Anna Savoie is a third year PhD student at the Children’s Literature Centre in Cambridge.

If you go around asking people in academia for things that would make students write higher quality PhDs, I doubt many people’s first answer would be a furry friend.  I doubt it would even be present on most people’s list.  I may be a bit biased (ok, I’m totally biased), but I’m here to say that it should be! Here are five reasons why pets are an excellent way to give your PhD a boost. Disclaimer – this post might just be an excuse to look at cute pictures of furry PhD assistants (but it’s still all true).

• They make you healthier.

PhD students, especially those of us doing theoretical/desk-based projects, have very little structure.  If I wanted to, I could wake up at noon and then eat cookies and gummy candy for breakfast while watching television. Yes, I have done that before. Any PhD student who says they haven’t done some version of this at least once is probably lying (or maybe you’re all much better people than I am).

But I can’t do that now I have my dog Ellie.  She gives my day structure.  I have to get up to give her breakfast.  Then she needs a walk, preferably a good long one.  I could still do my cookies-and-candy breakfast combo, but it turns out my mother was right all along: a diet based entirely of high-fructose corn syrup does NOT support your bodily needs, and walking for a couple of hours with nothing but processed sugar in my stomach feels terrible. So I have a real, nutritious breakfast, followed by a good dose of exercise and fresh air.

Somehow, magically, that lands me in a position where I am ready to work for the day at a reasonable hour, my brain is properly nourished and refreshed from exercise, and I am ready to produce some quality writing.  There you have it: a healthy, functioning schedule.

• Researching and writing is much better with an animal around

No matter how much you love your work, it’s always a drag at least sometimes.  Some days you just REALLY don’t feel like writing.  But it’s easier to get started when you have a furry pal cuddled up at your feet! There is no better way to write than by typing with your fingers while simultaneously stroking an animal with your feet. Digging your toes into a good bit of fluff makes the writing process so much better!

And our furry pals help us with writing quality, too.  We’re never at our best when we’re tired, and taking breaks is essential to good writing.  That can be hard to remember on your own, though.  That’s why you need a dog to bring you their ball for a quick play break, or a cat to come sit on your keyboard and physically enforce break time.  They are doing their solemn duty as PhD assistants.

• Animals decrease stress and anxiety

None of us do good work when we’re stressed and anxious.  Unfortunately, PhDs are well-known to cause a good deal of stress and anxiety.  What’s the solution? Spend a little time with an animal!

Even just stroking an animal (furry, feathery, or scaly) causes stress relief in adults, even regardless of whether or not they say they like animals![i] And cuddling a pet can cause a release of oxytocin and serotonin, feel-good hormones that decrease stress and fight depression.[ii]

• They provide a non-judgmental audience

Trying to practice that conference presentation, but too nervous to do it in front of an audience yet? Animals are excellent non-judgmental audiences (plus we’ve already talked about how they decrease stress, making it easier for you to take the stage!).  They provide an actual audience, but one that we’re sure will still love us and think the world of us, even if we mess up completely.  It’s such a good technique to improve your writing and presentation skills, they’ve even started a “dog audience” program for business students at American University.[iii]

• They make sure you’re never alone

PhDs can be lonely.  Even those who do empirical work still end up spending long hours working alone.  Contact with others can be scarce, and that leads to feelings of loneliness and even depression.  But it’s important for our well-being to connect with others, and no one can write a good PhD if they’re feeling lonely all the time.  Pets make sure that we always have company, even when we’re by ourselves.  Plus, they connect us to other humans, too! You get to know your neighbours a lot better once they start recognizing your cat.  Other dog walkers in your local park become your friend.  Friends like to come over and visit with your furry pal.  And when you’re out and about with a pet, lots of people like to stop and chat!

What about those PhD students who can’t have a pet for various reasons? There are lots of ways to get your fur fix! Join something like Borrow My Doggy or Trusted Housesitters, where you can hang out with other people’s pets for an afternoon or even several weeks while they’re on vacation. Ask around your neighbours too – I’m sure many of them would jump at the chance of free pet care.  Go to your local green space and get to know the dogs and dog walkers. I can recommend specific Cambridge spaces that are excellent for running into loads of pups with friendly owners who are happy to let you throw the ball for a bit. And the most obvious one of all – come hang out with my dog Ellie! She loves visitors. But be warned that you’ll probably be required to give at least ten minutes of belly rubs.

