Children's Literature 

About: Children's Literature is an academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Narrative & Fantasy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0092-8208. Over the lifetime, 770 publications have been published receiving 3685 citations.

Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction

Abstract: Many of the most devoted aficionados of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series have not merely contented themselves with the just-completed septilogy, but have gone online in droves to create and publish new Potter stories. These new narratives are called "fanfiction"—fiction that utilizes pre-existing characters and settings from a literary or media text. Fanfiction ("fanfic" or "fic," for short) differs from other forms of "recursive" fiction (Langford 805)—such as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Geraldine Brooks's Pulitzer Prize-winning March, and every Sherlock Holmes pastiche ever created—by its unof- ficial methods of distribution. 1 The legal status of fanfiction based on in-copyright texts, such as the Potter books, is uncertain, though in the United States it is likely defensible under transformative Fair Use laws. 2 Fanfiction is, by preference or necessity, not formally published; it initially was circulated by way of self-published "zines," and, these days, on the Internet. While fan writers are unable to capitalize on their work in terms of money or official recognition, they are compensated by not being restricted to institutionalized discourses. Fan writers are often characterized as refusing merely to consume media, but rather to engage actively with texts; fandom as a space of engagement is es- pecially valuable for young fans, who constitute a significant portion of Potter fandom. In our era of what Henry Jenkins calls "convergence culture," fan-produced writing provides a means for studying the impact of the Potter books on creative, motivated readers. One of the most interesting and fruitful areas of study is "slash" fanfiction—fan writing concerned with same-sex romance. 3

"A" is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the "Children's Literature of Atrocity"

Abstract: Since the early 1990s, children’s books about trauma, especially the trauma(s) of the Holocaust, have proliferated, as well as scholarly treatments of those books. Despite the difficulties of representing the Holocaust, or perhaps because of them, there seems to be consensus now that children’s literature is the most rather than the least appropriate literary forum for trauma work. Subjects previously thought too upsetting for children are now deemed appropriate and even necessary. Thus, in “A New Algorithm of Evil: Children’s Literature in a Post-Holocaust World,” Elizabeth R. Baer emphasizes the urgency of “a children’s literature of atrocity,” recommending what she calls “confrontational” texts, and proposing “a set of [four] criteria by which to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of children’s texts in confronting the Holocaust sufficiently” (384). 1 “A” is now for Auschwitz, and “H” for Holocaust (if sometimes for Hiroshima). And “B” is still for book, though no longer necessarily the Bible. 2 Baer sees as exemplary texts like Roberto Innocenti’s picture book Rose Blanche (1985), Seymour Rossel’s nonfiction history The Holocaust (1981), and Jane Yolen’s novel The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988). Such books emphasize their protagonists’ direct experiences of the Holocaust, experiences that extend to and presumably interpellate the child reader outside the story. How to explain this shift away from the idea that young readers should be protected from evil and toward the conviction that they should be exposed to it, perhaps even endangered by it? It’s almost as if we now expect reading about trauma to be traumatic itself—as if we think children can’t otherwise comprehend atrocity. Just how new is this faith in exposure, experience, and confrontation, and how do we assess its significance with respect to contemporary children’s literature and trauma studies? Many people believe that the Holocaust fundamentally changed the way we think about memory and narrative, as well as about human nature. Presumably the exposure model became necessary because