CFP – Verbal and Visual Strategies in Nonfiction Picturebooks

Verbal and Visual Strategies in Nonfiction Picturebooks

7th International conference European Network of Picturebook Research

PhD workshop September 25, 2019
International conference September 26 – 28, 2019

Western Norway University of Applied Sciences / Høgskulen på Vestlandet – Campus Bergen – Kronstad

Call for Papers

Nonfiction picturebooks have been published concurrently with fictional picturebooks for decades, if not centuries. Clearly recognized as an art form on a par with fiction picturebooks, nonfiction picturebooks have been honoured with their own category for awards at the prestigious Bologna Children’s Book Fair since 1995. In spite of this, the scholarly field of picturebooks and picturebook theory have paid comparatively little attention to nonfiction picturebooks.

Rather than dwelling on the reasons behind this lacuna within picturebook research, there is a need to bring together studies that attempt to remedy this deficiency, and to establish a theoretical framework or starting point for systematic and inventive approaches to various kinds of nonfiction picturebooks, both printed and digital. From pop-up books on urban development and big vehicles, to biographies about artists, adventurers, scientists, kings and queens, to graphic nonfiction on terrorism, the World Wars, and stem cells, to reference works such as atlases, encyclopaedias, ABC-books, and picture dictionaries, nonfiction picturebooks span a dizzying range of different themes, formats, and intended addressees. Central to the investigation of nonfiction picturebooks is the construction and validation of knowledge and the acknowledgement that the dissemination of knowledge in nonfiction picturebooks varies according to the context (time, place, function) in which the text was created. Questions for inquiry include the kind of knowledge that is examined and why, and the ways in which knowledge is presented and organized in the book.

The 7th International conference of the European Network of Picturebook Research aims at being a conference, where analytical perspectives, methods, and frameworks are examined, tested and developed.

We invite papers related to the overall theme of the conference. Possible areas for investigation include, but are not restricted to:

• The utilization of verbal, visual, audial, tactile and other multimodal strategies in nonfiction picturebooks
• The presentation of knowledge in nonfiction picturebooks
• The implied reader in nonfiction picturebooks
• Nonfiction picturebooks across time, cultures, and languages
• Picture dictionaries, concept books, and alphabet books
• Digital nonfiction picturebooks
• The paratexts of nonfiction picturebooks
• Nonfiction picturebook artists and artistic strategies

Submission

Please send an abstract of 300 words maximum and a short biography of 100 words as two attached Word documents to Nina Goga, ngo@hvl.no. E-mails should have the subject line: Conference nonfiction picturebooks.

Abstracts should include the following information:

1. Author(s)
2. Affiliation as you would like to appear in the programme
3. E-mail address
4. Title of proposal
5. Text of proposal
6. Selected bibliography with academic sources (3-5 references)
7. Areas of interest
8. Five keywords

All abstracts and papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English. Papers will be 30 minutes maximum followed by a 10 minutes discussion. All submissions are blind reviewed by the members of the Reading Committee.

Deadline for abstract submission: December 15, 2018

Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2019

Conference fee

Early registration fee (before May 15, 2019): € 60,00
Fee after May 15 (till July 31), 2019: € 95,00
Conference dinner: € 35,00 (drinks not included)

The European Network of Picturebook Research was established during the first picturebook conference in Barcelona in September 2007. The network was proposed by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (University of Tübingen, Germany) who was a member of both the reading committee and co-organizer of the Barcelona-conference, and of the core group of picturebook researchers, which includes/d Evelyn Arizpe, Nina Christensen, Teresa Colomer, Elina Druker, Maria Nikolajeva, and Cecilia Silva-Díaz.

The aims of these conferences are:
a. to foster international picturebook research
b. to promote young researchers who are focusing on the investigation of picturebooks
c. to publish selected papers presented at the conferences through international publishers or in peer-reviewed journals.