[i] Shiloh, S., Sorek†, G., & Terkel, J. (2003). Reduction of State-Anxiety by Petting Animals in a Controlled Laboratory Experiment. Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, 16(4), 387–395. https://doi.org/10.1080/1061580031000091582

[ii] Interacting and petting animals creates a hormonal response in humans that can help fight depression. (2004, May 14). Retrieved November 27, 2017, from https://www.news-medical.net/news/2004/05/14/1552.aspx

[iii] Fandos, N. (2016, August 5). How to Give a Better Speech: Talk to a Dog. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/education/edlife/how-to-give-a-better-speech-talk-to-a-dog.html

Lindsay Burton is an MPhil in Children’s Literature at St. John’s College. She wears loose, comfy clothing so as to be constantly ready for heroic action and is fully preparing to refuse the return in her own Student-Hero journey.

“…human ‘nature’ is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.” (W. H. Auden, The Quest Hero)

Are graduate students heroes? The current political climate in my home country would indicate that we are most assuredly not heroes, nor is the work we do heroic. Even if we allow for those well-funded, data-based STEM graduate students to be heroic, with their tangible results and real-world applications and whatnot, surely we must question the heroism of humanities graduate students, who produce reams of writing (both official, like 80,000-word dissertations, and unofficial, like this blog post) which are often decidedly unmarketable. Though, one does wonder what several million dollars’ worth of funding might prompt humanities students to produce…

I digress. Under the priorities of capitalism, those who study the humanities are ‘unheroic’. But capitalism was not truly designed to produce heroes; capitalism was designed to produce capitalists (synonyms for which include financiers, investors, and industrialists…I leave you to draw your own conclusion on the heroism of these figures). Underneath the economic machinery that seems to drive so much of the media we read and the decisions we make, we humanities grads (and, indeed, everyone else on the planet) remain merely human, with hopes and dreams that persistently buck any profit-driven yoke. Indeed, the very existence of humanities grads is evidence of the strength of these singularly human hopes and dreams.

So, if graduate students are heroes in pursuit of a degree (among other things), what is the shape of our quest? What are the particular characteristics of our monomyth? For those who are rusty on their Campbell, the hero’s journey has three distinct stages—Departure, Initiation, and Return—broken down into further specific categories. The remainder of this post will consider those categories from a combination of perspectives: firstly, of this graduate’s journey thus far, and secondly, of the imagined trajectory of a graduate hero continuing through the trenches of academia beyond where I have so far journeyed. (I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies accidentally included, particularly regarding the process of the PhD-Hero’s journey.)

Without further ado: The Student-Hero’s Quest

Stage One: Departure

• The Call to Adventure: The Student-Hero is not yet a student, merely a citizen, perhaps a worker of some sort, who longs for deeper meaning and purpose in their everyday life. An email arrives in her inbox informing her of the deadline for international funding for Cambridge master’s programs. An application is summarily filled out, references are procured, and after prolonged weeks of waiting, an acceptance is issued: the Student-Hero has been summoned to the adventure.
• The Refusal of the Call: Despite meeting the deadline for international funding, many Student-Heroes find themselves with little or no financial support forthcoming. Capitalism: 1, Student-Hero: 0.
• Supernatural Aid: We’re all paying for this somehow. Insert your own financial magical talisman here (last minute grant, the lottery, a savings account…etc.).
• Crossing the Threshold: After journeying across thousands of miles of ocean, not to mention facing the various demons of airport security, customs, passport control, luggage collection, public transportation, and the Heathrow Airport Animal Reception Centre (because what kind of hero would I be without my trusty animal sidekick?), this Student-Hero’s first heroic threshold was thoroughly crossed.

