused on its being a satirical device in adult fiction but paid less attention to how anthropomorphism is constructed in literature for children. This study was executed to examine the depiction of anthropomorphism through folktales, modern fables, and digitales-in selected contemporary Nigerian prose narratives for children intending to establish the use of anthropomorphized characters to bring abstract concepts to life. Jean Piaget’s cognitive constructivism was adopted as the theoretical framework for the study. Five narratives were purposively selected because of their relevance to the study. The narratives were subjected to critical analyses. The face of anthropomorphism is revealed as a rhetorical tool through personification and metaphoric expressions. Anthropomorphism in children’s narratives serves as an attention grabber and a means of giving concrete information on learning through cognitive constructivism which is effective through a literature-based learning experience. In juvenile literature, anthropomorphism is used in building a relational attitude between the young readers and the fictional characters in the text for subtle facilitation of knowledge.

Reading is always a topical issue in a child’s life. Seven open-ended questions test children’s attitudes toward books and reading. They reveal the reader’s experience and preferences of the respondent. The report analyzes the results of a study among children aged 6 to 11 years. The survey was conducted in the period from May 10 to May 14, 2021 with 216 respondents. The aim is to establish the place of the book as a value guide in child development. A drawing is attached to the survey. It provokes children’s imagination and creative thinking on the topic. Provides an opportunity for the manifestation of their personal colour perception. The survey contributes to the observation and study of the cognitive, affective, and connotative element in the child’s attitude to the phenomenon of reading. The survey is based on the following hypothesis: Placing the child in a consciously formed reading environment through his active role as a user and creator, the use of innovative pedagogical techniques activates his individual interest and motivation to read, and this leads to the formation of lasting reading skills. It creates an attitude and love for books and learning. The following conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of the survey: The reader’s attitude is directly related to the early reading by the child’s parent. Most children love reading fiction and encyclopedias. They also prefer printed books. The library in the classroom maintains the readers’ interest in the students.

The paper presents an analysis of the “Schulzoid” novel by Dominika Słowik, Atlas: Döppelganger, which addressed the topic of passing from adolescence to adulthood during the Polish systemic transformation. The author’s starting point is the famous interpretation of Schulz’s fiction by Artur Sandauer in his essay “The Degraded Reality” [Rzeczywistość zdegradowana], based on a claim that Schulz represented in his own way the experience of the decomposition of the known world as a result of the capitalist expansion in the early 20th century. The analysis focuses on the figure of the grandfather and the transformation itself. The former is the central character in the narrator’s mythology of childhood: he keeps telling fascinating stories about life at sea, on the other hand being a fantasist who tries to alleviate his sense of exclusion from the new reality. The systemic transformation has been represented in Słowik’s novel by a series of antinomies as well. The nostalgic and sublime descriptions of the material conditions at the turning point have been combined with the pictures of degradation and trash. Then the novel is placed against the background of the literature of the 1990s, summed up by Olga Drenda’s essay, Duchologia polska. Słowik remembers the material conditions of the period of the systemic transformation and the trashy, though also sentimental, aesthetics of the historical moment when she and other authors of her generation were children. This makes the author of the paper compare their writing with Schulz’s postulate of the return to childhood. Yet in Schulz’s fiction childhood is the source of a private mythology – the images that constitute the writer’s imagination. The writers of the 1990s make a turn toward the reminiscences of childhood to revise critically the myths of the historical turning moment and to articulate their own and their generation’s experience of the transformation.

Abstract My essay proposes a reading of J.G. Ballard’s 1988 novella Running Wild as a cautionary crime story, a parable about the self-fulfilling prophecies of contemporary urban fears and about the “prisons” they create in a consumerist, technology- and media-dominated civilization. Interpreted in the light of Foucault’s concept of panopticism, Ballard’s gated community as a crime setting reveals how a disciplinary pedagogy meant to obtain “docile bodies,” masked under the socially elitist comfort of affluence and parental care, “brands” the inmate-children as potential delinquents and ultimately drives them to an act of “mass tyrannicide.” Ballard uses the murder story as a vehicle for the exploration of the paradoxical effects of a regime of total surveillance and of mediated presence, which, while expected to make “murder mystery” impossible, allows for the precession of the representation to the real (crime). The essay also highlights the way in which Ballard both cites and subverts some of the conventions of the Golden Age detective fiction, mainly by his rejection of the latter’s escapist ethos and by the liminal character of his investigator, at once part of a normalizing panoptic apparatus and eccentric to it, a “poetic figure” (Chesterton) relying on imagination and “aestheticizing” the routines of the detection process.

This study analyzes and explores the concept of magic realism as a mixture of realism and fantasy made in order to serve a particular artistic fusion. The mixture is based on the fact that whatever happens, however extraordinary they may seem, they are ordinary and everyday occurrences. Anything which takes place within the boundaries of magical realism is meant to be accepted as a typical life among the characters in the stories. No matter how far-fetched or extraordinary the subjects may be, all the characters within the works give an allusion of acting naturally and casually. Instead of looking at the world as ordinary and mundane, the magical realists like Marquez and Rushdie bring in a spark of imagination to light the ordinary experiences such a way that they excite the mind of the readers. Magical realism is a fusion of dream and reality, an amalgamation of realism and fantasy, and a form of expression that is based with several fantastical elements, which are nevertheless regarded as normal by both the readers and the characters. This artistic device re-imagines the world and its reality, and presents a different viewpoint on life and the way in which people think and act. Marquez and Rushdie present the worlds where fiction blends with historical reality and in which reality incorporates magic, superstition, myth, religion and history. They use magical elements to create, rewrite and reconstruct broader commentaries on the politics, history and societies in Latin America and India. Marquez and Rushdie employ and establish an alternative reality which juxtaposes fantastical elements with equally mind boggling realities; the truth becomes fantasy and the fantasy becomes truth to disclose historical and political panorama of Latin America and India respectively.

The article deals with the story "Crazy wind" by Didakhmet Ashimkhanuly, who crossed the sacred threshold of literature in the seventies and eighties and managed to find his place in a short time. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the writer's skill, reveal the fruit of the writer's creative imagination, the novelty of the artistic tool in revealing the psychology of the character's personality. In addition, the personality of the protagonist, the cognitive and artistic place of the fictional story combined with the legend is proved. We tried to study the possibility of helping to reveal the educational value of the work with specific examples. The work concludes the description of the character's personality in connection with nature, the search for the inner world of man, the contradictory feelings in man, the unity of the plot to describe the fate of the country, the glorification of human qualities. Analyzing the success of the writer's work in the years of independence, focusing on his short stories, stories, journalistic essays, works in the genres of literary criticism, we see that his works are associated with the complex issues of modern society, such as social change, national values, national destiny. The research deals with the issues of national goals, mother tongue, spiritual immorality in the works of the author. It is emphasized that the writer connects his creative skills with the emergence of new technologies (children talk not with their parents, but with the mirror, no one understands what they are talking about, that is, talking with the internet), which contributes to the development of fiction. Focusing freely on the issues of the inability to preserve the national mentality (a bull on a calf, girls on a boy, a naked knife, a demonic dance, a frantic state), social situation (tribal life, the fate of the nation, etc.), the writer tries to show the aspirations of the spiritually degenerate tribes for material wealth, trying to reveal the peculiarities of the mentality and national identity of each tribe, turning to small episodes that form the basis of everyday life of Obyr, Zhebir, Orman tribes. The details are interesting and different, thus enriching the ideological and artistic content of the story.

The article is an attempt to define a very special role of women in society, inherent in only Ukrainian historical realities. In particular, a somewhat non-trivial approach to the formation of a source base for the study allowed referring to works of fiction. Most attention is paid to the issue of women entering society medium in the times of the Cossacks. Among the conclusions – contrary to national, gender and social oppression for several centuries – Ukrainian women have maintained their commitment to universal human and Christian ideals and virtues. The role and place that women take in the social structure is an extremely significant criterion for assessing the level of civilizing development of one or other society. It was the words “Equal among equals” that one could quite accurately define the positions of Ukrainian women in the glorious and tragic times of the national history – during the emergence and heyday of the Cossacks. It was a time when Ukrainian women, not only a gentry, but also a simple Cossack women, invariably felt not imaginary but sincere self-respect both in the family and in the society. However, not only in Cossack times, but throughout the turbulent history of our country, Ukrainian women did not just “walk alongside of” their men, they often stepped forward, and their actions were decisive for the further course of events for many years to come. Unfortunately, there are reasons to consider the current (as of 2019) stage of research in the format of scientific inquiry, which directly relates to Ukrainian women in the historical and cultural context, only as an initial one. With this in mind, the aim of the proposed work is to begin filling in quite substantial gaps in the civilizing history of Ukraine. It was they, Ukrainian women – even from renowned Princess Olha – who became the worthy examples to follow for their compatriots. There are countless names of women, by whom Ukraine is proud of and who are respected all over the world – from the poetess Lesia Ukrainka, folk paintress Yekateryna Bilokour, opera vocalist Solomiia Krushelnytska up to bright personalities already from the contemporary generation of Ukrainian women. They did never and under no circumstances bow to a slavish worldview. In this regard the observation of a well-known European writer, made by him as far back as in the last century, is very accurate: “The Ukrainian woman is the Spanish woman of the East ... At every opportunity, her irrepressible Cossack nature flares up in her soul that does not know any repressor ...”. And further: “They are always ready to change ploughshares for spears, they live in small republican communities, as equals among equals ...”. We discover all this for ourselves in the “Female Images from Galicia” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Paul of Aleppo, known also as Paul Zaim, an Arab traveller, who visited Ukraine twice in the middle of the XVII century, testified: “... Throughout the Cossack land we saw a strange thing – they all are, with few exceptions, literate; even most of their women and daughters can read and know the procedure of church service ... Ukrainian women are well dressed, busy with their own affairs, and no one casts sassy glances at them.” Numerous documents have survived, indicating that the wives of the Cossack Starshyna not only knew writing and reading well but were also able, when the need arose, to help their husbands in solving the most important political problems. The material, which is no less important in its cognitive weight from documentary evidence, also provides imaginative literature, where the realities of bygone times are reflected through the author’s creative imagination. These are the dramatic poem “Boyaryna” by Lesia Ukrainka, and “Hanna Montovt”, the story written by a famous Ukrainian historian and writer Orest Levytskyi, as well as “Aeneid”, a burlesque and tranny poem written by Ivan Kotliarevskyi; the latter literary work can be considered as a kind of encyclopaedia of Olde Ukrainian life. In “Boyarina”, the comparison of the “civil society” (using the modern definition) of the Ukrainian Cossack State with the conditions prevailing in neighbouring Muscovy is especially striking. A young girl of Ukrainian noble descent, who left her motherland for the sake to be with her beloved man, met in a foreign land very different ideas about human truths, class-specific and inherent female virtues, which are significantly different from those truly Christian and deeply democratic principles of life that she was used to since childhood in her native Ukraine. And, becoming a Boyarina, although she obeyed fate, however, she was no longer able to get used to her new life. The fate of poor Princess Hannа from the story by Orest Levytskyi was formed in a different manner. However, not at all because of the imperfection of the then social system, but solely because of her own frivolity and inability to execise her (tremendous) rights. But in “Aeneid” by Ivan Kotliarevskyi, where antique plots were whimsically intertwined with the signs of Cossack life, the remark: “Like a lady of certain sotnyk ...” became virtually the highest mark for one of the goddesses. As the expression goes, it speaks for itself, and the irony about the mention of the sotnyk will be completely inappropriate, given the trace that Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, the former Chygyryn sotnyk and subsequently a Hetman of Ukraine, left in the history of Ukrainian nationality! In the times of Cossacks, men have the opportunity to spend more or less long time with their families too rarely. But they went to a military campaign with peace of mind because from this moment their faithful wives took active roles in all matters – and not only household, but the domesticities too. And, say, not the eldest of their sons, but she herself took part, when necessary, in resolving property or other disputes, defended the interests of their families before the society, and even in court. Moreover, their wives could often ride horses with arms in hands to defend their native homes. Unfortunately, then-Muscovy have introduced serfdom in its most despotic form on intaken Ukrainian lands, combined with her absolutist system of government and public relations which immediately changed the state of Ukrainian women for the worst. And this applied not only to the impoverished and enslaved people, but also to the wealthy and influential sections of the then population. And subsequently Taras Shevchenko became the most sincere voice of a deeply tragic female fate ... Conclusions. Even when then Ukrainians were slowly forgetting about the previous rights and privileges of their women, undeniable documentary and literary evidence remained the mention of them, which in one way or another were connected with the times of Cossacks. So, Ukrainian women of those, already far from us times was not only faithful wives, caring mothers and teachers for their children, real Bereginias of the families, but also a self-sufficient persons, conscious in their place in the society.