Talk - The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh

Kathryn Aalto

Tuesday 01 May 2018, 17:00 - 18:30

Mary Allan Building room 104, Homerton College, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ

A. A. Milne's classic tales Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner have delighted readers for nearly a century. The stories' characters — Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore and the rest of the gang — are famous, but how much do we know about the setting, the Hundred Acre Wood? Join Kathryn Aalto, author of the New York Times best-seller, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, for a look at what we can learn from studying the intersection of nature and culture in Winnie-the-Pooh. Kathryn has taken thousands of people on nostalgic and vivid journeys into one of the most iconic settings in children's literature. Learn about Milne's extraordinary childhood in the natural world, conflicts he experienced as a father and author, and how his creative partnership with illustrator E. H. Shepard continues to enchant countless readers. Discover places that inspired the stories along with the forest's rare flora and fauna. Part travelogue and natural history, this talk weaves history with humor and birdsong with booklore as we learn how these masterpieces of children's literature were created. Leave with a new understanding of how the Winnie-the-Pooh books are field guides for 21st-century Christopher Robins — hymns to those days of doing Nothing yet learning Everything.

Children's Literature Research Centre

CFP - Synergy and contradiction: How picturebooks and picture books work

Cambridge Research and Teaching Centre for Children's Literature

University of Cambridge, UK
September 6-8, 2018

The aesthetic aspects of storytelling through word and image have been studied extensively in the past thirty-odd years. In 1982, the Swedish scholar Kristin Hallberg launched the concept of iconotext that has been widely employed in discussing the phenomenon. Perry Nodelman's Words about Pictures (1988) was a landmark that placed the subject firmly within children's literature research. The first international conference wholly devoted to the art form was held in Stockholm in 1998, featuring, among others, Jane Doonan and William Moebius. An international network was established in 2007, running biennial conferences and workshops. Dozens of monographs and edited volumes have been published, the most recent More Words about Pictures (2017), edited by Perry Nodelman, Naomi Hamer and Mavis Reimer, and The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2017), edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer.

And yet there is no universal consensus about the object of inquiry, starting with the controversy of spelling. While most scholars agree that the interaction of words and images is essential, there is no clear agreement on the difference between illustrated books and picture book/picturebooks, nor on the differences and similarities between picture books/picturebooks and comics, nor on the relationship between printed and digital texts.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary since the publication of Words about Pictures and to explore the recent development in picture book/picturebook theories, Cambridge Research and Teaching Centre for Children's Literature invites paper proposals on any aspect of theoretical approaches to picture books/picturebooks as an art form. We are particularly interested in new approaches that go beyond statements that picture books/picturebooks depend on the combination of the verbal and the visual. We also welcome authors, illustrators, publishers and translators. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:

• Picture book/picturebook as an art form and a material object 
• Picture books/picturebooks and other word/image-driven texts (e.g. illustrated books, picture dictionaries, concept books, artist books)
• Metalanguage for discussing picture books/picturebooks: coming to terms
• Theory vs. culture: how trustworthy are the semiotic generalizations of books like Words about Pictures or How Picturebooks Work in relationship to picture books/picturebooks produced in different times, places, cultures? Is there a universal language of picture books/picturebooks?
• Picture book/picturebook design: creators' perspective
• Is there anything beyond words and images? Picture books/picturebooks without words? Picture books/picturebooks without pictures?
• Looking at words, seeing pictures (e.g. implications of fonts, intraiconic texts, etc)
• Young readers' engagement with word/image storytelling: do words and pictures invite different kinds of relationships between texts and readers?
• How have adjacent areas of research benefited from picture book/picturebook theory, for instance, digital literature, comics, graphic novels and games?
• Translation and transmediation

We will not consider proposals on content-focused topics.

Confirmed jousters are Perry Nodelman and Maria Nikolajeva.

Deadline: January 8, 2018. 300-word (or any size image) proposals for a 20-minute paper should be sent, together with a 100-word bio, to mn351@cam.ac.uk. We also encourage panel and round-table proposals. Early indication of interest would be helpful in arranging affordable accommodation. Further inquiries to mn351@cam.ac.uk.