• Belly of the Whale: A stage in which the student-hero must undergo their first instance of self-evaluation in the face of a set-back. Follow my analogy for a moment: have you been inside St. John’s College’s dining hall? It sure looks like the belly of a whale to me. Ribs and all. Matriculating into a college and becoming an official Cambridge student produced a set-back to my belly, primarily due to wine consumption. Time management also becomes more of a challenge at this stage.

 Stage Two: Initiation

• The Road of Trials: MPhil students in the Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature stream must complete two essays and a master’s thesis during the completion of their degree. PhD students have their upgrade viva, innumerable drafts, and their thesis defense. Road of trials, indeed.
• The Meeting with the Goddess Supervisor: Whether or not one’s supervisor qualifies as a deity is a judgment that each Student-Hero must make for themselves, although I defy any graduate student to not feel some amount of trepidation on the day of their very first supervision.
• Woman Pub as Temptress Locus of Temptation: Pub, here, is interchangeable with the following: Formal Hall, swap, disco, happy hour, Christmas party, Spoons, weekend trips to the continent, sleep.
• Atonement with the Father Revisions: To quote Campbell: “Atonement consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster—the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id)”. Meaning, the Student-Hero must accept that their writing is imperfect, but not be too hard on themselves. Just do the revisions, Student-Hero. (Do them. Do them nowwww.)
• Apotheosis: This stage has two meanings for the Student-Hero. Firstly, it represents the entire reason for going on this journey in the first place: we learn. We develop. We become, or at least begin to become, researchers. Real ones. Secondly, it represents that obscure vocabulary word (or three) that no matter how many times you’ve googled it, you know you will have to google it again when it pops up in a paper. (Looking at you, nugatory.)
• The Ultimate Boon: A pass. A distinction. Graduation. A degree. Dare I say it–further funding. As a current MPhil student, my ultimate boon shifts daily between a distinction and a stress-free holiday. Out of respect for the hallowed nature of this stage in the journey, I will say no more, only nod solemnly and continue on with fingers crossed.

Stage Three: Return

• Refusal of the Return: For Campbell, the return involves the hero bringing their dearly-won knowledge or prize “back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet or the ten thousand worlds.” For the Student-Hero, this stage can come in many forms. For MPhils, the return is often a return to the real world. The real world? A job outside academia? 9-to-5? What are these concepts? Must we give them any credence? Alternatively, this stage may represent a reluctance to consider publishing one’s work for public consumption. A third alternative for this stage is the Student-Hero having to discuss their work at a family holiday dinner. It’s worth pointing out, as Campbell did, that “the responsibility has frequently been refused,” citing the Buddha himself as someone who refused the return. The Student-Hero should keep this in mind if their Aunt Mabel asks them to explain what, exactly, carnivalesque means for the third time that evening.
• The Magic Flight: Referring to the flight out of the realm of journey, or a separation from the journey with one’s magical knowledge intact. The process of disentangling one’s life from a degree program can be tricky, particularly as it often involves a major move, sometimes to a different country. Even transitioning from a master’s program to a PhD requires a shift in lifestyle and daily expectations. This stage can also apply to the process of publication, which feels less like a magic flight and more like a vaguely enchanted crawl.
• Rescue from Without: In a more meta sense, one’s friends and family are vital for a return to the realm of normalcy, no matter which stage of the Student-Hero’s journey a grad student finds themselves on. Having a support system is crucial. See above re: my animal sidekick.
• The Crossing of the Return Threshold: Regardless of which degree program the student is in, and regardless of where the student ends up afterwards, all degree programs end. They are finite (even if yours doesn’t feel very finite at the moment). There will be a moment when the student is cut loose from the program, and though that moment might not have as much fanfare as the crossing of the initial threshold to begin the journey, the gut-deep feeling of nervousness will be similar. This time, though, the Student-Hero has their knowledge, their research, their writing, maybe even a publication to their name. They have the thing they came to obtain: a degree, a talisman in its own right that represents all that they have accumulated over the past several years. Like all heroes, the Student-Hero often views their possession of this talisman with a decent amount of cynicism, but that does not lessen their achievement.
• Master of Two Worlds: In the middle of this journey myself, I can only imagine that this stage represents a kind of heavenly, transcendental time management process that results in all chores being done on time, regular exercise, healthy meals, deadlines regularly met, and eight hours of sleep while still producing good research. (I’ll pause here while all of the post-docs, lecturers, and independent researchers reading this post laugh at me through their computer monitors or smart phone screens.)
• Freedom to Live: At this stage, the Student-Hero’s journey has come to a close. Like the Luke Skywalkers, Lyra Belacquas, and Harry Potters before them, the Student-Hero can now continue getting through this thing we call life. You, the Student-Hero, are now fully equipped to analyze your own life through a literary lens, perhaps as a hero’s journey, or maybe as something more explicitly carnivalesque or multimodal. You can even analyze real hero’s journeys in real books! Most importantly, though, you are in a position to contribute to humanity’s knowledge of itself. You are a hero for that, because we are not here to collect multicolored pieces of paper with numbers on them, despite all Christmas advertising to the contrary. What we are here for, I’m not qualified to say, but learning to recognize the heroes among us, fighting for our inner humanity and our identity in a sea of political and economic turmoil, just might be part of it.