Marshall, Rita, and Etienne Delessert. I Hate to Read! Mankato, MN: Creative Education, 1992. Print. As you might guess from the title, this book invites reluctant readers to discover the wondrous adventures that can be accessed through turning the pages of a book, as opposed to tuning into TV programs. The cover features the narrator—third-grader Victor Dickens—on a dragon’s back, with flames licking out of the pages of a stack of books. Readers are told that Victor is a “really good kid” “most of the time,” and many children will be able to relate to his academic difficulties: “Victor got As in math and Bs in science, but Fs when it came to the ABCs”. He calls himself a “victim of the hate to read syndrome”. One night, Victor is visited by a series of storybook creatures, including a crocodile in a white coat, a field mouse carrying gold coins, a pirate parrot, and a white rabbit in black barn boots; all of whom attempt to convince him to read. He repeats his usual mantra, “I hate to read,” until gradually he begins turning pages, and his imagination takes over. Fictional characters morph into people from his real life: Sleeping Beauty turns into Natalie Nickerson, on whom Victor appears to have a bit of a crush. The turning point comes when one of the characters whispers: “It’s fun to read even when you’re not supposed to.” This thought appeals to his sense of juvenile rebellion, and he continues in his literary reverie, even missing his favourite TV program. He imagines his teacher as a witch, throwing books into a cauldron, and his classmates, led by Natalie, shouting, “We hate to read!” Instead of joining in, however, Victor thinks of how sad he would be to lose all of his new friends, so he looks for them in his book: “And as he read each page, he just hated…to come to the end.” Writer and designer Rita Marshall and illustrator Etienne Delessert have each been awarded numerous literary prizes for their work. The large-scale drawings of the storybook creatures are whimsical and inviting. They also contain small details that might not be noticed on the first reading. For example, the toes and talons of the dragon on the cover also form crow-like birds with pointy beaks. In another image, letters of the alphabet are hidden in animal tracks. On the other hand, the book includes some literary references that would likely be lost on a typical third-grader. For example, Victor’s parents are said to have bought all 56 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica to help pique his interest in reading. It is unlikely that many families would have this set in their homes, nor would a child normally encounter one in an elementary school library. However, these details will perhaps prompt questions from curious readers. On the whole, “I hate to read” is highly likely to achieve its principal goal. Much like Victor, most children will probably hate to see it come to an end. Not to fear, they can continue to follow Victor’s adventures in “I Still Hate to Read,” which was published in 2007. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Kim Frail Kim is a Public Services Librarian at the H.T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta. Children’s literature is a big part of her world at work and at home. She also enjoys gardening, renovating and keeping up with her two-year old.

Interviews with Canadian children’s public librarians reveal that they believe fiction and non-fiction scatological content has an important place in library collections, that children have an intellectual freedom right to access this material, and that adults have many misconceptions about the role of library collections and the development of juvenile humour.Des entrevues auprès de bibliothécaires jeunesses au Canada révèlent qu’ils croient que le contenu scatologique dans les documents de fiction et de non-fiction a sa place dans les collections en bibliothèque, que les enfants ont un droit intellectuel d’accès à ce type de matériel et que les adultes ont de nombreuses fausses idées quant au rôle des collections en bibliothèque et au développement d’un sens de l’humour juvénile.

Abstract Literature for children is often designed to stimulate imagination through variants of the “real” world that we inhabit, expanding their potential for construing different possible worlds – variants that include imaginary characters like animals with human traits or toys that are somehow animated and conscious. Here we will examine one version of Margery William’s classic nursery tale The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real, where the theme of “real” and imaginary characters and worlds is construed both linguistically and pictorially. We will show how the theme is construed in both text and image, and how the two complement one another, together keeping the two worlds apart while at the same time representing the Velveteen Rabbit’s transformation from toy rabbit to real rabbit.

This article is a study of letters written by American children to authors of juvenile fiction. It emphasizes the rhetorical and material choices children made in bridging the distance between themselves as writers and the authors who were to receive the letters. Focused on notions of convention, the study uses the theoretical concept of the slant to analyze the way the child writers conformed to conventions of writing and communication while also rendering those expectations askew. Ultimately, the stylistic techniques and content choices reveal methods children used to cocreate a world with the authors to whom they wrote.

AbstractTechnologies have become an essential part of the daily life of our children. Consequently, artifacts that imply the early adoption of abstract thinking affect the imagination of children and young people in relation to the world of technology, now much more than they did in the past. With the emerging importance of robots in many aspects of our everyday lives, the goal of this study is to investigate which mental representations children have about robots. To this end, drawings from 104 children aged between 7 and 12 years old were used as a map of representations, considering the drawings as a proxy capable of evoking learned or emerging mental frameworks. The drawings were analyzed in several steps: they were first labeled using binary descriptors and then classified using clustering methods based on Hamming distances between drawings. Finally, questionnaire items covering children’s perceptions about robots were analyzed for each of the resulting cluster separately to identify differences between them. The results show that there are relationships between the way children draw robots and their perception about robots’ capabilities as well as their aspirations to pursue a career in science. These findings can provide meaningful insights into how to design educational robots and learning activities for children to learn with and about robots.

Against the backdrop of human-induced climate change and severe biodiversity loss, feminist technoscience scholars stress the need for movements towards less anthropocentric knowledge production processes. The present paper delves into the alignment work involved in striving to coordinate and align human-centred epistemic cultures and epistemic cultures centring other species. In an early childhood education site, children, teachers, materials, imagination and the attribution of human traits to snails are elaborated on as key actors. In a literary fiction site, also referred to as environmental imagination, texts, choices of literary style, scientific facts and the attribution of human traits to eels, are featured as actors accomplishing alignment work. The paper argues that adding the concept of the terrestrial to the analysis of the alignment work, as proposed by feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway, makes other aspects and versions of non-anthropocentric or less anthropocentric knowledge production processes visible. The paper adds to STS-discussions on alignment work through highlighting alignment work processes as political, power-producing processes, which privilege certain interests while downplaying others.

Proceeding from the belief that in a world shaped by violent anthropodomination literature takes important part in the substitution of real nonhuman animals with their false cultural duplicates, the paper offers examples of Bulgarian literary works about nonhuman animals and tries to examine the different angles of focalization in them. In Bulgarian literary history there is a (disputed) tradition of differentiating a certain literary branch called “animalist fiction” or “animalist literature”, distinguished predominantly on thematic basis (stories about nonhuman animals), and considered classical realistic literature for adults (or rather for all ages), not literature for children. Such works include a variety of focalization types: from extreme anthropocentrism, through pseudoanimalist focalization, up to claimed “objectivism”. All these types show that escaping anthropocentrism and achieving real nonhuman animal representation seems impossible, so the inevitable anthropocentrism should at least try to be honest. Bulgarian classical realist “animalist” fiction testifies that “animalist” focalization can never be purely nonhuman, inasmuch as literary narrative always originates from the human imagination, gets expressed through a human language, and is experienced by human perception. Focalization always includes the human, but in the best cases it can resist violent anthropodomination by being empathic for the good of the nonhuman animals.

How is the life of the East Indonesia ’world’ seen by a small Javanese women with her cosmopolitan glasses? Okky Madasari, the winner of the Equator Literary Award 2012, created a series of fantasy stories about the adventures of Mata, her mother and her imaginary friends as they explore areas far from the bustle of Jakarta. This article examines the first three novels in the series: Mata di Tanah Melus (which represents the culture of East Nusa Tenggara); Mata dan Rahasia Pulau Gapi (set in Ternate, North Maluku); and Mata dan Manusia Laut (which tells the story of Mata’s adventures in Bajo, Southeast Sulawesi). The exotic world seen through Mata’s eyes draws upon the post-colonial discourses which continue to influence Indonesian girls in the modern, global world of capitalism. This is contrasted with the narration of the Mother and miraculous friends of Mata in seeing ’the other world and others’ in the eastern tip of Indonesia. This study uses a sociological approach to literature to uncover the issues of inequality and social justice that occur in post-colonial eastern Indonesia. Okky and his Mata series show that embodying Indonesianness is the task of a maturing imagination which develops upon ideals of the nation’s children. The series encourages little girls like Mata to open their eyes to see the history, reality and direction of their country and nation. Keywords: girl’s education, social justice, children’s stories

The impact of the current globalization is seen from the appearance of some of the interesting phenomenon that afflicts the young generation especially children in Indonesia. Various issues of the world educational coloring make the sublime values and behavior as if suspended. The efforts of the formation of character in children can be done one of them through literature. The approach used in this research is descriptive qualitative. This article studies focus on the role of children's literature in the formation of the child's character and learning literature relevant to children build characters learners at a basic level. Learning about the character of the discipline, honesty, responsibility, admit mistakes, religious, and others will be more effective if delivered through the story with a cast of character. Through literature, children will also be directed to think logically about the relation of causal and imagination that will correlate significantly with creativity so that the child will be able to think creatively (creative thinking) to always be productive. As a form of conveyor injects character education in literature to the students there are some efforts that could be made by educators. Educators reveal the values that are contained in the children's literature with the direct integration of the values of the characters become integrated parts of the subjects. Learning literature in primary schools can be classified into three groups, namely; learning fiction, poetry, drama and learning

Spiritedly inspired by the well-known, nonsensical children’s stories Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, this satirical narrative describes common academic experiences within a fictitious frame. Many children’s stories present a foundational basis for the early life lessons of justice, truth, fairness, and how power corrupts. Therefore, regression to a simpler understanding of complex social interactions potentially frees one’s thinking, which frequently becomes muddled in adult-acquired ego, hubris, and sense of status. So, when adults act illogically (or like children), sense can be made of unreasonable juvenile actions by re-storying irrational episodes through the logical lens of adolescent literature and satire; thereby, establishing a safe distance for examining emotional issues and tapping into imagination for making meaning of taxing experiences. This deliberately playful narrative explores how in academia, the projection of privilege and power often generates troublesome challenges that lead down a political rabid hole of unsolvable riddles.