Please note that this conference is not a part of the Picturebook Network series

Conference - Insects and Children's Literature

Philippa Pearce Lecture 2017

Booking is now open for the 2017 Philippa Pearce Lecture, which will be given by Chris Riddell, the celebrated, multi-award-winning illustrator and political cartoonist.

Chris has illustrated over 150 books, collaborating with some of the best known children’s authors of recent decades, including Neil Gaiman and Michael Rosen. Chris has won two CILIP Kate Greenaway Medals, the UK librarians’ annual award for the best-illustrated children’s book, and three Nestlé Smarties Book Prizes. On 9 June 2015 he was appointed the UK Children’s Laureate. During his two-year tenure, he championed creativity, the importance of visual literacy, and the role of libraries in schools. He called on people to enjoy the “joy of doodling” by drawing every day, setting the example with his own fantastic ‘Laureate’s Log’, a whimsical visual diary shared on social media, which has recently been published in a compendium called Travels with My Sketchbook. In the 2017 Philippa Pearce Lecture, Chris will talk about how words and pictures work together for a reader both on traditional page and how he believes this continues to be true in a digital age. He will explore how books are ever more covetable as objects in their own right, as well as valued for the words and illustrations inside, and also how libraries remain vital as repositories for these beautiful productions.

The lecture is entitled, The Age of the Beautiful Book and will take place on September 8^th in the Mary Allan Building, Homerton College, Cambridge.

Call for Chapters - Posthuman Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years

Deadline for Submissions: August 31, 2017

Full name / Name of Organization: Jennifer Harrison, East Stroudsburg University, USA

Contact email: jharriso11@esu.edu

I am currently seeking chapter submissions for an edited volume celebrating the centenary in 2026 of A. A. Milne's The World of Pooh. As classics from the "golden age" of children's literature, Milne's Pooh stories have received considerable attention from critics and fans over the years; however, less critical attention has been devoted to the continuing relevance of the Pooh phenomenon in contemporary children's culture. As recent critics have discussed, the Pooh stories are complex and multifaceted, written in many different modes and employing a vast array of different narrative styles and techniques; they have also undergone transformation and adaptation into a plethora of related cultural artefacts.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of The World of Pooh, therefore, this volume will explore Pooh in light of cutting-edge children's literature and culture theory, with a particular focus on the stories as addressing the fundamentally modern posthuman concern with interrogations of the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the material and the immaterial.

Submissions of an interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome, as are submissions which examine the relationship between the texts and modern adaptations and artefacts. Some potential areas of exploration might include:

• The blurring of human-animal-toy boundaries
• Explorations of space and place within the stories
• Adaptations for film and TV
• The marketing of the Pooh franchise
• Explorations of time within the stories
• Material culture and artefacts within the stories
• Bodies and identity within the stories
• Postcolonial and ecocritical readings

However, this list is nowhere near exhaustive and I am happy to consider any submission which focuses on the Pooh stories and their role in modern children's culture.

I hope to include chapters by authors from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of current studies in children's literature and culture, as well as the diverse relevance of the Pooh stories in modern children's culture. Please submit a 500-word chapter abstract and a biography of no more than 250 words by August 31, 2017, to:

jharriso11@esu.edu

You can also see a digital version of the CFP at: http://quantum.esu.edu/faculty/jharrison/2017/06/20/call-chapters-posthuman-pooh-edward-bear-100-years/.

All proposed abstracts will be given full consideration, and submission implies a commitment to publish in this volume if your work is selected for inclusion. If selected, completed chapters will be due by December 30, 2017.

All questions regarding this volume should be directed to:

jharriso11@esu.edu

I look forward to what I hope will be a stimulating and exciting array of submissions on this fascinating topic!

Talk - 'Lewis Carroll and Darwin'

Children's Literature Children's Lives is pleased to announce our next event:

Laura White, "Lewis Carroll and Darwin."
 Tuesday 30^th May 2017 5:30 – 7pm.Room 218, Arts Two, Queen Mary University of London.

