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Early in the nineteenth century the London publishers and printsellers, S. and J. Fuller, packaged paper dolls and storybooks together in their Temple of Fancy paper doll books. This article examines the tension between the narratives of these works-typically moral tales for children in which a love of clothing is punished-and the accompanying paper dolls, which celebrate costume and dressing up. The textual morals against love of clothing are gendered in problematic ways, with female characters mortified for this flaw more readily than male characters. However, the variety of potential reading experiences offered by the form of the paper doll book, in which picture and word are separate, is viewed as a challenge to the gendered moral content of the stories. Ultimately this article argues that the form of the paper doll book sheds new light on D. F. McKenzie's (1986) ideas about how readers make meaning from texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the 1960s, British children's literature began to include sympathetic representations of people from outside the dominant culture. Greater numbers of Jewish characters appeared as part of this trend. In the succeeding decades, the British publishing industry has continued to encourage cultural sensitivity in children's books, but this article argues that, despite this, in the twenty-first century constructions of Jews and Judaism increasingly resemble the stereotypical images common in works from previous eras. The paper goes on to contend that although these stereotypes were acknowledged and challenged in historical fiction for children of the 1960s and 1970s in order to promote tolerance, authorial intent in employing such images in more recent historical novels is often unclear, and as a result the texts convey ambivalent messages to today's young readers about the place of Jews in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, it had been assumed that since the end of the Second World War and up until the Eichmann trial in 1961, Hebrew culture in Israel tended to repress the Holocaust or narrate it according to the Zionist ideology's viewpoint – to accentuate the events of the rebellion against the Nazis and to infer from them a lesson of national revival and restoration. The consensus concerning children's literature, in particular, maintained that it had been utterly committed in the early decades of statehood to extracting out of the Holocaust a 'fortifying tale' bearing a national lesson. This paper, however, argues the existence of a developed Holocaust discourse in children's literature written in Jewish Palestine during the war years, and suggests that children's literature even predated adult literature in setting the Holocaust theme at centre stage. This article aims to shed light on a rare narrative in the Israeli public discourse of the Holocaust: the literary story told to Jewish children in Palestine during the years of the Holocaust. At the time, this new narrative for children was extensive and diverse. For the first time in the history of Zionist children's literature, it challenged the Diaspora-negating code that had been dominant since its beginning. Nevertheless, only a few years later, with the founding of the State of Israel, this new narrative was rapidly 'forgotten' by the Israeli collective memory and proceeded to be neglected by literary and educational research as well. Although it spanned a short time period and failed to leave a literary impact on writings for children in Israel, this Holocaust narrative is tremendously important, having evoked the unique voice of the Jewish settlement in Palestine (the Yishuv) during the Second World War. It also serves as a case study of the crucial function of children's literature within the public discourse during traumatic times, illuminating the advantages of children's literature as a marginal and peripheral form of communication in the public domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luke Pearson's comic for children, Hilda and the Black Hound (2017), introduces characters who live at the margins of society and who respond to those marginalising forces not with outright resistance but with what Monalesia Earle has called 'misdirection'. As the characters move around and through the gutters of the comics page, they similarly slip between and around the authority that stands in their way. Literary theories related to formalism, children's literature and the Gothic illuminate how the movement on the page hints at a form of disobedience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthology of Chinese Fictions on Adolescent Girls' Psychology (2016) is one of the most renowned collections of girls' stories in Chinese children's literature. Authored by Qin Wenjun, Cheng Wei, and Chen Danyan, it is often associated with the rise of shaonu xiaoshuo (girls' fiction) in China. In this article, I evaluate the collective writing practices of the women authors mentioned above, focusing, in particular, on how their featured stories address intergenerational dissent and explore models of communication between adolescent girls and women. Highlighting how The Anthology traverses the age divide in a time during which both children's literature and the lives of teenagers underwent significant shifts, I intend to further scholarly understandings of Chinese girls' fiction as a unique literary phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Devorah Omer's first two historical children's novels, Ben-Yehuda's Eldest Son and Sarah, Heroine of NILI (both published in 1967), as a case study for the ideological role played by historical fiction for children and youth in 1960s Israel. A comparison of the novels with the historical sources on which Omer relied reveals how the selection of the figures of Sarah Aaronsohn and Itamar Ben-Avi allowed her to create a narrative that crossed the political divide while presenting the difficulties experienced by children and women in their encounters with the national myth. Omer's novels thus play a dual role: they preserve the Zionist narrative and shape a collective memory consistent with the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state, while also raising issues that call into question the national narrative's hegemonic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Sholem Aleichem's collection of stories Tevye the Dairyman and Vladimir Jabotinsky's novel The Five take as their main subject what Tevye frequently refers to as 'today's children': children growing up in a world of transition, where customs and morals are subject to external and internal pressures, and the old world is evolving and trying to adjust to confusing aspects of 'modernity'. The authors explore this theme within the context of the Jewish family: Tevye lives in the village of Anatevka in central Ukraine, and Jabotinsky's Milgroms live in Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea. The article examines the fates of two sets of children and compares the authors' views on the complex issues of modernity and assimilation. As traditions weakened, there was a significant shift in power and decision-making from parents to children. The eternal conflict of generations took on dramatic form as children violated the most sacred conventions of their parents' moral universe. In addition, these two extraordinary books succeed as original artistic expressions of the authors' personal journeys, documenting their own paths to ideological maturity: the subtitle of each could well be one and the same, namely: 'How and why I became a Zionist'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]