Auden, W. H. “The Quest Hero.” Tolkien and the Critics; Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2008.

“Hero’s Journey.” Wikipedia, 2 Dec. 2017. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hero%27s_journey&oldid=813242348.

Anna Purkiss is a first-year PhD student, researching children’s responses to representations of disability in children’s literature.

It is snowing as I am writing this here in Cambridge, so I am humming ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ and feeling very Christmassy! It seems appropriate then to talk about another sure (and these days much more reliable) sign that Christmas is approaching. Over the past few years, Christmas adverts for some department stores and supermarkets have developed into miniature films that are unlike traditional adverts filled with product placements but rather stories that highlight sentiments and morals connected with ‘the meaning of Christmas’, and several have used characters from children’s literature.

Two years ago, Judith Kerr wrote a brand-new story about her beloved character, Mog the cat, for the 2015 Sainsbury’s Christmas advert. Mog first appeared forty years previously in Mog the Forgetful Cat (1975) and had actually died in Goodbye Mog (2002), so her return was quite the surprise. Mog’s Christmas Calamity  includes a CGI Mog and a cameo appearance from Judith Kerr herself (2:23 – 2:30). Mog accidentally ruins the Thomas family’s Christmas: her tail twitching due to a bad dream sets off a train of events which leads to a burnt turkey, needle-less Christmas tree and ruined house. Luckily, she also accidentally rings the fire service and so saves the day. The story ends with their neighbours rallying round and making sure the Thomas family have a Christmas after all. This is very much in line with Kerr’s previous Mog stories, particularly the first in which Mog is always getting into trouble for being forgetful, but then saves the day when her forgetfulness helps to apprehend a burglar. I was teaching at the time this advert was released, and used both the advert and tie-in picturebook (written and illustrated by Kerr) as the basis for my Key Stage 1 class’s English unit leading up to Christmas.

This year, Michael Bond’s cherished character of Paddington Bear stars in Marks and Spencer’s Christmas advert, to tie in with the release of the film Paddington 2. Bond first revealed Paddington in A Bear Called Paddington (1958), and this bear from deepest, darkest Peru has since appeared in over 150 books, several television series and two films. Paddington & the Christmas Visitor sees Paddington mistake a thief for Santa Claus and consequently help him to return the gifts he has stolen to their rightful owners along the street. After seeing the children happily opening their presents and receiving one of Paddington’s marmalade sandwiches himself, the burglar appears to be reformed, and thanks Paddington. The style and aesthetic are very recognisable from the two recent Paddington films (2014; 2017), as are the many instances of gentle humour, particularly the sequence with the sleigh (0:40-0:56). Paddington’s trusting, optimistic and kind nature as seen in this advert are also in keeping with the films as well as Bond’s many books.