​

 

As has long been understood by scholars, Carroll's Alice books revel in complex jokes about Darwinian theory. But what did Carroll really make of Darwin's challenge to older thinking about nature, and what then are the satiric objects of his nonsensical jokes, such as the evolutionarily-challenged Mock Turtle? This presentation will examine the evidence concerning Carroll's views of Darwin and explore the nature of his jokes on Darwinian ideas.

Laura White is John E. Weaver Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of several books on Jane Austen, her last being Jane Austen's Anglicanism (Ashgate, 2011). She has also published widely on interdisciplinary topics in nineteenth-century British culture and literature, and has recently inaugurated a data-mining site on Austen's diction, Austen Said (austen.unl.edu). Her most recent book, The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World, is forthcoming from Routledge this spring.

This event is free but please RSVP
We look forward to seeing you there!


With best regards,

Lucie and Kiera

--

Children's Literature/ Children's Lives
childlitchildlives@gmail.com
https://childlitchildlives.wordpress.com/


Children's Literature/ Children's Lives is part of the Centre for Childhood Cultures

Book launch - 'Astronomouse'

A launch party for the book Astronomouse, by Frances Willmoth, will be held at the Whipple Museum on Friday 17 March, 4.30-6pm. Everyone is welcome to attend.

The book describes the building of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (1675-76) from the unique viewpoint of the local mouse population. It is beautifully illustrated with line-drawings. Further details may be found at www.astronomouse.com (RRP £8.99 - £8.00 at the launch party).

Talk - Fantasy Worlds with Frances Hardinge

Wednesday 8th February, 6 – 7pm followed by a drinks reception

G07, Percy Building, Newcastle University

Join us for an exclusive event with Frances Hardinge, as she discusses the borders between fantasy and reality and her inspiration for her writing with Aishwarya Subramanian from Newcastle University’s Children’s Literature Unit. Her latest novel, The Lie Tree, described as ‘a Victorian Gothic mystery with added paleontology, blasting powder, post-mortem photography and feminism” won the Costa Book of the Year 2015 and audiences will also be treated to a reading from the outstanding novel by Frances as part of this very special event.

This event is hosted by Newcastle University’s School of English Literature, Langauge and Linguistics with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books.

Free event. Please book online in advance at: http://www.sevenstories.org.uk/whats-on/events/122952/fantasy-worlds-with-frances-hardinge

This event complements the Children’s Literature Unit’s Postgraduate Visit Day, which will be hosted earlier that day for prospective Masters and PhD students. For more information and to book, visit: http://forms.ncl.ac.uk/view.php?id=11282

CFP - Any Signs of Childness?

Peter Hollindale's Signs of Childness in Children's Books (1997), 20 years on.
Day Symposium, 05/05/2017, Department of Education, University of York (UK) – H/G21, The Eynns Room

I wish to argue here that childness is the distinguishing property of a text in children's literature, setting it apart from other literature as a genre, and it is also the property that the child brings to the reading of a text.

Twenty years ago, Peter Hollindale coined the term 'childness' to qualify, or rather evoke, the particular feel of those discourses which express with unique intensity something of the quality of being a child in a certain place and time. Childness, Hollindale argued, is not a static property; always situated, it occurs through reading events, and signals a successful exchange between text and young reader.

This compelling but also elusive concept, although very often mentioned in children's literature studies, has arguably been underused; children's literature theorists have not engaged with that text as much as with Hollindale's other celebrated work, Ideology and the Children's Book (1988). Yet the 'I know it when I see it' dimension of childness continues to condense much of the seduction and frustration of children's literature as an object of study. In this symposium, we welcome scholarly contributions that reread, update, reevaluate, rethink, or trace the legacy of, Hollindale's concept in the light of two decades of children's literature theory and criticism. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Childness and contemporary children's literature theory
• Childness and exchange: 'kinship' and 'difference' models; generational gaps and 'cultural time-gaps'; adult-child relationships; childness and 'adultness'
• The reading event: potential uses of 'childness' in empirical work
• Childness and sociological, political and intersectional approaches to children's literature
• Childness beyond children's literature: childhood studies, education, sociology and philosophy of childhood; general literary theory
• Childness beyond children's books: multimedia, film, cultural and material productions

We welcome abstracts of 300 words from researchers and postgraduates before February 5th, 2017. To submit an abstract or for any questions, please email clementine.beauvais@york.ac.uk. Peter Hollindale has kindly agreed to be present at the event.

