Barnboken

Pia Maria Ahlbäck, Jouni Teittinen och Maria Lassén-Seger (red.), Nordic Utopias and Dystopias: From Aniara to Allatta!

2024-04-18T14:31:19-07:00

Review/Recension

Charlotte Appel, Nina Christensen och M.O. Grenby (red.), Transnational Books for Children 1750–1900

2024-04-18T14:31:26-07:00

Review/Recension

Kristina Öhman, Ett tjejligt rum: Tidningen Starlet 1966–1996

2024-04-18T14:31:34-07:00

Review/Recension

Lonely Landscapes

2024-04-18T14:31:41-07:00

Anna-Liisa Haakana is a Finnish novelist best known for her realistic stories set in Sápmi (better known in English by its colonial name “Lapland”) during the 1980s. Haakana’s teenage protagonists, Ykä in Ykä Yksinäinen (Ykä the Lonely, 1980) and Anitra in Ykköstyttö (Number One Girl, 1981), feel lonely and isolated despite being surrounded by their families. Loneliness, as Fay Alberti reminds us, is a social and cultural phenomenon which has its own history. In Haakana’s pre-internet novels, loneliness is mapped onto the northern landscape such that the protagonists’ perceptions of their homes are tinged with feelings of isolation. In this article, I investigate the links between the feelings of loneliness and landscape by drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on queer orientations to examine the geo-spatial dimensions of loneliness. Although neither of the novels by Haakana examined here are romances per se, desire acts as a form of way-finding for both Ykä and Anitra. For both teens, feelings of love combined with the desire to care for someone vulnerable orient them towards their homes. To do so, they must move: stillness leads to feelings of loneliness and topophobia, but movement leads to feelings of purpose and topophilia.

Bakom den leende masken

2024-04-18T14:31:49-07:00

Behind the Pretty Mask: Vulnerable Mothering in Contemporary Picturebooks about Surrogacy and Illness

Children and adults, the dual audience of picturebooks, are joined in the act of reading aloud. For many parents, reading to their child constitutes one of the basic, intimate care practices of mothering (Rich; Holm). In this study, we examine picturebooks about surrogacy and about mothering parents who are mentally or physically ill, published in Sweden in the period between 2010 and 2022. Both types of books depict a vulnerability in relation to parenthood, motherhood and mothering and are often autobiographical and niche- or self-published. With an analytical approach grounded in critical theories of adult agency in children’s literature (Rose; Nodelman; Beauvais), we find that both picturebooks about surrogacy and illness communicate straightforward and often sentimental messages to the child reader, whereas more complex and possibly problematic adult desires and needs can be detected on the level of the adult address. Through the projected child perspective (Rhedin), our material offers the vulnerable adult reader representation and recognition in relation to a motherhood/mothering that is not unequivocally considered sufficient or legitimate. The traditional aesthetics and pedagogical use-value of the picturebook as well as the positive maternal associations to reading aloud, are essential in this legitimization process. Meanwhile, the implied child reader functions as a projection surface for adult wishes of normalcy and happy endings. Although hidden behind adult projections, it is this “mighty” child (Beauvais) who ultimately has the power to acknowledge and justify the parents in an impending future which reaches beyond the control of both adult writer and implied adult reader.