Both adverts are beautifully made with high production values, involving live action in combination with CGI main characters; necessary when dealing with animals who have been anthropomorphised to differing degrees. They also have tie-in picturebooks with proceeds going to charity (Save the Children and NSPCC’s Childline respectively), while the taglines of ‘Christmas is for sharing’ (Sainsbury’s) and ‘This Christmas, let’s spend it well’ (Marks and Spencer) also foster a sense of Christmas goodwill. However, this emphasis is somewhat tempered by the range of tie-in goods available to buy in store. While Sainsbury’s only produced a plush toy Mog in connection to Mog’s Christmas Calamity (interestingly, this sold out quickly and was then available for ten times the price on Ebay!), Paddington & the Christmas Visitor is linked to 35 products in Marks and Spencer’s ‘The Paddington Shop’, including the ‘Super Alice’ costume featured in the advert. Interestingly, Paddington is also used to market Robertson’s Golden Shred marmalade, reflecting Paddington’s love of marmalade sandwiches, and showing that he is no stranger to the world of advertising!

It is therefore easy to be cynical about the purpose of such adverts and their associated products, with good reason. However, these short films are also very enjoyable, and are largely keeping with the original books and characters, particularly Mog’s Christmas Calamity, which was made with the full collaboration of the author. This is not always the case though; John Lewis has come under fire this year for the significant similarities between their advert, Moz the Monster, and former Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell’s picturebook, Mr Underbed (1986). This has had the unexpected but happy consequence of Mr Underbed selling out, and 10,000 more copies being printed. Riddell has said, “I think this has sent a powerful message to John Lewis who I hope will work more directly with picture book authors in the future.” [i]

Why then is children’s literature increasingly being drawn upon for such adverts? Even when specific characters are not used, many adverts are clearly inspired by themes and styles found in children’s literature. For instance, this year’s Debenhams advert, #YouShall Find Your Fairytale, is a modern-day version of Cinderella, while John Lewis’ The Bear and The Hare (2013) has links to both Aesop’s fables and Disney animation. Perhaps this is due to the strong link between childhood and Christmas, as well as a sense of nostalgia: Mog and Paddington are as, if not more so, familiar to the parents of children today as to the children themselves. It will be interesting to see if this trend for short films inspired by children’s literature continues to develop in the Christmas adverts next year.

[i] Mr Underbed sells out after John Lewis ad boost (2017, November 30). Retrieved December 10, 2017 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42180228

Lisa Kazianka is a first-year PhD student analysing modern Arthurian adaptations for children and young adults from a masculinity studies perspective.

Time flies – the first term of my PhD is over, and I’m now back home with my family for the holidays.

Ah, the holidays.

People who celebrate Christmas have different views on it, of course. Some think it’s the most stressful time of the year and are happy when it’s over. Others are frustrated that it’s getting more and more commercialised, that we’re forgetting about the ‘true’ values and meaning of the holidays. And then there are those who absolutely love Christmas, who think it’s a magical, happy, wonderful time – and I have no shame to admit that I belong in this category.

For me, Christmas means being at home and spending time with my family and friends – something that has become even more valuable and special to me now that I live abroad.

Somehow, this year particularly, being home for the holidays has made me quite nostalgic.

So, for this blog post, I thought I’d do an MPhil-Essay-One-inspired reflection on my holiday childhood readings – ‘readings’ broadly referring to poems, stories and films.

I have many happy childhood memories about the holidays. I always saw them as something magical – even after I found out, aged 10/11, that the ‘Christkind’ (that’s who’s bringing the presents in Austria, not Santa Claus) does in fact not exist – though it did take me some time to forgive my parents for the ‘betrayal’ and to get over the embarrassment that they had read ALL the letters that I had written to the ‘Christkind’ in absolute confidentiality!

As a child, I took the build-up to Christmas very seriously. Already at the beginning of November, sometimes even earlier, I began reading my favourite Christmas poems and stories, singing Christmas carols, watching Christmas movies, and making holiday-themed crafts.

My favourite, most-treasured holiday book from my childhood is called ‘Advent Advent’ (published in 1996). It is a collection of 19^th-century German and Austrian poems, stories, letters and Christmas carols, illustrated with beautiful drawings that instantly pull the reader into a fairy-tale-like past.

The 19^th century, of course, is well known as some kind of ‘golden age’ of Christmas – let’s just think of Charles Dickens in England and Washington Irving in America, who, through their writings, basically invented the Christmas that we look back on with nostalgia today.