Talk - Memory, Miniaturization, and the Transformative Energy of Fairy Tales

Professor Maria Tatar, The John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature, Harvard University. Thursday 01 December 2016, 17:00 - 18:30 Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 8PQ, DMB, Room GS5

"Fairy tales may be simple stories but they also give us the expression of complex thought. On the one hand, they offer up stark enactments of binary oppositions and cultural contradictions, with encounters between predator and prey, beauties and beasts, or primal innocence and cannibalistic cruelty. At the same time, their surfaces conceal layers of cultural memory saturated with historical meaning. This talk will draw on Walter Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller to understanding the cultural repetition compulsion that drives us to keep retelling “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and other fairy tales."

Maria Tatar is without doubt one of the world’s leading authorities on children’s literature, fairy tales and folklore. She was born in Hungary, but her family moved to the USA in the 1950s, when Maria was a child. She grew up in Highland Park Illinois, which she refers to in her 2014 Lowell Lecture for the Boston Public Library (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR10oa8hq18). Maria went from Highland Park High School to Denison University in Ohio, and from there to graduate study at Princeton. On completing her doctoral work, Maria joined the faculty of Harvard University where she is now the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology. She also shares her love of wonder tales and children’s literature with a wider audience through her Breezes from Wonderland blog (http://blogs.harvard.edu/tatar/). Her extensive list of publications includes _The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales_ (1987), _Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood_ (1992), _Enchanted Hunters_ (2009), and _Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives_. (2004).

http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/68717

Gillian Beer - Untangling Alice

A preview of Gillian Beer's forthcoming book, Alice in Space, is in the latest issue of Nature (£).

Article - The Rhetoric of Quantum Mechanics

Fascinating article by Kanta Dihal on her PhD research online here: lots of references to Science and Literature Reading Group favourites!

"Frog and Toad" in the New Yorker

Article by Colin Stokes here.

Recap - Entomological Adventures

Many thanks to everyone who came along and contributed to last night's discussion! Building on the previous meeting, we continued to talk about children's natural history books, and saw the academic year out in style with suitably entomological refreshments.

The introduction and subsequent conversation touched on many crucial themes for literature and science scholarship, from anecdote, antagonists, and autobiography, to childhood and colonialism, objectivity and observation, changes of scale and moments of wonder. We thought about these works in relation to the contemporary rise of Nature Study in Britain and American, situating the pond-dipping anecdotes of Fabre, in particular, against attempts to teach children through 'Nature, not books', and against other attempts such as the Boy Scout movement to engage young groups with their surrounding worlds. We considered Fabre's work as a nostalgic piece of writing, looking back on his earliest natural historical experiences, and characteristic of his particular blend of the personal and informal with the scientifically-specific, as - for instance - when he pulled focus at the end of the 'pond' chapter to consider the planet as a whole. What connections could we draw, we wondered, to the development of ecological and ethological sciences? We also analysed Madalene and Louisa as a work of the 1980s, looking back at the Victorian period: its connections to nineteenth-century domestic practices of watercolours, scapbooks, and Brontesque juvenilia, as well as to comic journalism and - back in the twentieth century - graphic novels; the surprising, perhaps, subversion of the received view of dour Victorian childhood.

Many thanks to Daniel for alerting us to the existence of Maya the bee and her own Adventures: there is a 1922 English translation (with beautiful illustrations) available here.

See below for some photos of the group in action, of some of the texts we looked at, and - of course - of the creepy-crawly catering.

