CBCP Children’s Literature Workshop: Identities and Visibility in Children’s Print Culture Archives and Collections

This workshop hears from three recent CBCP visiting fellows and their research in the children’s culture and the children’s collections held at the University of Reading. Their papers will explore the ways archives and collections (interpreted broadly) can make visible different actors, agents, writers and themes in print culture for children and the construction of identities.

This online workshop is free & open to all.

To join us via MS Teams, please register here.

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Paper 1:
Aleksandra Wieczorkiewicz, Where the Translators Are (in Victorian Periodicals for Children)
Translators are among the most important agents in children’s literature. But they were often – especially in the early stages of its evolution – marginalized and placed in the background. Not mentioned on the title pages or hidden under pseudonyms or initials they were “invisible storytellers” and “the great disappeared of literary history” (Lathey 2014). In her presentation Where the Translators Are (in the Victorian Periodicals for Children), Aleksandra will talk about the project she carried out in the UoR Special Collections as the CBCP Visiting Research Fellow 2022–23. Its primary objective was to explore the visibility of translators in Victorian children’s periodicals such as Aunt’s Judy Magazine, Good Words for the Young and The Children’s Friend: to find out who the translators working for the periodicals were, whether they left their signature in the texts (in form of prefaces, footnotes, accompanying articles etc.), in which periodicals – if in any – they were most visible, and what this tells us about the position of the translators at the time.

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Paper 2:
Simona Di Martino, “Do you want to be a Nurse?”: Girl and the British Educational Magazines for Girls in 1950s
British girls’ magazines and comics flourished in the UK from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first girls’ magazines, School Friend and Girl, appeared in the early 1950s, even though the girls’ comics trend took off in the latter half of the 1950s, with the long-running titles Bunty and Judy. Magazines for girls have long been regarded as a minor source for the history of education and children’s literature. However, these publications allow us to understand ethical models and values related to a specific historical period. Particularly, my visiting fellowship at the CBCP allowed me to consult the UoR’s Special Collections and analyse many issues of the educational magazine Girl by Hulton Press. This magazine, founded by the Rev. Marcus Morris in 1951, was very much an educational magazine whose heroines, including those who got into scrapes, became involved in tales that had a moral substance and showcased several jobs and careers that young women could pursue. This paper aims to examine the British educational magazine Girl and to assess the ways in which it promoted active and ‘visible’ models of girlhood. Such an analysis will pave the way for a comparative investigation of other European markets for girls, such as the more lacunary Italian one.

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Paper 3:
Margarida Castellano,  Making visible Antifascist and totalitarian discourses in Children’s & YA literature in Spain, 1936 to 2023
This presentation examines the role of children’s and young adult literature in Spain as a medium to confront and undermine fascist and totalitarian ideologies from the Spanish Civil War to 2023. It specifically centers on the 1937 Cartilla Escolar Antifascista and subsequent multimodal texts, illustrating their use of text and imagery as ideological tools against fascism in an era of high illiteracy. It also considers the historical contributions of the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and the Misiones Pedagógicas, which highlighted the transformative power of education. Moving to the present, it draws parallels with contemporary picturebooks and graphic novels that defy Spain’s ‘Pact of Oblivion’, showcasing works by renowned authors and illustrators. These modern narratives, like their historical forerunners, intertwine aesthetic appeal with profound socio-historical insights. This research, forming part of the investigation conducted at the CBCP and presented at the 2023 Annual CBCP Conference Publishing Antifascism, emphasizes the critical need for pedagogical strategies based on multiliteracies and critical thinking, thus equipping students to critically engage with dominant narratives and foster a future of social justice.

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Speakers

Dr Aleksandra Wieczorkiewicz is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology and a researcher in the Children’s Literature & Culture Research Team at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. Her academic interests include English children’s literature of the Golden Age and children’s literature translation studies. She is the author of an award-winning dissertation on the Polish translation reception of George MacDonald, J.M. Barrie and Cicely Mary Barker; she is also a literary and academic translator. In 2020 Aleksandra completed her PhD fellowship as a Visiting Scholar at the CIRCL, University of Reading; in 2023 she was a Visiting Fellow at the CBCP, UoR, where she carried out the project Translator’s Own Paper? Translated Literature in British Children’s Periodicals of the Victorian Era. She is co-organising the upcoming international conference “Children’s Literature and European Identities” (24-26th October 2024, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland; https://bit.ly/CFP_europeanidentities)

Dr Simona Di Martino is an MHRA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warwick currently working on her first monograph Italian Gothic Poetry (Liverpool University Press). She holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick. In 2023 Simona was a CBCP Visiting Research Fellow and had the chance to conduct archival research at the MERL Special Collection, at the University of Reading. She organised and took part in national and international conferences and published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on various topics including the Gothic, children’s literature, and representations of witches in Italian comics. Simona is currently developing a new research project on witch girlhood and female empowerment in Anglo-American and Italian popular print culture for young people. Finally, she is co-organiser of the upcoming conference Seen and Heard: Voices of Transnational Girlhood(s) on Identity, Gender, and Culture Conference to be held at the University of Warwick in April 2024.

Dr Margarida Castellano is a Lecturer in Language and Literature Teaching at the Universitat de València. Author of the award-winning Les altres catalanes. Memòria, identitat i autobiografia en la literatura d’immigració (2018), she has published various chapters and peer-reviewed articles related to the processes of identity formation through literary texts and the uses of multimodal texts in the context of teaching additional languages. Her current research endeavors extend to exploring the integration of multimodal texts and multiliteracy frameworks in additional language instruction, as well as investigating language acquisition within multilingual environments.