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM.Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is possibly the best known cinematic example of HM, and this film version of the 1986 novel by Winston Groom particularly excels in seamlessly inserting images of a fictional character into verified history, as represented by well-known television newsreel footage. In Zemeckis’s adaptation, gaps were created in the celluloid artefact and filled digitally with images of the actor, Tom Hanks, playing the eponymous role. Words are often deemed less trustworthy than images, however, and fiction is considered particularly unreliable--although there are some exceptions conceded. In addition to Gregory’s novel; Midnight’s Children (1980) by Salman Rushdie; The Name of the Rose (1983) by Umberto Eco; and The Flashman Papers (1969-2005) by George MacDonald Fraser, are three well-known, loved and lauded examples of literary HM, which even if they fail to convince the reader of their bona fides, nevertheless win a place in many hearts. But despite the genre’s popularity, there is nevertheless a conceptual gap in the literary theory of Hutcheon given her (perfectly understandable) inability in 1988 to predict the future of e-publishing. This article will attempt to address that shortcoming by exploring the potential for authors of HM e-novels to use hyperlinks which immediately direct the reader to fact providing webpages such as those available at the website Wikipedia, like a much speedier (and more independent) version of the footnotes in Fraser’s Flashman novels.Of course, as Roland Barthes declared in 1977, “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” (146) and, as per any academic work that attempts to contribute to knowledge, a text’s sources--its “quotations”--must be properly identified and acknowledged via checkable references if credibility is to be securely established. Hence, in explaining the way claims to fact in the HM novel can be confirmed by independently published experts on the Internet, this article will also address the problem Hutcheon identifies, in that for many readers the entirety of the HM novel assumes questionable authenticity, that is, the novel’s “meta-fictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3). This article (and the PhD in creative writing I am presently working on at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia) will possibly develop the concept of HM to a new level: one at which the Internet-connected reader of the hyperlinked e-novel is made fully (and even instantly) aware of those literary elements of the narrative that are legitimate and factual as distinct from those that are fictional, that is, illegitimate. Furthermore, utilising examples from my own (yet-to-be published) hyperlinked HM e-novel, this article demonstrates that such hyperlinking can add an ironic sub-text to a fictional character’s thoughts and utterances, through highlighting the reality concerning their mistaken or naïve beliefs, thus creating HM narratives that serve an entertainingly complex yet nevertheless truly educational purpose.As a relatively new and under-researched genre of historical writing, HM differs dramatically from the better known style of standard historical or biographical narrative, which typically tends to emphasise mimesis, the cataloguing of major “players” in historical events and encyclopaedic accuracy of dates, deaths and places. Instead, HM involves the re-contextualisation of real-life figures from the past, incorporating the lives of entirely (or, as in the case of Gregory’s Mary Boleyn, at least partly) fictitious characters into their generally accepted famous and factual activities, and/or the invention of scenarios that gel realistically--but entertainingly--within a landscape of well-known and well-documented events. As Hutcheon herself states: “The formal linking of history and fiction through the common denominators of intertextuality and narrativity is usually offered not as a reduction, as a shrinking of the scope and value of fiction, but rather as an expansion of these” ("Intertextuality", 11). Similarly, Gregory emphasises the need for authors of HM to extend themselves beyond the encyclopaedic archive: “Archives are not history. The trouble with archives is that the material is often random and atypical. To have history, you have to have a narrative” (University of Sussex). Functionally then, HM is an intertextual narrative genre which serves to communicate to a contemporary audience an expanded story or stories of the past which present an ultimately more self-reflective, personal and unpredictable authorship: it is a distinctly auteurial mode of biographical history writing for it places the postmodern author’s imaginative “signature” front and foremost.Hutcheon later clarified that the quest for historical truth in fiction cannot possibly hold up to the persuasive powers of a master novelist, as per the following rationale: “Fact is discourse-defined: an event is not” ("Historiographic Metafiction", 843). This means, in a rather simplistic nutshell, that the new breed of HM novel writer is not constrained by what others may call fact: s/he knows that the alleged “fact” can be renegotiated and redefined by an inventive discourse. An event, on the other hand, is responsible for too many incontrovertible consequences for it to be contested by her/his mere discourse. So-called facts are much easier for the HM writer to play with than world changing events. This notion was further popularised by Ansgar Nunning when he claimed the overtly explicit work of HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). HM authors can radically alter, it seems, the way the reader perceives the facts of history especially when entertaining, engaging and believable characters are deliberately devised and manipulated into the narrative by the writer. Little wonder, then, that Hutcheon bemoans the unfortunate reality that for many readers the entirety of a HM work assumes questionable “veracity” due to its author’s insertion of imaginary and therefore illegitimate personages.But there is an advantage to be found in this, the digital era, and that is the Internet’s hyperlink. In our ubiquitously networked electronic information age, novels written for publication as e-books may, I propose, include clickable links on the names of actual people and events to Wikipedia entries or the like, thus strengthening the reception of the work as being based on real history (the occasional unreliability of Wikipedia notwithstanding). If picked up for hard copy publication this function of the HM e-novel can be replicated with the inclusion of icons in the printed margins that can be scanned by smartphones or similar gadgets. This small but significant element of the production reinforces the e-novel’s potential status as a new form of HM and addresses Hutcheon’s concern that for HM novels, their imaginative but illegitimate invention of characters “renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3).Some historic scenarios are so little researched or so misunderstood and discoloured by the muddy waters of time and/or rumour that such hyperlinking will be a boon to HM writers. Where an obscure facet of Australian history is being fictionalised, for example, these edifying hyperlinks can provide additional background information, as Glenda Banks and Martin Andrew might have wished for when they wrote regarding Bank’s Victorian goldfields based HM novel A Respectable Married Woman. This 2012 printed work explores the lives of several under-researched and under-represented minorities, such as settler women and Aboriginal Australians, and the author Banks lamented the dearth of public awareness regarding these peoples. Indeed, HM seems tailor-made for exposing the subaltern lives of those repressed individuals who form the human “backdrop” to the lives of more famous personages. Banks and Andrew explain:To echo the writings of Homi K. Bhaba (1990), this sets up a creative site for interrogating the dominant, hegemonic, ‘normalised’ master narratives about the Victorian goldfields and ‘re-membering’ a marginalised group - the women of the goldfields, the indigenous [sic], the Chinese - and their culture (2013).In my own hyperlinked short story (presently under consideration for publishing elsewhere), which is actually a standalone version of the first chapter of a full-length HM e-novel about Aboriginal Australian activists Eddie Mabo and Chicka Dixon and the history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, entitled The Bullroarers, I have focussed on a similarly under-represented minority, that being light-complexioned, mixed race Aboriginal Australians. My second novel to deal with Indigenous Australian issues (see Starrs, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance), it is my first attempt at writing HM. Hopefully avoiding overkill whilst alerting readers to those Wikipedia pages with relevance to the narrative theme of non-Indigenous attitudes towards light-complexioned Indigenous Australians, I have inserted a total of only six hyperlinks in this 2200-word piece, plus the explanatory foreword stating: “Note, except where they are well-known place names or are indicated as factual by the insertion of Internet hyperlinks verifying such, all persons, organisations, businesses and places named in this text are entirely fictitious.”The hyperlinks in my short story all take the reader not to stubs but to well-established Wikipedia pages, and provide for the uninformed audience the following near-unassailable facts (i.e. events):The TV program, A Current Affair, which the racist character of the short story taken from The Bullroarers, Mrs Poulter, relies on for her prejudicial opinions linking Aborigines with the dealing of illegal drugs, is a long-running, prime-time Channel Nine production. Of particular relevance in the Wikipedia entry is the comment: “Like its main rival broadcast on the Seven Network, Today Tonight, A Current Affair is often considered by media critics and the public at large to use sensationalist journalism” (Wikipedia, “A Current Affair”).The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, located on the lawns opposite the Old Parliament House in Canberra, was established in 1972 and ever since has been the focus of Aboriginal Australian land rights activism and political agitation. In 1995 the Australian Register of the National Estate listed it as the only Aboriginal site in Australia that is recognised nationally for representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their political struggles (Wikipedia, “The Aboriginal Tent Embassy”).In 1992, during an Aboriginal land rights case known as Mabo, the High Court of Australia issued a judgment constituting a direct overturning of terra nullius, which is a Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one”, and which had previously formed the legal rationale and justification for the British invasion and colonisation of Aboriginal Australia (Wikipedia, “Terra Nullius”).Aboriginal rights activist and Torres Strait Islander, Eddie Koiki Mabo (1936 to 1992), was instrumental in the High Court decision to overturn the doctrine of terra nullius in 1992. In that same year, Eddie Mabo was posthumously awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Awards (Wikipedia, “Eddie Mabo”).The full name of what Mrs Poulter blithely refers to as “the Department of Families and that” is the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (Wikipedia, “The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs”).The British colonisation of Australia was a bloody, murderous affair: “continuous Aboriginal resistance for well over a century belies the ‘myth’ of peaceful settlement in Australia. Settlers in turn often reacted to Aboriginal resistance with great violence, resulting in numerous indiscriminate massacres by whites of Aboriginal men, women and children” (Wikipedia, “History of Australia (1788 - 1850)”).Basically, what is not evidenced empirically with regard to the subject matter of my text, that is, the egregious attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians towards Indigenous Australians, can be extrapolated thanks to the hyperlinks. This resonates strongly with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion in 2012 that those under-represented by mainstream, patriarchal epistemologies need to be engaged in acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” (143) so as to be re-presented as authentic identities in these HM artefacts of literary research.Exerting auteurial power as an Aboriginal Australian author myself, I have sought to imprint on my writing a multi-levelled signature pertaining to my people’s under-representation: there is not just the text I have created but another level to be considered by the reader, that being my careful choice of Wikipedia pages to hyperlink certain aspects of the creative writing to. These electronic footnotes serve as politically charged acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” Aboriginal Australian history, to reuse the words of Smith, for when we Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away from the colonising overseers, our readers witness the Other writing back, critically. As I have stated previously (see Starrs, "Writing"), receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed rational, enlightened and civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately eroded and made into the Other: s/he is rendered the villainous, predatory savage by the auteurial signatures in revisionist histories such as The Bullroarers.Whilst the benefit in these hyperlinks as electronic educational footnotes in my short story is fairly obvious, what may not be so obvious is the ironic commentary they can make, when read in conjunction with the rest of The Bullroarers. Although one must reluctantly agree with Wayne C. Booth’s comment in his classic 1974 study A Rhetoric of Irony that, in some regards, “the very spirit and value [of irony] are violated by the effort to be clear about it” (ix), I will nevertheless strive for clarity and understanding by utilizing Booth’s definition of irony “as something that under-mines clarities, opens up vistas of chaos, and either liberates by destroying all dogmas or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (ix). The reader of The Bullroarers is not expecting the main character, Mrs Poulter, to be the subject of erosive criticism that destroys her “dogmas” about Aboriginal Australians--certainly not so early in the narrative when it is unclear if she is or is not the protagonist of the story--and yet that’s exactly what the hyperlinks do. They expose her as hopelessly unreliable, laughably misinformed and yes, unforgivably stupid. They reveal the illegitimacy of her beliefs. Perhaps the most personally excoriating of these revelations is provided by the link to the Wikipedia entry on the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, which is where her own daughter, Roxy, works, but which Mrs Poulter knows, gormlessly, as “the Department of Families and that”. The ignorant woman spouts racist diatribes against Aboriginal Australians without even realising how inextricably linked she and her family, who live at the deliberately named Boomerang Crescent, really are. Therein lies the irony I am trying to create with my use of hyperlinks: an independent, expert adjudication reveals my character, Mrs Poulter, and her opinions, are hiding an “inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (Booth ix), despite the air of easy confidence she projects.Is the novel-reading public ready for these HM hyperlinked e-novels and their potentially ironic sub-texts? Indeed, the question must be asked: can the e-book ever compete with the tactile sensations a finely crafted, perfectly bound hardcover publication provides? Perhaps, if the economics of book buying comes into consideration. E-novels are cheap to publish and cheap to purchase, hence they are becoming hugely popular with the book buying public. Writes Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, a successful online publisher and distributor of e-books: “We incorporated in 2007, and we officially launched the business in May 2008. In our first year, we published 140 books from 90 authors. Our catalog reached 6,000 books in 2009, 28,800 in 2010, 92,000 in 2011, 191,000 in 2012 and as of this writing (November 2013) stands at over 250,000 titles” (Coker 2013). Coker divulged more about his company’s success in an interview with Forbes online magazine: “‘It costs essentially the same to pump 10,000 new books a month through our network as it will cost to do 100,000 a month,’ he reasons. Smashwords book retails, on average, for just above $3; 15,000 titles are free” (Colao 2012).In such a burgeoning environment of technological progress in publishing I am tempted to say that yes, the time of the hyperlinked e-novel has come, and to even predict that HM will be a big part of this new wave of postmodern literature. The hyperlinked HM e-novel’s strategy invites the reader to reflect on the legitimacy and illegitimacy of different forms of narrative, possibly concluding, thanks to ironic electronic footnoting, that not all the novel’s characters and their commentary are to be trusted. Perhaps my HM e-novel will, with its untrustworthy Mrs Poulter and its little-known history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy addressed by gap-filling hyperlinks, establish a legitimising narrative for a people who have traditionally in white Australian society been deemed the Other and illegitimate. Perhaps The Bullroarers will someday alter attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians to the history and political activities of this country’s first peoples, to the point even, that as Nunning warns, we witness a change in the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). If that happens we must be thankful for our Internet-enabled information age and its concomitant possibilities for hyperlinked e-publications, for technology may be separated from the world of art, but it can nevertheless be effectively used to recreate, enhance and access that world, to the extent texts previously considered illegitimate achieve authenticity and veracity.ReferencesBanks, Glenda. A Respectable Married Woman. Melbourne: Lacuna, 2012.Banks, Glenda, and Martin Andrew. “Populating a Historical Novel: A Case Study of a Practice-led Research Approach to Historiographic Metafiction.” Bukker Tillibul 7 (2013). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://bukkertillibul.net/Text.html?VOL=7&INDEX=2›.Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977.Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.Colao, J.J. “Apple’s Biggest (Unknown) Supplier of E-books.” Forbes 7 June 2012. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/06/07/apples-biggest-unknown-supplier-of-e-books/›.Coker, Mark. “Q & A with Smashwords Founder, Mark Coker.” About Smashwords 2013. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹https://www.smashwords.com/about›.Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver, San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.Forrest Gump. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Paramount Pictures, 1994.Fraser, George MacDonald. The Flashman Papers. Various publishers, 1969-2005.Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. NY: Doubleday, 1986.Gregory, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. UK: Scribner, 2001.Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 1988.---. “Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History: A Poetics of Postmodernism History, Theory, Fiction.” 1988. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_3553.pdf›.---. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” Eds. P. O’Donnell and R.C. Davis, Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins UP, 1989. 3-32.---. “Historiographic Metafiction.” Ed. Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 830-50.Nunning, Ansgar. “Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet.” Style 38.3 (2004): 352-75.Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012.---. “Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?” M/C Journal 17.4 (2014). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/834›.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. London & New York: Zed Books, 2012.University of Sussex. “Philippa Gregory Fills the Historical Gaps.” University of Sussex Alumni Magazine 51 (2012). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.scribd.com/doc/136033913/University-of-Sussex-Alumni-Magazine-Falmer-issue-51›.Wikipedia. “A Current Affair.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Current_Affair›.---. “Aboriginal Tent Embassy.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tent_Embassy›.---. “Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Families,_Housing,_Community_Services_and_Indigenous_Affairs›.---. “Eddie Mabo.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Mabo›.---. “History of Australia (1788 – 1850).” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia_(1788%E2%80%931850)#Aboriginal_resistance›.---. “Terra Nullius.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius›.

