Mer enn helt og bestevenn?

Hundens rolle i relasjon med barn i barnelitteratur om andre verdenskrig

Abstract

Theme: Dog

More than a Hero and a Best Friend?
The Dog’s Role in a Relationship with a Child in Children’s Literature on the Second World War

The aim of this article is to analyze representations of dogs in relationships with children in children’s literature set during the Second World War. Placing the article in a posthumanism tradition, we use literary comparison and modality analysis to reveal underlying anthropocentric ideology in a genre of literature that tends to convey moral and ethical values related to human rights and value. Drawing upon theory about companion animals and war memorial literature, we find that the dogs from the selected material of Italian and Swedish children’s books tend to be either heroes, loving companions or initiators for the children’s development, or several of these roles at once. Our analysis also indicates that war as a backdrop makes these roles possible – and impacts them in specific ways. The dog might be seen as a hero to the protagonist child in the story, as a national hero important to the war effort, or both. Since the parents of the child often are unable to fulfil their roles as caregivers and protectors due to the war, the dog seems to be the natural substitute. The dogs are also in different ways helping the child protagonists cope with the traumatic experiences related to war. Our closing discussion highlights how these roles in many ways continue to maintain an anthropocentric world view, but we suggest other ways that war memorial literature for children, through the use of certain literary devices, can be used to support the readers’ critical thinking about species’ relationships and about how not only humans are affected by war.