My favourite stories contained in the book were fairy tales: Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Match Girl”, “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” and “The Snow Queen”, as well as “Frau Holle” (known, I think, as Mother Holle, Mother Hulda or Old Mother Frost) by the Brothers Grimm. I also had multiple film adaptations of these tales that I would always watch at Christmas.

I also loved the poems in the book ‘Advent Advent’ – and during my childhood I even attempted writing my own poetry, inspired by and based on the style of those contained in the book. Most poems reflect the (assumed) innocence of childhood, depicting children as happy and carefree during the holidays, having fun, enjoying the first snow and building snowmen – it’s all about the simple things in life.

However, the poems and stories also seem to ask of the child reader to show gratitude at this time of the year, to be thankful for how blessed they are; that they are warm and comfy at Christmas, with a tree and a family to celebrate the birth of Jesus (unsurprisingly, there’s a lot about religion as well).

Most illustrations depict children or the family. The values of the nuclear family and traditional, stereotypical gender roles are clearly foregrounded. The book advocates a return to traditional holiday values and customs – particularly local customs within a German and Austrian context. I wonder whether this had anything to do with an increase in Americanization in the 1990s.

This Americanization was clearly reflected in the movies that I watched. They were, with few exceptions, Disney movies!

Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983) was my absolute favourite. I had no idea that it was based on a very popular story written by a very popular English writer, and I had no idea that there were hundreds of other adaptations based on that same story. So, this is what Scrooge and Marley will forever look like in my head, even when I read Dickens’ original story today:

The Grinch was also one of my favourites, one that I would always watch with the family. I also didn’t know that it was based on a very popular picturebook by a very popular American author. This really reflects my childhood experience of English ‘classics’: I only got in contact with them through movie or TV adaptations.

So, while I didn’t have any English Christmas books (not even in translation) and my reading was German/Austrian-focused, all the movies I watched were American productions! (Miracle on 34^th Street was another favourite, btw.)

I realize this blog post is already quite long, so I won’t continue listing all the things I read and watched at Christmas as a kid

Generally speaking, it’s fascinating to me how, both as children and adults, year after year, we return to the same Christmas stories of our childhood and youth.

Clark (1995) explains that the developmental past as well as the historical past are often idealized when it comes to Christmas. The developmental past refers to early childhood, and the historical to “an era of fireplaces and sleigh rides” (43). Both developmental and historical past, she writes, are rendered innocent, and thus offer us a return to “a paradisal world” (43). I guess, in a way, my favourite Christmas book, ‘Advent Advent’, allows me to return to both kinds of past.

Perhaps my desire to take this book from the shelf year after year reflects a deep longing for my childhood, the desire to go back to a time when everything seemed easier and more carefree. I’m idealising the past, of course. As so many of us do. But at least I am aware of it

Today, for me, Christmas is a time of calm and tranquillity, when I am grateful and appreciative of the days I get to spend back home surrounded by friends and family. It is also a time when I think about how blessed I am to be able to do my PhD in Cambridge, where I am surrounded by such supportive, kind and knowledgeable individuals; where I am part of a wonderful community of children’s literature scholars – and children’s literature scholars to-be ; where I am able to pursue what is important and meaningful to me. These are the things that, today, I consider magical.

Happy holidays!

Clark, Cindy Dell. 1995. Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children’s Myths in Contemporary America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Zoe is a current MPhil student on the children’s literature course. She enjoys reading and writing stories.

Note: I wrote this blog entry while rereading my Essay 1. This short reflective piece addresses some of the thoughts that I would very much like to put in my essay if I had more time and a larger word count.

As a child, I always had a book hidden somewhere: under my pillows, beneath my crumpled T-shirts, behind the bathroom door, and between the navy-blue layers of my schoolbag—as I firmly believed that a book must be well-hidden in order to avoid persecution from adults. While I preferred to hide my books in different places (mainly in order to lower the risks of exposure), I also managed to save a corner for my personal collection of ‘banned books’ inside my desk drawers at home and at school. These corners were, unsurprisingly, dark, narrow, dusty and moldy. As a result, my books were usually covered in sawdust, smeared with dirt and milk stains, and emitted a curious smell of orange pips and melted chocolate. The pages became dogged-eared and sometimes torn, not because I ran my fingers on them often, but because I had to perform a routine task of thrusting them into of my drawers at light speed. I believe I must have been quite good at this particular practice, for my hidden collection was never once discovered by my parents or teachers.