The traditional German tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin inhabits an ambiguous narrative borderland, a liminal space between fact and fiction, fantasy and horror, concrete details and elusive mystery. In his study of the Pied Piper in Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature, Wolfgang Mieder describes how manuscripts and other evidence appear to confirm the historical base of the story. Precise details from a fifteenth-century manuscript, based on earlier sources, specify that in 1284 on the 26th of June, the feast-day of Saints John and Paul, 130 children from Hamelin were led away by a piper clothed in many colours to the Koppen Hill, and there vanished (Mieder 48). Later manuscripts add details familiar today, such as a plague of rats and a broken bargain with burghers as a motive for the Piper’s actions, while in the seventeenth century the first English-language version advances what might also be the first attempt at a “rational” explanation for the children’s disappearance, claiming that they were taken to Transylvania. The uncommon pairing of such precise factual detail with enigmatic mystery has encouraged many theories. These have ranged from references to the Children’s Crusade, or other religious fervours, to the devastation caused by the Black Death, from the colonisation of Romania by young German migrants to a murderous rampage by a paedophile. Fictional interpretations of the story have multiplied, with the classic versions of the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning being most widely known, but with contemporary creators exploring the theme too. This includes interpretations in Hamelin itself. On 26 June 2015, in Hamelin Museum, I watched a wordless five-minute play, entirely performed not by humans but by animatronic stylised figures built out of scrap iron, against a montage of multilingual, confused voices and eerie music, with the vanished children represented by a long line of small empty shirts floating by. The uncanny, liminal nature of the story was perfectly captured. Australia is a world away from German fairy tale mysteries, historically, geographically, and culturally. Yet, as Lisa M. Fiander has persuasively argued, contemporary Australian fiction has been more influenced by fairy tales than might be assumed, and in this essay it is proposed that major motifs from the Pied Piper appear in several Australian novels, transformed not only by distance of setting and time from that of the original narrative, but also by elements specific to the Australian imaginative space. These motifs are lost children, the enigmatic figure of the Piper himself, and the power of a very particular place (as Hamelin and its Koppen Hill are particularised in the original tale). Three major Australian novels will be examined in this essay: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), Christopher Koch’s The Doubleman (1985), and Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011). Dubosarsky’s novel was written for children; both Koch’s and Lindsay’s novels were published as adult fiction. In each of these works of fiction, the original tale’s motifs have been developed and transformed to express unique evocations of the Pied Piper theme. As noted by Fiander, fiction writers are “most likely to draw upon fairy tales when they are framing, in writing, a subject that generates anxiety in their culture” (158). Her analysis is about anxieties of place within Australian fiction, but this insight could be usefully extended to the motifs which I have identified as inherent in the Pied Piper story. Prominent among these is the lost children motif, whose importance in the Australian imagination has been well-established by scholars such as Peter Pierce. Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety explores this preoccupation from the earliest beginnings of European settlement, through analysis of fiction, newspaper reports, paintings, and films. As Pierce observed in a later interview in the Sydney Morning Herald (Knox), over time the focus changed from rural children and the nineteenth-century fear of the vast impersonal nature of the bush, where children of colonists could easily get lost, to urban children and the contemporary fear of human predators.In each of the three novels under examination in this essay, lost children—whether literal or metaphorical—feature prominently. Writer Carmel Bird, whose fiction has also frequently centred on the theme of the lost child, observes in “Dreaming the Place” that the lost child, the stolen child – this must be a narrative that is lodged in the heart and imagination, nightmare and dream, of all human beings. In Australia the nightmare became reality. The child is the future, and if the child goes, there can be no future. The true stories and the folk tales on this theme are mirror images of each other. (7) The motif of lost children—and of children in danger—is not unique to the Pied Piper. Other fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, contain it, and it is those antecedents which Bird cites in her essay. But within the Pied Piper story it has three features which distinguish it from other traditional tales. First, unlike in the classic versions of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, the children do not return. Neither are there bodies to find. The children have vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. Second, it is not only parents who have lost them, but an entire community whose future has been snatched away: a community once safe, ordered, even complacent, traumatised by loss. The lack of hope, of a happy ending for anyone, is striking. And thirdly, the children are not lost or abandoned or even, strictly speaking, stolen: they are lured away, semi-willingly, by the central yet curiously marginal figure of the Piper himself. In the original story there is no mention of motive and no indication of malice on the part of the Piper. There is only his inexplicable presence, a figure out of fairy folklore appearing in the midst of concrete historical dates and numbers. Clearly, he links to the liminal, complex world of the fairies, found in folklore around the world—beings from a world close to the human one, yet alien. Whimsical and unpredictable by human standards, such beings are nevertheless bound by mysteriously arbitrary rules and taboos, and haunt the borders of the human world, disturbing its rational edges and transforming lives forever. It is this sense of disturbance, that enchanting yet frightening sudden shifting of the border of reality and of the comforting order of things, the essence of transformation itself, which can also be seen at the core of the three novels under examination in this essay, with the Piper represented in each of them but in different ways. The third motif within the Pied Piper is a focus on place as a source of uncanny power, a theme which particularly resonates within an Australian context. Fiander argues that if contemporary British fiction writers use fairy tale to explore questions of community and alienation, and Canadian fiction writers use it to explore questions of identity, then Australian writers use it to explore the unease of place. She writes of the enduring legacy of Australia’s history “as a settler colony which invests the landscape with strangeness for many protagonists” (157). Furthermore, she suggests that “when Australian fiction writers, using fairy tales, describe the landscape as divorced from reality, they might be signalling anxiety about their own connection with the land which had already seen tens of thousands of years of occupation when Captain James Cook ‘found’ it in 1770” (160). I would argue, however, that in the case of the Pied Piper motifs, it is less clear that it is solely settler anxieties which are driving the depiction of the power of place in these three novels. There is no divorce from reality here, but rather an eruption of the metaphysical potency of place within the usual, “normal” order of reality. This follows the pattern of the original tale, where the Piper and all the children, except for one or two stragglers, disappear at Koppen Hill, vanishing literally into the hill itself. In traditional European folklore, hollow hills are associated with fairies and their uncanny power, but other places, especially those of water—springs, streams, even the sea—may also be associated with their liminal world (in the original tale, the River Weser is another important locus for power). In Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is another outcrop in the landscape which holds that power and claims the “lost children.” Inspired partly by a painting by nineteenth-century Australian artist William Ford, titled At the Hanging Rock (1875), depicting a group of elegant people picnicking in the bush, this influential novel, which inspired an equally successful film adaptation, revolves around an incident in 1900 when four girls from Appleyard College, an exclusive school in Victoria, disappear with one of their teachers whilst climbing Hanging Rock, where they have gone for a picnic. Only one of their number, a girl called Irma, is ever found, and she has no memory of how and why she found herself on the Rock, and what has happened to the others. This inexplicable event is the precursor to a string of tragedies which leads to the violent deaths of several people, and which transforms the sleepy and apparently content little community around Appleyard College into a centre of loss, horror, and scandal.Told in a way which makes it appear that the novelist is merely recounting a true story—Lindsay even tells readers in an author’s note that they must decide for themselves if it is fact or fiction—Picnic at Hanging Rock shares the disturbingly liminal fact-fiction territory of the Piper tale. Many readers did in fact believe that the novel was based on historical events and combed newspaper files, attempting to propound ingenious “rational” explanations for what happened on the Rock. Picnic at Hanging Rock has been the subject of many studies, with the novel being analysed through various prisms, including the Gothic, the pastoral, historiography, and philosophy. In “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush,” Kathleen Steele has depicted Picnic at Hanging Rock as embodying the idea that “Ordered ‘civilisation’ cannot overcome the gothic landscapes of settler imaginations: landscapes where time and people disappear” (44). She proposes that Lindsay intimates that the landscape swallows the “lost children” of the novel because there is a great absence in that place: that of Aboriginal people. In this reading of the novel, it is that absence which becomes, in a sense, a malevolent presence that will reach out beyond the initial disappearance of the three people on the Rock to destroy the bonds that held the settler community together. It is a powerfully-made argument, which has been taken up by other scholars and writers, including studies which link the theme of the novel with real-life lost-children cases such as that of Azaria Chamberlain, who disappeared near another “Rock” of great Indigenous metaphysical potency—Uluru, or Ayers Rock. However, to date there has been little exploration of the fairy tale quality of the novel, and none at all of the striking ways in which it evokes Pied Piper motifs, whilst transforming them to suit the exigencies of its particular narrative world. The motif of lost children disappearing from an ordered, safe, even complacent community into a place of mysterious power is extended into an exploration of the continued effects of those disappearances, depicting the disastrous impact on those left behind and the wider community in a way that the original tale does not. There is no literal Pied Piper figure in this novel, though various theories are evoked by characters as to who might have lured the girls and their teacher, and who might be responsible for the disappearances. Instead, there is a powerful atmosphere of inevitability and enchantment within the landscape itself which both illustrates the potency of place, and exemplifies the Piper’s hold on his followers. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, place and Piper are synonymous: the Piper has been transformed into the land itself. Yet this is not the “vast impersonal bush,” nor is it malevolent or vengeful. It is a living, seductive metaphysical presence: “Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete . . .” (Lindsay 35). Just as in the original tale, the lost children follow the “Piper” willingly, without regret. Their disappearance is a happiness to them, in that moment, as it is for the lost children of Hamelin, and quite unlike how it must be for those torn apart by that loss—the community around Appleyard, the townspeople of Hamelin. Music, long associated with fairy “takings,” is also a subtle feature of the story. In the novel, just before the luring, Irma hears a sound like the beating of far-off drums. In the film, which more overtly evokes fairy tale elements than does the novel, it is noteworthy that the music at that point is based on traditional tunes for Pan-pipes, played by the great Romanian piper Gheorge Zamfir. The ending of the novel, with questions left unanswered, and lives blighted by the forever-inexplicable, may be seen as also following the trajectory of the original tale. Readers as much as the fictional characters are left with an enigma that continues to perplex and inspire. Picnic at Hanging Rock was one of the inspirations for another significant Australian fiction, this time a contemporary novel for children. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011) is an elegant and subtle short novel, set in Sydney at an exclusive girls’ school, in 1967. Like the earlier novel, The Golden Day is also partly inspired by visual art, in this case the Schoolgirl series of paintings by Charles Blackman. Combining a fairy tale atmosphere with historical details—the Vietnam War, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the drowning of Harold Holt—the story is told through the eyes of several girls, especially one, known as Cubby. The Golden Day echoes the core narrative patterns of the earlier novel, but intriguingly transformed: a group of young girls goes with their teacher on an outing to a mysterious place (in this case, a cave on the beach—note the potent elements of rock and water, combined), and something inexplicable happens which results in a disappearance. Only this time, the girls are much younger than the characters of Lindsay’s novel, pre-pubertal in fact at eleven years old, and it is their teacher, a young, idealistic woman known only as Miss Renshaw, who disappears, apparently into thin air, with only an amber bead from her necklace ever found. But it is not only Miss Renshaw who vanishes: the other is a poet and gardener named Morgan who is also Miss Renshaw’s secret lover. Later, with the revelation of a dark past, he is suspected in absentia of being responsible for Miss Renshaw’s vanishment, with implications of rape and murder, though her body is never found. Morgan, who could partly figure as the Piper, is described early on in the novel as having “beautiful eyes, soft, brown, wet with tears, like a stuffed toy” (Dubosarsky 11). This disarming image may seem a world away from the ambiguously disturbing figure of the legendary Piper, yet not only does it fit with the children’s naïve perception of the world, it also echoes the fact that the children in the original story were not afraid of the Piper, but followed him willingly. However, that is complicated by the fact that Morgan does not lure the children; it is Miss Renshaw who follows him—and the children follow her, who could be seen as the other half of the Piper. The Golden Day similarly transforms the other Piper motifs in its own original way. The children are only literally lost for a short time, when their teacher vanishes and they are left to make their own way back from the cave; yet it could be argued that metaphorically, the girls are “lost” to childhood from that moment, in terms of never being able to go back to the state of innocence in which they were before that day. Their safe, ordered school community will never be the same again, haunted by the inexplicability of the events of that day. Meanwhile, the exploration of Australian place—the depiction of the Memorial Gardens where Miss Renshaw enjoins them to write poetry, the uncomfortable descent over rocks to the beach, and the fateful cave—is made through the eyes of children, not the adolescents and adults of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The girls are not yet in that liminal space which is adolescence and so their impressions of what the places represent are immediate, instinctive, yet confused. They don’t like the cave and can’t wait to get out of it, whereas the beach inspires them with a sense of freedom and the gardens with a sense of enchantment. But in each place, those feelings are mixed both with ordinary concerns and with seemingly random associations that are nevertheless potently evocative. For example, in the cave, Cubby senses a threateningly weightless atmosphere, a feeling of reality shifting, which she associates, apparently confusedly, with the hanging of Ronald Ryan, reported that very day. In this way, Dubosarsky subtly gestures towards the sinister inevitability of the following events, and creates a growing tension that will eventually fade but never fully dissipate. At the end, the novel takes an unexpected turn which is as destabilising as the ending of the Pied Piper story, and as open-ended in its transformative effects as the original tale: “And at that moment Cubby realised she was not going to turn into the person she had thought she would become. There was something inside her head now that would make her a different person, though she scarcely understood what it was” (Dubosarsky 148). The eruption of the uncanny into ordinary life will never leave her now, as it will never leave the other girls who followed Miss Renshaw and Morgan into the literally hollow hill of the cave and emerged alone into a transformed world. It isn’t just childhood that Cubby has lost but also any possibility of a comforting sense of the firm borders of reality. As in the Pied Piper, ambiguity and loss combine to create questions which cannot be logically answered, only dimly apprehended.Christopher Koch’s 1985 novel The Doubleman, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, also explores the power of place and the motif of lost children, but unlike the other two novels examined in this essay depicts an actual “incarnated” Piper motif in the mysteriously powerful figure of Clive Broderick, brilliant guitarist and charismatic teacher/guru, whose office, significantly, is situated in a subterranean space of knowledge—a basement room beneath a bookshop. Both central yet peripheral to the main action of the novel, touched with hints of the supernatural which never veer into overt fantasy, Broderick remains an enigma to the end. Set, like The Golden Day, in the 1960s, The Doubleman is narrated in the first person by Richard Miller, in adulthood a producer of a successful folk-rock group, the Rymers, but in childhood an imaginative, troubled polio survivor, with a crutch and a limp. It is noteworthy here that in the Grimms’ version of the Pied Piper, two children are left behind, despite following the Piper: one is blind, one is lame. And it is the lame boy who tells the townspeople what he glimpsed at Koppen Hill. In creating the character of Broderick, the author blends the traditional tropes of the Piper figure with Mephistophelian overtones and a strong influence from fairy lore, specifically the idea of the “doubleman,” here drawn from the writings of seventeenth-century Scottish pastor, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle. Kirk’s 1691 book The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is the earliest known serious attempt at objective description of the fairy beliefs of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. His own precisely dated life-story and ambiguous end—it is said he did not die but is forever a prisoner of the fairies—has eerie parallels to the Piper story. “And there is the uncanny, powerful and ambiguous fact of the matter. Here is a man, named, born, lived, who lived a fairy story, really lived it: and in the popular imagination, he lives still” (Masson).Both in his creative and his non-fiction work Koch frequently evoked what he called “the Otherland,” which he depicted as a liminal, ambiguous, destabilising but nevertheless very real and potent presence only thinly veiled by the everyday world. This Otherland is not the same in all his fictions, but is always part of an actual place, whether that be Java in The Year of Living Dangerously, Hobart and Sydney in The Doubleman, Tasmania, Vietnam and Cambodia in Highways to a War, and Ireland and Tasmania in Out of Ireland. It is this sense of the “Otherland” below the surface, a fairy tale, mythical realm beyond logic or explanation, which gives his work its distinctive and particular power. And in The Doubleman, this motif, set within a vividly evoked real world, complete with precise period detail, transforms the Piper figure into one which could easily appear in a Hobart lane, yet which loses none of its uncanny potency. As Noel Henricksen writes in his study of Koch’s work, Island and Otherland, “Behind the membrane of Hobart is Otherland, its manifestations a spectrum stretched between the mystical and the spiritually perverted” (213).This is Broderick’s first appearance, described through twelve-year-old Richard Miller’s eyes: Tall and thin in his long dark overcoat, he studied me for the whole way as he approached, his face absolutely serious . . . The man made me uneasy to a degree for which there seemed to be no explanation . . . I was troubled by the notion that he was no ordinary man going to work at all: that he was not like other people, and that his interest couldn’t be explained so simply. (Koch, Doubleman 3)That first encounter is followed by another, more disturbing still, when Broderick speaks to the boy, eyes fixed on him: “. . . hooded by drooping lids, they were entirely without sympathy, yet nevertheless interested, and formidably intelligent” (5).The sense of danger that Broderick evokes in the boy could be explained by a sinister hint of paedophilia. But though Broderick is a predator of sorts on young people, nothing is what it seems; no rational explanation encompasses the strange effect of his presence. It is not until Richard is a young man, in the company of his musical friend Brian Brady, that he comes across Broderick again. The two young men are looking in the window of a music shop, when Broderick appears beside them, and as Richard observes, just as in a fairy tale, “He didn’t seem to have changed or aged . . .” (44). But the shock of his sudden re-appearance is mixed with something else now, as Broderick engages Brady in conversation, ignoring Richard, “. . . as though I had failed some test, all that time ago, and the man had no further use for me” (45).What happens next, as Broderick demonstrates his musical prowess, becomes Brady’s teacher, and introduces them to his disciple, young bass player Darcy Burr, will change the young men’s lives forever and set them on a path that leads both to great success and to living nightmare, even after Broderick’s apparent disappearance, for Burr will take on the Piper’s mantle. Koch’s depiction of the lost children motif is distinctively different to the other two novels examined in this essay. Their fate is not so much a mystery as a tragedy and a warning. The lost children of The Doubleman are also lost children of the sixties, bright, talented young people drawn through drugs, immersive music, and half-baked mysticism into darkness and horrifying violence. In his essay “California Dreaming,” published in the collection Crossing the Gap, Koch wrote about this subterranean aspect of the sixties, drawing a connection between it and such real-life sinister “Pipers” as Charles Manson (60). Broderick and Burr are not the same as the serial killer Manson, of course; but the spell they cast over the “lost children” who follow them is only different in degree, not in kind. In the end of the novel, the spell is broken and the world is again transformed. Yet fittingly it is a melancholy transformation: an end of childhood dreams of imaginative potential, as well as dangerous illusions: “And I knew now that it was all gone—like Harrigan Street, and Broderick, and the district of Second-Hand” (Koch, Doubleman 357). The power of place, the last of the Piper motifs, is also deeply embedded in The Doubleman. In fact, as with the idea of Otherland, place—or Island, as Henricksen evocatively puts it—is a recurring theme in Koch’s work. He identified primarily and specifically as a Tasmanian writer rather than as simply Australian, pointing out in an essay, “The Lost Hemisphere,” that because of its landscape and latitude, different to the mainland of Australia, Tasmania “genuinely belongs to a different region from the continent” (Crossing the Gap 92). In The Doubleman, Richard Miller imbues his familiar and deeply loved home landscape with great mystical power, a power which is both inherent within it as it is, but also expressive of the Otherland. In “A Tasmanian Tone,” another essay from Crossing the Gap, Koch describes that tone as springing “from a sense of waiting in the landscape: the tense yet serene expectancy of some nameless revelation” (118). But Koch could also write evocatively of landscapes other than Tasmanian ones. The unnerving climax of The Doubleman takes place in Sydney—significantly, as in The Golden Day, in a liminal, metaphysically charged place of rocks and water. That place, which is real, is called Point Piper. In conclusion, the original tale’s three main motifs—lost children, the enigma of the Piper, and the power of place—have been explored in distinctive ways in each of the three novels examined in this article. Contemporary Australia may be a world away from medieval Germany, but the uncanny liminality and capacious ambiguity of the Pied Piper tale has made it resonate potently within these major Australian fictions. Transformed and transformative within the Australian imagination, the theme of the Pied Piper threads like a faintly-heard snatch of unearthly music through the apparently mimetic realism of the novels, destabilising readers’ expectations and leaving them with subversively unanswered questions. ReferencesBird, Carmel. “Dreaming the Place: An Exploration of Antipodean Narratives.” Griffith Review 42 (2013). 1 May 2016 <https://griffithreview.com/articles/dreaming-the-place/>.Dubosarsky, Ursula. The Golden Day. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011.Fiander, Lisa M. “Writing in A Fairy Story Landscape: Fairy Tales and Contemporary Australian Fiction.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 2 (2003). 30 April 2016 <http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/index>.Henricksen, Noel. Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and His Books. Melbourne: Educare, 2003.Knox, Malcolm. “A Country of Lost Children.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Aug. 2009. 1 May 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-country-of-lost-children-20090814-el8d.html>.Koch, Christopher. The Doubleman. 1985. Sydney: Minerva, 1996.Koch, Christopher. Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections. 1987. Sydney: Vintage, 2000. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock. 1967. Melbourne: Penguin, 1977.Masson, Sophie. “Captive in Fairyland: The Strange Case of Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle.” Nation and Federation in the Celtic World: Papers from the Fourth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, University of Sydney, June–July 2001. Ed. Pamela O’Neil. Sydney: University of Sydney Celtic Studies Foundation, 2003. Mieder, Wolfgang. “The Pied Piper: Origin, History, and Survival of a Legend.” Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature. 1987. London: Routledge Revivals, 2015.Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Steele, Kathleen. “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Colloquy 20 (2010): 33–56. 27 July 2016 <http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts/files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_20_december_2010/steele.pdf>.

