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The theme of “Silence and Silencing” for the IRSCL Congress 2019 in Stockholm struck a chord with many scholars of children’s literature, resulting in hundreds of paper presentations. The papers explored various uses and forms of silence while also detailing figurative and literal strategies of silencing, and the ensuing critical discussion was both lively and productive. Further enriching the polyphony of scholarly responses, many of the presenters also heeded the call to develop their papers into articles:
The
In her article “The Silence of Fragmentation: Ethical Representations of Trauma in Young Adult Holocaust Literature”, Talia E. Crockett discusses narrative silences and elisions as an ethical and aesthetical strategy to express the inexpressible: the horror and trauma of the Holocaust. The evolving use of silence and fragmentation in Holocaust literature is discussed in three young adult novels from the last thirty-five years: Jane Yolen’s
Similarly, Mateusz Świetlicki’s article “‘It felt better to stay quiet’: Miming as a Non-Verbal Way of Coping with Trauma in Kathy Kacer’s
The depiction of silence as a symptom and cause of trauma is also discussed by Helen King in her article “Seeking Asylum, Speaking Silence: Speech, Silence and Psychosocial Trauma in Beverley Naidoo’s
In her article “Nature Unnested: Kin and Kind in Switched Egg Children’s Stories”, Kathleen Forrester examines the complex use of Hans Christian Andersen’s switched egg narrative in
Lance Weldy also focuses on a character study in his article “The Queerness of the Man-Child: Narcissism and Silencing in Astrid Lindgren’s Karlson on the Roof Series”, where he discusses the charming but narcissistic character Karlson from Astrid Lindgren’s Karlson on the Roof trilogy (1955–1968). As Weldy demonstrates, Karlson is a “man-child” character who can be read as queer in that he disrupts traditional boundaries of the child/adult binary, disregarding societal expectations of what it means to be an adult by moving freely between these two categories and thereby subverting their meaning.
Aetonormativity and ideologies surrounding “the child” and childhood are also discussed in Emma Reay’s article “Secrets, Stealth, and Survival: The Silent Child in the Video Games
Political silencing is investigated in Sara Pankenier Weld’s article “The Silencing of Children’s Literature: The Case of Daniil Kharms and the Little Old Lady”. Discussing the Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms, who wrote for both children and adults in the 1920s and 1930s, before his premature death as a result of repression by the Soviet regime, Pankenier Weld shows how children’s literature can be studied not only for its own sake, but also in order to illuminate our understanding of literature for adults. To demonstrate the arbitrariness of subdividing an author’s literary production into mutually exclusive categories, Pankenier Weld discusses the motif of the little old lady, a marginal figure who recurs in Kharms’s writings regardless of audience and shows how the character functions both as an embodiment of writing itself but also, and more importantly, as an expression for the silencing, marginalization, and censorship of the author in a repressive societal context.
Joshua Simpson also discusses political silencing in his article “Silence and Absence in the Political Discourse on Section 28 and Children’s Literature in the United Kingdom”. He analyzes the uses of children’s literature in the 1986–1988 British Parliamentary debates that led up to Section 28, which prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities, showing how silence and absence were used as a discursive strategy by supporters of the law during the debates. As Simpson demonstrates, politicians in favour of the law would misrepresent or omit the content of children’s books featuring gay characters to support their argument.
Another article that exposes silencing strategies, but in this case those that support the killing and eating of animals, is Marianna Koljonen’s “Breaking the Silence about the Animals We Eat: Representations of the Inherent Value of Nonhuman Animals in Children’s Picturebooks”. Koljonen dissects socially and culturally maintained silences regarding animal-farming and the meat industry in relation to animal picturebooks, demonstrating how these silencing strategies are countered in two Nordic picturebooks:
Ann-Sofie Persson’s article “Narrative Strategies Giving Voice to the Silenced Subject: The Horse in Fiction for Children” also uses a posthumanist approach and discusses how a framework of silence versus voice, and othering versus anthropomorphizing, co-exists within different narrative strategies in stories about horses. Persson studies two Swedish book series: the stories of Vitnos (1971–1980) by Marie Louise Rudolfsson, and the Klara books (1999–2008), showing that regardless of the narrative form chosen, these stories depict horse and human as each other’s Other.
As this brief overview of the ten articles shows, the theme of silence and silencing is a rich area of investigation. The great variety the articles display in terms of both material and theoretical approaches underlines the complexity of the theme, pointing to the multitude of forms that silence and silencing can take in the context of children’s literature and the many different implications of silence as narrative device, motif, or analytic tool. With this theme, we hope to demonstrate not only the importance of exploring the silences of children’s and young adult literature, but also the rewards of listening closely to what has been left unsaid.