My forbidden library started with a palm-sized magazine named ‘Story Collections’ (《故事会》). It was a popular magazine with miscellaneous contents, including jokes, Chinese folktales, foreign stories, and short stories depicting contemporary Chinese social life and popular culture. I first discovered it in a newsagent’s shop on the way to school. When my Chinese teacher saw me sniggering behind this magazine at recess, she snatched it away and sternly pointed out that stories in this magazine are ‘not fit for a primary school student’ and ‘of low taste’, affording no aesthetic or educational value whatsoever. My parents agreed likewise and ordered me to return to my textbooks immediately. However, entranced by the gripping conflicts in the adult world and the outlandish spaces of adventure in these stories, I started hoarding the magazines inside my desk drawers. Safely surrounded by a stack of textbooks, exercise papers and notebooks, my precious collection survived under the prying eyes of the adults, and was left to prosper on its own.

At the same time, I was beginning to lead a double life as a reader. In front of my teachers, I opened up my textbooks and recited with pious devotion. When my teachers left the classroom, I quickly groped inside my drawers for the most recent issue of ‘Story Collections’ and placed them on my lap. The same thing happened at home. Growing up, I always knew when I had to ‘perform’ reading, and when I could truly ‘enjoy’ reading. In many cases, reading could be an undercover operation. One must observe the surroundings carefully and wait until the coast is clear, before discreetly fishing out the book from its hiding place. While reading, one must also remain highly vigilant, lest a ‘well-meaning’ adult might jump on you and confiscate the book once and for all. A teacher was entitled to confiscate almost anything back then, from a ‘bad book’ to a chewing gum.

Despite being ‘closely monitored’ as a child reader, I found great pleasure in breaking the rules and secretly reading something that I was not supposed to be reading. I call it the ‘purloined pleasures’ of reading precisely because such pleasures resulted from periods of ‘stolen’ reading hours, and from stacks of ‘stolen materials’ that would have otherwise been inaccessible to me. Having been brought up in an educational system where curriculum reading is highly valued, and where parents and teachers habitually interfere with a child’s reading choices, I was luckily able to freely read almost anything that interested me. The experience of encountering a rich pool of texts inspired my early passion in writing stories, leading me to construct an identity as a young author and storyteller.

Sometimes we may be surprised by how children love to read their chosen books in lone, private spaces. Jane Eyre, for example, admired Bewick’s History of British Birds behind ‘the red moreen curtains’ at Reed House, where she was ‘shrined in double retirement’[2]; in The Neverending Story, Bastion stole the magical book and began reading it in the school attic; and in The Book Thief, Liesel stole The Grave Digger’s Handbook, hid it under her mattress and observed it secretly when no one was around. As for me, I remember reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover under my bedcovers when I was thirteen, with my one arm almost numb from holding the flashlight. Such secret hideaways may not always seem like a comfortable place to read, yet these are unsanctioned spaces where a child consciously and independently develops his or her personal reading preferences. These spaces belong to the child and the child only, representing, to a certain extent, an aspect of childhood experience that would always remain elusive to the adult.

At this point, you may be tempted to ask: as a child, have I never read or enjoyed any book in a proper manner? I have indeed, and those were equally wonderful memories. Yet somehow, I find it important to acknowledge the ‘darker’, or, to use a better word, ‘unregulated’ moments in my reading history. Sometimes those unregulated aspects of childhood reading—the secret collections and purloined pleasures—can prove equally crucial to shaping a child’s literacy development and creative consciousness. To some extent, the existence of a child’s secret library constantly reminds us of the gap between what we think children should read, and what they actually choose to read. It also pushes us to acknowledge the wide spectrum of texts that is available to a child reader, many of which lie outside the treasured garden of the children’s literature canon, beyond the rigorous framework of academic inquiry. In fact, however clearly we think we know about children, children’s reading and children’s literature, there will always be something beyond our grasp, something waiting to be uncovered and explored. This is perhaps why I always consider children’s literature an inexhaustible fountain, a forever running spring brimming with the delicious invitation for new knowledge and understanding.