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.

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.

The Bildungsroman has been extensively studied in the West, bit scholarly works on it in Africa are very few. This could be attributed to the fact that these narratives are sometimes treated as juvenile fiction because of the preponderance of growing-up children in them. I therefore examine how third generation Nigerian female writers subvert and alter the form in an African context to articulate the fact that growth as a universal human experience differs according to contexts and the space where it is negotiated. The paper concentrates mainly on Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, but I shall make passing remarks on Azuah’s Sky-High Flames and Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, not specifically for the purpose of intertextuality, but to demonstrate how these novels belong to the same tradition. From the plot structure and analysis of texts it becomes clear that the traditional western Bildungsroman has been domesticated within a postcolonial context to appraise narrative of growth. They offer a model of resistance to women’s oppression. The Nigerian variant of the Bildungsroman articulated in these novels portrays the struggle for individuation and the negotiations of feminine subjectivity, while concurrently depicting the plight of women in a society plagued by the debilitating forces of patriarchy, and alternatives to the plight.

Smith Milway, Katie. Mimi's Village and How Basic Health Care Transformed It. Toronto, ON: Kids Can Press, 2012. Print.Mimi’s Village is part of the CitizenKid series, a collection that seeks to inspire children to be better global citizens. Based on Katie Smith Milway’s experiences working for non-profit organizations, the story is set in Western Kenya – a real-world context that is vividly supported by Eugenie Fernandes’ colourful full-page illustrations of flora, fauna and village life.Told in simple one-page chapters, this story introduces children to the health challenges experienced by Mimi and her family: unsafe drinking water, a child’s life-threatening illness, and travel through the night to a distant health clinic. As the story develops, readers begin to see that small steps can radically improve health in the village: clean water, vaccinations and mosquito nets. Perhaps most importantly, Mimi’s inspirational role – she asks her father, “Could you build a clinic too? Maybe then a nurse would come” – demonstrates that children can make meaningful contributions to their communities. This theme is carried into the book’s final seven pages, which include the story of a “real village health worker,” as well as concrete suggestions that answer the question, “How can you help?”The writing in this book is not the strongest and the title may not inspire child readers. In addition, younger readers will benefit from reading this with an adult. These shortcomings are, however, fully mitigated by Mimi’s engaging story and the book’s two important messages: simple public health measures will dramatically improve the lives of many children living throughout the world; and children everywhere can positively impact their world. This juvenile nonfiction book will make a compelling addition to any library collection.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Shelagh K. GenuisShelagh K. Genuis is an Alberta Innovates–Health Solutions Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health. Although an avid reader of biography, she has never stopped reading children’s fiction.

Historical fiction, a widely-read genre, continues to engender contradiction and controversy within the fields of literature and historiography. This paper begins with a discussion of the differences and similarities between historical writing and the historical novel, focusing on the way these forms interpret and represent the past. It then examines the dilemma facing historians as they try to come to terms with the modern era and the growing competition from other modes of presenting history. Finally, it considers claims by Australian historians that so-called “fictive history” has been bestowed with historical authority to the detriment of traditional historiography. The Fact/Fiction Dichotomy Hayden White, a leading critic in the field of historiography, claims that the surge in popularity of historical fiction and the novel form in the nineteenth century caused historians to seek recognition of their field as a serious “science” (149). Historians believed that, to be scientific, historical studies had to cut ties with any form of artistic writing or imaginative literature, especially the romantic novel. German historian Leopold von Ranke “anathematized” the historical novel virtually from its first appearance in Scott’s Waverley in 1814. Hayden White argues that Ranke and others after him wrote history as narrative while eschewing the use of imagination and invention that were “exiled into the domain of ‘fiction’ ” (149-150). Early critics in the nineteenth century questioned the value of historical fiction. Famous Cuban poet Jose Maria Heredia believed that history was opposite and superior to fiction; he accused the historical novel of degrading history to the level of fiction which, he argued, is lies (cited in de Piérola 152). Alessandro Manzoni, though partially agreeing with Heredia, argued that fiction had value in its “poetic truth” as opposed to the “positive truth” of history (153). He eventually decided that the historical novel fails through the mixing of the incompatible elements of history and fiction, which can lead to deception (ibid). More than a hundred years after Heredia, Georg Lukács, in his much-cited The Historical Novel, first published in 1937, was more concerned with the social aspect of the historical novel and its capacity to portray the lives of its protagonists. This form of writing, through its attention to the detail of minor events, was better at highlighting the social aspects than the greater moments of history. Lukács argues that the historical novel should focus on the “poetic awakening” of those who participated in great historical events rather than the events themselves (42). The reader should be able to experience first-hand “the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (ibid). Through historical fiction, the reader is thus able to gain a greater understanding of a specific period and why people acted as they did. In contrast to these early critics, historian and author of three books on history and three novels, Richard Slotkin, argues that the historical novel can recount the past as accurately as history, because it should involve similar research methods and critical interpretation of the data (225). Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk go even further, suggesting that “historical fiction may offer a more plausible representation of the past than those sources typically accepted as more factual” (144). In its search for “poetic truth,” the novel tries to create a sense of what the past was, without necessarily adhering to all the factual details and by eliminating facts not essential to the story (Slotkin 225). For Hayden White, the difference between factual and fictional discourse, is that one is occupied by what is “true” and the other by what is “real” (147). Historical documents may provide a basis for a “true account of the world” in a certain time and place, but they are limited in their capacity to act as a foundation for the exploration of all aspects of “reality.” In White’s words: The rest of the real, after we have said what we can assert to be true about it, would not be everything and anything we could imagine about it. The real would consist of everything that can be truthfully said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be. (ibid) White’s main point is that both history and fiction are interpretative by nature. Historians, for their part, interpret given evidence from a subjective viewpoint; this means that it cannot be unbiased. In the words of Beverley Southgate, “factual history is revealed as subjectively chosen, subjectively interpreted, subjectively constructed and incorporated within a narrative” (45). Both fiction and history are narratives, and “anyone who writes a narrative is fictionalising,” according to Keith Jenkins (cited in Southgate 32). The novelist and historian find meaning through their own interpretation of the known record (Brown) to produce stories that are entertaining and structured. Moreover, historians often reach conflicting conclusions in their translations of the same archival documents, which, in the extreme, can spark a wider dispute such as the so-called history wars, the debate about the representation of the Indigenous peoples in Australian history that has polarised both historians and politicians. The historian’s purpose differs from that of the novelist. Historians examine the historical record in fine detail in an attempt to understand its complexities, and then use digressions and footnotes to explain and lend authority to their findings. The novelist on the other hand, uses their imagination to create personalities and plot and can leave out important details; the novelist achieves authenticity through detailed description of setting, customs, culture, buildings and so on (Brown). Nevertheless, the main task of both history and historical fiction is to represent the past to a reader in the present; this “shared concern with the construction of meaning through narrative” is a major component in the long-lasting, close relationship between fiction and history (Southgate 19). However, unlike history, the historical novel mixes fiction and fact, and is therefore “a hybrid of two genres” (de Piérola 152); this mixture of supposed opposites of fact and fiction creates a dilemma for the theorist, because historical fiction cannot necessarily be read as belonging to either category. Attitudes towards the line drawn between fiction and history are changing as more and more critics and theorists explore the area where the two genres intersect. Historian John Demos argues that with the passing of time, this distinction “seems less a boundary than a borderland of surprising width and variegated topography” (329). While some historians are now willing to investigate the wide area where the two genres overlap, this approach remains a concern for traditionalists. History’s Dilemma Historians face a crisis as they try to come to terms with the postmodern era which has seen unprecedented questioning of the validity of history’s claim to accuracy in recounting the past. In the words of Jenkins et al., “ ‘history’ per se wobbles” as it experiences a period of uncertainty and challenge; the field is “much changed and deeply contested,” as historians seek to understand the meaning of history itself (6). But is postmodernism the cause of the problem? Writing in 1986 Linda Hutcheon, well known for her work on postmodernism, attempted to clarify the term as it is applied in modern times in reference to fiction, where, she states, it is usually taken to mean “metafiction, or texts which are in some dominant and constitutive way self-referential and auto-representational” (301). To eliminate any confusion with regard to concept or terminology, Hutcheon coined the phrase “historiographic metafiction," which includes “the presence of the past” in “historical, social, and ideological” form (302). As examples, she cites contemporary novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The White Hotel, Midnight’s Children and Famous Last Words. Hutcheon explains that all these works “self-consciously focus on the processes of producing and receiving paradoxically fictive historical writing” (ibid). In the Australian context, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish could be added to the list. Like the others, they question how historical sources maintain their status as authentic historical documents in the context of a fictional work (302). However, White argues that the crisis in historical studies is not due to postmodernism but has materialised because historians have failed to live up to their nineteenth century expectations of history being recognised as a science (149). Postmodernists are not against history, White avows; what they do not accept “is a professional historiography” that serves self-seeking governing bodies with its outdated and severely limited approach to objectivity (152). This kind of historiography has denied itself access to aesthetic writing and the imaginary, while it has also cut any links it had “to what was most creative in the real sciences it sought half-heartedly to emulate” (ibid). Furthering White’s argument, historian Robert Rosenstone states that past certitude in the claims of historians to be the sole guardians of historical truth now seem outdated in the light of our accumulated knowledge. The once impregnable position of the historian is no longer tenable because: We know too much about framing images and stories, too much about narrative, too much about the problematics of causality, too much about the subjectivity of perception, too much about our own cultural imperatives and biases, too much about the disjuncture between language and the world it purports to describe to believe we can actually capture the world of the past on the page. (Rosenstone 12) While the archive confers credibility on history, it does not confer the right to historians to claim it as the truth (Southgate 6); there are many possible versions of the past, which can be presented to us in any number of ways as history (Jenkins et al. 1). And this is a major challenge for historians as other modes of representing the past cater to public demand in place of traditional approaches. Public interest in history has grown over the last 20 years (Harlan 109). Historical novels fill the shelves of bookstores and libraries, while films, television series and documentaries about the past attract large audiences. In the words of Rosenstone, “people are hungry for the past, as various studies tell us and the responses to certain films, TV series and museums indicate” (17). Rosenstone laments the fact that historians, despite this attraction to the past, have failed to stir public interest in their own writings. While works of history have their strengths, they target a specific, extremely limited audience in an outdated format (17). They have forgotten the fact that, in the words of White, “the conjuring up of the past requires art as well as information” (149). This may be true of some historians, but there are many writers of non-fiction, including historians, who use the narrative voice and other fictional techniques in their writings (Ricketson). Matthew Ricketson accuses White of confusing “fiction with literariness,” while other scholars take fiction and narrative to be the same thing. He argues that “the use of a wide range of modes of writing usually associated with fiction are not the sole province of fiction” and that narrative theorists have concentrated their attention on fictional narrative, thereby excluding factual forms of writing (ibid). One of the defining elements of creative non-fiction is its use of literary techniques in writing about factual events and people. At the same time, this does not make it fiction, which by definition, relies on invention (ibid). However, those historians who do write outside the limits of traditional history can attract criticism. Historian Richard Current argues that if writers of history and biography try to be more effective through literary considerations, they sometimes lose their objectivity and authenticity. While it is acceptable to seek to write with clarity and force, it is out of the question to present “occasional scenes in lifelike detail” in the manner of a novelist. Current contends that if only one source is used, this violates “the historiographical requirement of two or more independent and competent witnesses.” This requirement is important because it explains why much of the writing by academic historians is perceived as “dry-as-dust” (Current 87). Modern-day historians are contesting this viewpoint as they analyse the nature and role of their writings, with some turning to historical fiction as an alternative mode of expression. Perhaps one of the more well-known cases in recent times was that of historian Simon Schama, who, in writing Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), was criticised for creating dramatic scenes based on dubious historical sources without informing the reader of his fabrications (Nelson). In this work, Schama questions notions of factual history and the limitations of historians. The title is suggestive in itself, while the afterword to the book is explicit, as “historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation . . . We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot” (320). Another example is Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine, which was considered to be “postmodern” and not acceptable to publishers and agents as the correct way to present history, despite the author’s reassurance that nothing was invented, “it just tells the story a different way” ("Space for the Birds to Fly" 16). Schama is not the only author to draw fire from critics for neglecting to inform the reader of the veracity or not of their writing. Richard Current accused Gore Vidal of getting his facts wrong and of inaccurately portraying Lincoln in his work, Lincoln: A Novel (81). Despite the title, which is a form of disclaimer itself, Current argued that Vidal could have avoided criticism if he had not asserted that his work was authentic history, or had used a disclaimer in a preface to deny any connection between the novel’s characters and known persons (82). Current is concerned about this form of writing, known as “fictional history," which, unlike historical fiction, “pretends to deal with real persons and events but actually reshapes them—and thus rewrites the past” (77). This concern is shared by historians in Australia. Fictive History Historian Mark McKenna, in his essay, Writing the Past, argues that “fictive history” has become a new trend in Australia; he is unhappy with the historical authority bestowed on this form of writing and would like to see history restored to its rightful place. He argues that with the decline of academic history, novelists have taken over the historian’s role and fiction has become history (3). In sympathy with McKenna, author, historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen claims that “novelists have been doing their best to bump historians off the track” (16). McKenna accuses writers W.G. Sebald and David Malouf of supporting “the core myth of historical fiction: the belief that being there is what makes historical understanding possible.” Malouf argues, in a conversation with Helen Daniel in 1996, that: Our only way of grasping our history—and by history I really mean what has happened to us, and what determines what we are now and where we are now—the only way of really coming to terms with that is by people's entering into it in their imagination, not by the world of facts, but by being there. And the only thing really which puts you there in that kind of way is fiction. Poetry may do so, drama may do so, but it's mostly going to be fiction. It's when you have actually been there and become a character again in that world. (3) From this point of view, the historical novel plays an important role in our culture because it allows people to interact with the past in a meaningful way, something factual writing struggles to do. McKenna recognises that history is present in fiction and that history can contain fiction, but they should not be confused. Writers and critics have a responsibility towards their readers and must be clear that fiction is not history and should not be presented as such (10). He takes writer Kate Grenville to task for not respecting this difference. McKenna argues that Grenville has asserted in public that her historical novel The Secret River is history: “If ever there was a case of a novelist wanting her work to be taken seriously as history, it is Grenville” (5). The Secret River tells the story of early settlement along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Grenville’s inspiration for the story emanated from her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life. The main protagonist, William Thornhill (loosely based on Wiseman), is convicted of theft in 1806 and transported to Australia. The novel depicts the poverty and despair in England at the time, and describes life in the new colony where Grenville explores the collision between the colonists and the Aborigines. McKenna knows that Grenville insists elsewhere that her book is not history, but he argues that this conflicts with what she said in interviews and he worries that “with such comments, it is little wonder that many people might begin to read fiction as history” (5). In an article on her website, Grenville refutes McKenna’s arguments, and those of Clendinnen: “Here it is in plain words: I don’t think The Secret River is history…Nor did I ever say that I thought my novel was history.” Furthermore, the acknowledgements in the back of the book state clearly that it is a work of fiction. She accuses the two above-mentioned historians of using quotes that “have been narrowly selected, taken out of context, and truncated” ("History and Fiction"). McKenna then goes on to say how shocked he was on hearing Grenville, in an interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National, make her now infamous comments about standing on a stepladder looking down at the history wars, and that he “felt like ringing the ABC and leaping to the defence of historians.” He accuses Grenville of elevating fiction above history as an “interpretive power” (6). Koval asked Grenville where her book stood in regard to the history wars; she answered: Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars. . . I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they’ve got themselves into these polarised positions, and that’s fine, I think that’s what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other. But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, [emphasis in original audio] and say there is another way to understand it. ("Interview") Grenville claims that she did not use the stepladder image to imply that her work was superior to history, but rather to convey a sense of being outside the battle raging between historians as an uninvolved observer, “an interested onlooker who made the mistake of climbing a stepladder rather than a couple of fruit-boxes to get a good view.” She goes on to argue that McKenna’s only sources in his essay, Writing the Past, are interviews and newspaper articles, which in themselves are fine, but she disagrees with how they have been used “uncritically, at face value, as authoritative evidence” ("History and Fiction"), much in contrast to the historian’s desire for authenticity in all sources. It appears that the troubles between history and fiction will continue for some time yet as traditional historians are bent on keeping faith with the tenets of their nineteenth century predecessors by defending history from the insurgence of fiction at all costs. While history and historical fiction share a common purpose in presenting the past, the novel deals with what is “real” and can tell the past as accurately or even in a more plausible way than history, which deals with what is “true”. However, the “dry-as-dust” historical approach to writing, and postmodernism’s questioning of historiography’s role in presenting the past, has contributed to a reassessment of the nature of history. Many historians recognise the need for change in the way they present their work, but as they have often doubted the worth of historical fiction, they are wary of the genre and the narrative techniques it employs. Those historians who do make an attempt to write differently have often been criticised by traditionalists. In Australia, historians such as McKenna and Clendinnen are worried by the incursion of historical fiction into their territory and are highly critical of novelists who claim their works are history. The overall picture that emerges is of two fields that are still struggling to clarify a number of core issues concerning the nature of both the historical novel and historiographical writing, and the role they play in portraying the past. References Brown, Joanne. "Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults." ALAN Review 26.1 (1998). 1 March 2010 ‹http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall98/brown.html›. Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 2000. Clendinnen, Inga. "The History Question: Who Owns the Past?" Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1-72. Current, Richard. "Fiction as History: A Review Essay." Journal of Southern History 52.1 (1986): 77-90. De Piérola, José. "At the Edge of History: Notes for a Theory for the Historical Novel in Latin America." Romance Studies 26.2 (2008): 151-62. Demos, John. "Afterword: Notes from, and About, the History/Fiction Borderland." Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 329-35. Den Heyer, Kent, and Alexandra Fidyk. "Configuring Historical Facts through Historical Fiction: Agency, Art-in-Fact, and Imagination as Stepping Stones between Then and Now." Educational Theory 57.2 (2007): 141-57. Flanagan, Richard. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish. Sydney: Picador, 2002. Grenville, Kate. “History and Fiction.” 2007. 19 July 2010 ‹http://kategrenville.com/The_Secret_River_History%20and%20Fiction›. ———. “Interview with Ramona Koval.” 17 July 2005. 26 July 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm›. ———. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. Harlan, David. “Historical Fiction and the Future of Academic History.” Manifestos for History. Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Jenkins, Keith, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow. Manifestos for History. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Lukács, György. The Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Malouf, David. "Interview with Helen Daniel." Australian Humanities Review (Sep. 1996). McKenna, Mark. “Writing the Past: History, Literature & the Public Sphere in Australia.” Australian Financial Review (2005). 13 May 2010 ‹http://www.afraccess.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/search›. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (2007). 5 June 2010 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au›. Ricketson, Matthew. “Not Muddying, Clarifying: Towards Understanding the Boundaries between Fiction and Nonfiction.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 14.2 (2010). 6 June 2011 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct10/ricketson.htm›. Rosenstone, Robert A. “Space for the Bird to Fly.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. 11-18. ———. Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Schama, Simon. Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations). 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. “Fiction for the Purposes of History.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 221-36. Southgate, Beverley C. History Meets Fiction. New York: Longman, Harlow, England, 2009. White, Hayden. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 147-57.