Entomological Adventures - further reading

A few additional items of interest for our meeting on 9th June:

• Charlotte Sleigh on Fabre in the BSHS Travel Guide: 'Insect souvenirs in Provence'.
• A website dedicated to Fabre.
• An article about a 2009 exhibition of Madalene and Louisa Pasley's drawings.
• Rare entomology books, and a video about Fabre, from Abe Books.

9th June - Entomological Adventures

Our second meeting of Easter Term 2014 looks at introductory entomology. We meet from 7.30-9pm in the Godwin Room at Clare College. Links to the readings can be found below: those not online are in the Whipple Library box file. We hope to see you there!

• The Adventures of Madalene and Louisa: pages from the album of L. and M.S. Pasley, Victorian entomologists.
• Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, The Life of the Fly... by J. Henri Fabre (1913). Read chapter 7, 'The Pond', but feel free to skim the rest of the book as well.
• Louise Seymour Hasbrouck, Insect Adventures by J. Henri Fabre (1917). Read the preface and chapter 1 ('My First Pond'). Feel free to skim the rest of the book.

Recap - What Mr Darwin Saw

Many thanks to everyone who came along to last night's meeting: there was a great turn-out to discuss all things Darwinian!

Julie Barzilay gave a fantastic introduction to the set readings, detailing her recent research into this topic, and providing some very helpful background information on Wendell Phillips Garrison, author of the original What Mr Darwin Saw. She explained how the book fitted with Garrison's other editoral work, abolitionist convictions, and writings for children, and drew attention in particular to his restructuring of Darwin's words into a natural history guide that taught children how to be observers, moving from animals to man to geography to nature. She asked us to consider what was lost, as well as gained, in this editorial process; and more generally to analyse the role of editors and their responsibility to - or exploitation of - works' original authors. In the thought-provoking and characteristically wide-ranging discussion that followed, many different aspects of this children's book were brought into question. How and by whom would the book have been read? What was its relationship with other types of children's natural history books, with encyclopaedias, with travel narratives? What kinds of scientific methods were taught through this work? How 'invisible' was its the editor, after all? What ethical considerations should we foreground when reading historical source material about racial difference, especially with juvenile audiences in mind?

In comparison with the more recent book which shares its title, we were also able to think about how the Beagle voyage has been rewritten for audiences today. Rather than Darwin the superlative 'see-er', as had been presented in the 19th century, we explored how Darwin the scientific hero was the star of this work. Published as part of the 2009 celebrations commemorating 200 years since his birth, and 150 years since the publication of the Origin of Species, a shift from teaching natural history to teaching history was, as we discussed, apparent.

Easter Term 2014

Science for Children

This term we explore how scientific texts have been rewritten for juvenile audiences in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, as well as analysing a work written by two young people themselves. We meet on Mondays from 7.30 to 9pm in the Godwin Room at Clare College (Old Court).

Organised by Julie Barzilay (HPS), and Melanie Keene (Homerton College): please contact us if you would like to join the mailing list. Copies of readings not available online will be put in the Science and Literature Reading Group box file in the Whipple Library. All welcome!

12 May: What Mr Darwin Saw

• Charles Darwin, Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world (1845 edn). Read the preface and chapter 1 (Porto Praya).
• Wendell Phillips Garrison, What Mr. Darwin Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the ship 'Beagle' (1879). Read the introduction for parents, introduction for children, pages 29–33 in Part I ('The Horse') and pages 92–104 in Part II ('Man'). Feel free to skim the rest of the book.
• Mick Manning and Brita Granström, What Mr Darwin Saw (2009).

 

9 June: Entomological adventures

• The Adventures of Madalene and Louisa: pages from the album of L. and M.S. Pasley, Victorian entomologists.
• Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, The Life of the Fly... by J. Henri Fabre (1913). Read chapter 7, 'The Pond', but feel free to skim the rest of the book as well.
• Louise Seymour Hasbrouck, Insect Adventures by J. Henri Fabre (1917). Read the preface and chapter 1 ('My First Pond'). Feel free to skim the rest of the book.