Hartt-Sussman, Heather. Noni speaks up. Tundra Books, 2016.Nominated for the Ontario Library Association’s Blue Spruce Award, Noni speaks up is the third book in the Noni series by Toronto-based children’s picture book author, Heather Hartt-Sussman, and acclaimed illustrator Geneviève Côté.When Noni sees Hector being bullied by other kids at school, and is encouraged by her friends to join in, she is unable to speak up; Noni is paralyzed by fear of making enemies if she stands up for her schoolmate. Noni feels bad for not defending Hector, but is uncertain about what to do.During a restless night, she worries about what might happen if she doesn’t take her friends’ side. She considers the things Hector is being bullied about. As Noni reflects on her relationships with her friends, she notices that they sometimes say and do things to her that are hurtful.When Noni goes to school the next day, she sees Hector being bullied again and experiences the same fear and inability to speak. But when her friend laughs at Hector’s misfortune, Noni has had enough and screws up the courage to defend Hector. Speaking out stops her friend laughing, and Noni and a grateful Hector actively ignore the bully’s taunting, demonstrating another strategy for dealing with bullying.Noni speaks up presents a realistic scenario and provides accurate, helpful information for dealing with bullying, in an empathic and reassuring manner. Young readers will relate to the events in the story, and the Noni models positive behaviour that children experiencing a similar issue could put into practice. This book meets the Juvenile Health Fiction Checklist criteria (described in the October 2014 issue of the Deakin Review).Readers who enjoy Noni speaks up can re-connect with Noni in Hartt-Sussman’s other books, Noni is nervous and Noni says no.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Maria TanMaria is a sessional instructor at the University of Alberta and a former editorial team member of the Deakin Review. She is the co-author, with Sandy Campbell, of the Children’s Health Fiction Checklist, described in the October 2014 Special Issue of the Deakin Review (Vol. 4, No. 2) https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/deakinreview/article/view/23321.

McAllister, Ian, and Nicholas Read. The Sea Wolves: Living Wild in the Great Bear Rainforest. Vancouver: Orca, 2010. Print At first glance, The Sea Wolves is a small coffee table book. It is not, however, just a pretty photographic exploration of the wolves that inhabit The Great Bear Rainforest. It is a very long opinion piece written expressly to convince readers that wolves are not “the big bad wolf” of stories; rather, we should all love and respect them. Authors Ian McAllister, a founding director of both the Raincoast Conservation Society and Pacific Wild, and Nicholas Read, a journalist, pull no punches in their attempt to sway the reader. While the book does present facts about the wolves and their environment, many of them likely accurate, the authors make sweeping statements and claims which they require the reader to accept at face value. For example, though the authors state that there is “a great deal of evidence to suggest that over-fishing, fish farms and climate change have all played a role in [the wolves’] decline,” this statement does not direct the reader to any evidence. Part of the purpose of the book is to educate the reader about the wolves; however, it is also clearly designed to manipulate the readers’ emotions. The authors attempt to get the reader to identify with the wolves through anthropomorphizing the animals and by drawing extensive parallels between the lives of wolves and the lives of people. For example, they state that the reason that wolves save the “tastiest deer” for their young pups “could be because, just as in human families, wolf families like to spoil their babies.” Furthermore, throughout the book, the authors choose emotionally-laden words and images, stating, for example, that wolves “have been persecuted by humans, with a kind of madness,” or that they “romp on the beach in the ocean foam that burbles off the waves like bubble bath.” Each interpretation of the wolves’ behaviour seems designed to achieve the desired effect of garnering sympathy for the creatures. While there is nothing wrong with writing a polemic against the dangers to wolves and their environment, this book is presented by the publisher as juvenile non-fiction for ages 8 and up. Children in upper elementary or even junior high school grades may have difficulty distinguishing between facts and strongly-worded opinions presented in a book labelled as non-fiction. Recommended: Three stars out of fourReviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

The Harry Potter (HP) Fan Fiction (FF) phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the nature of fame and the work of fans (including the second author, a participant observer) in creating and circulating cultural products within fan communities. Matt Hills comments (xi) that “fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work”. This paper explores the cultural work of fandom in relation to FF and fame. The global HP phenomenon – in which FF lists are a small part – has made creator J K Rowling richer than the Queen of England, according to the 2003 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. The books (five so far) and the films (three) continue to accelerate the growth in Rowling’s fortune, which quadrupled from 2001-3: an incredible success for an author unknown before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. Even the on-screen HP lead actor, Daniel Radcliffe, is now Britain’s second wealthiest teenager (after England’s Prince Harry). There are other globally successful books, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia collection, but neither of these series has experienced the momentum of the HP rise to fame. (See Endnote for an indication of the scale of fan involvement with HP FF, compared with Lord of the Rings.) Contemporary ‘Fame’ has been critically defined in relation to the western mass media’s requirement for ‘entertaining’ content, and the production and circulation of celebrity as opposed to ‘hard news’(Turner, Bonner and Marshall). The current perception is that an army of publicists and spin doctors are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to create and nurture global fame. Yet the HP phenomenon started out with no greater publicity investment than that garnered by any other promising first novelist: and given the status of HP as children’s publishing, it was probably less hyped than equivalent adult-audience publications. So are there particular characteristics of HP and his creator that predisposed the series and its author to become famous? And how does the fame status relate to fans’ incorporation of these cultural materials into their lives? Accepting that it is no more possible to predict the future fame of an author or (fictional) character than it is to predict the future financial success of a book, film or album, there is a range of features of the HP phenomenon that, in hindsight, helped accelerate the fame momentum, creating what has become in hindsight an unparalleled global media property. J K Rowling’s personal story – in the hands of her publicity machine – itself constituted a magical myth: the struggling single mother writing away (in longhand) in a Scottish café, snatching odd moments to construct the first book while her infant daughter slept. (Comparatively little attention was paid by the marketers to the author’s professional training and status as a teacher, or to Rowling’s own admission that the first book, and the outline for the series, took five years to write.) Rowling’s name itself, with no self-evident gender attribution, was also indicative of ambiguity and mystery. The back-story to HP, therefore, became one of a quintessentially romantic endeavour – the struggle to write against the odds. Publicity relating to the ‘starving in a garret’ background is not sufficient to explain the HP/Rowling grip on the popular imagination, however. Instead it is arguable that the growth of HP fame and fandom is directly related to the growth of the Internet and to the middle class readers’ Internet access. If the production of celebrity is a major project of the conventional mass media, the HP phenomenon is a harbinger of the hyper-fame that can be generated through the combined efforts of the mass media and online fan communities. The implication of this – evident in new online viral marketing techniques (Kirby), is that publicists need to pique cyber-interest as well as work with the mass media in the construction of celebrity. As the cheer-leaders for online viral marketing make the argument, the technique “provides the missing link between the [bottom-up] word-of-mouth approach and the top-down, advertainment approach”. Which is not to say that the initial HP success was a function of online viral marketing: rather, the marketers learned their trade by analysing the magnifier impact that the online fan communities had upon the exponential growth of the HP phenomenon. This cyber-impact is based both on enhanced connectivity – the bottom-up, word-of-mouth dynamic, and on the individual’s need to assume an identity (albeit fluid) to participate effectively in online community. Critiquing the notion that the computer is an identity machine, Streeter focuses upon (649) “identities that people have brought to computers from the culture at large”. He does not deal in any depth with FF, but suggests (651) that “what the Internet is and will come to be, then, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it”. What happens when fans sit down to use the Internet, and is there a particular reason why the Internet should be of importance to the rise and rise of HP fame? From the point of view of one of us, HP was born at more or less the same time as she was. Eleven years old in the first book, published in 1997, Potter’s putative birth year might be set in 1986 – in line with many of the original HP readership, and the publisher’s target market. At the point that this cohort was first spellbound by Potter, 1998-9, they were also on the brink of discovering the Internet. In Australia and many western nations, over half of (two-parent) families with school-aged children were online by the end of 2000 (ABS). Potter would notionally have been 14: his fans a little younger but well primed for the ‘teeny-bopper’ years. Arguably, the only thing more famous than HP for that age-group, at that time, was the Internet itself. As knowledge of the Internet grew stories about it constituted both news and entertainment and circulated widely in the mass media: the uncertainty concerning new media, and their impact upon existing social structures, has – over time – precipitated a succession of moral panics … Established commercial media are not noted for their generosity to competitors, and it is unsurprising that many of the moral panics circulating about pornography on the Net, Internet stalking, Web addiction, hate sites etc are promulgated in the older media. (Green xxvii) Although the mass media may have successfully scared the impressionable, the Internet was not solely constructed as a site of moral panic. Prior to the general pervasiveness of the Internet in domestic space, P. David Marshall discusses multiple constructions of the computer – seen by parents as an educational tool which could help future-proof their children; but which their children were more like to conceptualise as a games machine, or (this was the greater fear) use for hacking. As the computer was to become a site for the battle ground between education, entertainment and power, so too the Internet was poised to be colonised by teenagers for a variety of purposes their parents would have preferred to prevent: chat, pornography, game-playing (among others). Fan communities thrive on the power of the individual fan to project themselves and their fan identity as part of an ongoing conversation. Further, in constructing the reasons behind what has happened in the HP narrative, and in speculating what is to come, fans are presenting themselves as identities with whom others might agree (positive affirmation) or disagree (offering the chance for engagement through exchange). The genuinely insightful fans, who apparently predict the plots before they’re published, may even be credited in their communities with inspiring J K Rowling’s muse. (The FF mythology is that J K Rowling dare not look at the FF sites in case she finds herself influenced.) Nancy Baym, commenting on a soap opera fan Usenet group (Usenet was an early 1990s precursor to discussion groups) notes that: The viewers’ relationship with characters, the viewers’ understanding of socioemotional experience, and soap opera’s narrative structure, in which moments of maximal suspense are always followed by temporal gaps, work together to ensure that fans will use the gaps during and between shows to discuss with one another possible outcomes and possible interpretations of what has been seen. (143) In HP terms the The Philosopher’s Stone constructed a fan knowledge that J K Rowling’s project entailed at least seven books (one for each year at Hogwarts School) and this offered plentiful opportunities to speculate upon the future direction and evolution of the HP characters. With each speculation, each posting, the individual fan can refine and extend their identity as a member of the FF community. The temporal gaps between the books and the films – coupled with the expanding possibilities of Internet communication – mean that fans can feel both creative and connected while circulating the cultural materials derived from their engagement with the HP ‘canon’. Canon is used to describe the HP oeuvre as approved by Rowling, her publishers, and her copyright assignees (for example, Warner Bros). In contrast, ‘fanon’ is the name used by fans to refer the body of work that results from their creative/subversive interactions with the core texts, such as “slash” (homo-erotic/romance) fiction. Differentiation between the two terms acknowledges the likelihood that J K Rowling or her assignees might not approve of fanon. The constructed identities of fans who deal solely with canon differ significantly from those who are engaged in fanon. The implicit (romantic) or explicit (full-action descriptions) sexualisation of HP FF is part of a complex identity play on behalf of both the writers and readers of FF. Further, given that the online communities are often nurtured and enriched by offline face to face exchanges with other participants, what an individual is prepared to read or not to read, or write or not write, says as much about that person’s public persona as does another’s overt consumption of pornography; or diet of art house films, in contrast to someone else’s enthusiasm for Friends. Hearn, Mandeville and Anthony argue that a “central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption” (106), and few would disagree with them: herein lies the power of the brand. Noting that consumer culture centrally focuses upon harnessing ‘the desire to desire’, Streeter’s work (654, on the opening up of Internet connectivity) suggests a continuum from ‘desire provoked’; through anticipation, ‘excitement based on what people imagined would happen’; to a sense of ‘possibility’. All this was made more tantalising in terms of the ‘unpredictability’ of how cyberspace would eventually resolve itself (657). Thus a progression is posited from desire through to the thrill of comparing future possibilities with eventual outcomes. These forces clearly influence the HP FF phenomenon, where a section of HP fans have become impatient with the pace of the ‘official’/canon HP text. J K Rowling’s writing has slowed down to the point that Harry’s initial readership has overtaken him by several years. He’s about to enter his sixth year (of seven) at secondary school – his erstwhile-contemporaries have already left school or are about to graduate to University. HP is yet to have ‘a relationship’: his fans are engaged in some well-informed speculation as to a range of sexual possibilities which would likely take J K Rowling some light years from her marketers’ core readership. So the story is progressing more slowly than many fans would choose and with less spice than many would like (from the evidence of the web, at least). As indicated in the Endnote, the productivity of the fans, as they ‘fill in the gaps’ while waiting for the official narrative to resume, is prodigious. It may be that as the fans outstrip HP in their own social and emotional development they find his reactions in later books increasingly unbelievable, and/or out of character with the HP they felt they knew. Thus they develop an alternative ‘Harry’ in fanon. Some FF authors identify in advance which books they accept as canon, and which they have decided to ignore. For example, popular FF author Midnight Blue gives the setting of her evolving FF The Mirror of Maybe as “after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as an alternative to the events detailed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, [this] is a Slash story involving Harry Potter and Severus Snape”. Some fans, tired of waiting for Rowling to get Harry grown up, ‘are doin’ it for themselves’. Alternatively, it may be that as they get older the first groups of HP fans are unwilling to relinquish their investment in the HP phenomenon, but are equally unwilling to align themselves uncritically with the anodyne story of the canon. Harry Potter, as Warner Bros licensed him, may be OK for pre-teens, but less cool for the older adolescent. The range of identities that can be constructed using the many online HP FF genres, however, permits wide scope for FF members to identify with dissident constructions of the HP narrative and helps to add to the momentum with which his fame increases. Latterly there is evidence that custodians of canon may be making subtle overtures to creators of fanon. Here, the viral marketers have a particular challenge – to embrace the huge market represented by fanon, while not disturbing those whose HP fandom is based upon the purity of canon. Some elements of fanon feel their discourses have been recognised within the evolving approved narrative . This sense within the fan community – that the holders of the canon have complimented them through an intertextual reference – is much prized and builds the momentum of the fame engagement (as has been demonstrated by Watson, with respect to the band ‘phish’). Specifically, Harry/Draco slash fans have delighted in the hint of a blown kiss from Draco Malfoy to Harry (as Draco sends Harry an origami bird/graffiti message in a Defence against the Dark Arts Class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as an acknowledgement of their cultural contribution to the development of the HP phenomenon. Streeter credits Raymond’s essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as offering a model for the incorporation of voluntary labour into the marketplace. Although Streeter’s example concerns the Open Source movement, derived from hacker culture, it has parallels with the prodigious creativity (and productivity) of the HP FF communities. Discussing the decision by Netscape to throw open the source code of its software in 1998, allowing those who use it to modify and improve it, Streeter comments that (659) “the core trope is to portray Linux-style software development like a bazaar, a real-life competitive marketplace”. The bazaar features a world of competing, yet complementary, small traders each displaying their skills and their wares for evaluation in terms of the product on offer. In contrast, “Microsoft-style software production is portrayed as hierarchical and centralised – and thus inefficient – like a cathedral”. Raymond identifies “ego satisfaction and reputation among other [peers]” as a specific socio-emotional benefit for volunteer participants (in Open Source development), going on to note: “Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon [… for example] science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ‘egoboo’ (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity”. This may also be a prime mover for FF engagement. Where fans have outgrown the anodyne canon they get added value through using the raw materials of the HP stories to construct fanon: establishing and building individual identities and communities through HP consumption practices in parallel with, but different from, those deemed acceptable for younger, more innocent, fans. The fame implicit in HP fandom is not only that of HP, the HP lead actor Daniel Radcliffe and HP’s creator J K Rowling; for some fans the famed ‘state or quality of being widely honoured and acclaimed’ can be realised through their participation in online fan culture – fans become famous and recognised within their own community for the quality of their work and the generosity of their sharing with others. The cultural capital circulated on the FF sites is both canon and fanon, a matter of some anxiety for the corporations that typically buy into and foster these mega-media products. As Jim Ward, Vice-President of Marketing for Lucasfilm comments about Star Wars fans (cited in Murray 11): “We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.” Slash fans would beg to differ, and for many FF readers and writers, the joy of engagement, and a significant engine for the growth of HP fame, is partly located in the creativity offered for readers and writers to fill in the gaps. Endnote HP FF ranges from posts on general FF sites (such as fanfiction.net >> books, where HP has 147,067 stories [on 4,490 pages of hotlinks] posted, compared with its nearest ‘rival’ Lord of the rings: with 33,189 FF stories). General FF sites exclude adult content, much of which is corralled into 18+ FF sites, such as Restrictedsection.org, set up when core material was expelled from general sites. As an example of one adult site, the Potter Slash Archive is selective (unlike fanfiction.net, for example) which means that only stories liked by the site team are displayed. Authors submitting work are asked to abide by a list of ‘compulsory parameters’, but ‘warnings’ fall under the category of ‘optional parameters’: “Please put a warning if your story contains content that may be offensive to some authors [sic], such as m/m sex, graphic sex or violence, violent sex, character death, major angst, BDSM, non-con (rape) etc”. Adult-content FF readers/writers embrace a range of unexpected genres – such as Twincest (incest within either of the two sets of twin characters in HP) and Weasleycest (incest within the Weasley clan) – in addition to mainstream romance/homo-erotica pairings, such as that between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. (NB: within the time frame 16 August – 4 October, Harry Potter FF writers had posted an additional 9,196 stories on the fanfiction.net site alone.) 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Watson, Nessim. “Why We Argue about Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community.” Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Ed. Steven G. Jones. London: Sage, 1997. 102-32. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia, and Carmen Guinery. "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>. APA Style Green, L., and C. Guinery. (Nov. 2004) "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>.