[1] Image retrieved from: https://image.baidu.com/search/detail?z=0&ipn=d&word=上课偷偷看书&step_word=&hs=0&pn=1&spn=0&di=34500771360&pi=&tn=baiduimagedetail&is=0%2C0&istype=2&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&cs=1520105078%2C3874635028&os=3480736507%2C2169860275&simid=&adpicid=0&lpn=0&fm=&sme=&cg=&bdtype=0&simics=478575346%2C1175566583&oriquery=&objurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftimgsa.baidu.com%2Ftimg%3Fimage%26quality%3D80%26size%3Db10000_10000%26sec%3D1513989792%26di%3D2b4d59e67683103331753d6d75a1a4ba%26src%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fimg7.itiexue.ne

[2] Brontë, C. (2006). Jane Eyre. Edited with an introduction and notes by Stevie Davies. London: Penguin.

[3] Image retrieved from: https://jmillwanders.com/2014/10/02/jane-eyre-read-along-update-one/

Zoe is a current MPhil student on the children’s literature course. She enjoys reading and writing stories.

This child has taught me a lesson tonight! He knew better to cast aside the tangling web of cause and effects which has imprisoned mortal beings, and to see things as they truly are. He is the creator, he can give life to all. The child is the master in the Kingdom of Art. Aye, I must learn from him! (Inspirations from the child, 1926)[2]

Feng Zikai is not the only Chinese author to have gained inspirations from children. Bing Xin, often considered one of the pioneers of Chinese children’s literature, wrote letters to children when she studying in the United States, which was later published as Letters to My Little Readers. In those letters, she rhapsodized about her love for children, expressing her pride to have been a child, and to remain one still. She addressed children in a tone of near-worship, as she effusively wrote:

[…] Pray think of me, your loving and loyal friend from afar, who, alone in this miserable weather, will not have the good fortune to enjoy the sweet pleasures of family reunions. If you should think of me, please offer me your innocent and caring wishes, which should already grant me with infinite happiness and comfort. And pray forgive me if I do not manage to correspond with you regularly, for I would never dream of writing to you with the heavy heart of an adult, and should only take up my pen when my heart is filled again by the truth and simplicity of childhood. Therefore, I sincerely ask you to understand my plight. […] I am afraid I have to stop here, my dear little readers. I am overwhelmed by inexplicable emotions right now, and I feel extremely privileged to make your acquaintance. (Bing Xin, 25 July 1923)[3].

Both Bing Xin and Feng Zikai’s works represent a view of childhood that has begun to emerge in China after the May Fourth Movement. They were one of the first authors to initiate a recognition of the idea of childhood, and the need to produce works specifically for children. Since then, many scholars and literary critics have also started to grapple with the complex ideas of ‘the child’ and ‘children’s literature’, which is why many people see the May Fourth Movement as the beginning of modern Chinese children’s literature.

Despite the flourishing development of children’s literature in China since the 1920s, few critical works on this topic have been published. Farquhar’s influential 1999 study seemed to be first and one of the most detailed survey to date, tracing the literature written for children in China from 1919 to 1976. Later critics like Lijun Bi, Kate Foster, Dorothea Scott and Xu Xu contributed new insights into how children’s texts were constructed in specific time periods in China, and how children and childhood is perceived in ancient and popular Chinese literature. In 2006, Bookbird created a special issue for Chinese children’s literature[4], its contents ranging from historical overviews to vibrant discussions on the advent of children’s science fiction and the future of Chinese children’s publishing.

As a student who is just getting to know children’s literature as an academic discipline, I am constantly reminded of how much I still don’t know about this dynamic field, so I hesitate to make any claims that might seem arbitrary. While I wish to avoid making overarching assumptions, I find it hard not to notice the gap between Chinese children’s literature (scholarship) and that of the West. The word ‘gap’ is by no means used in a pejorative sense—it denotes instead a lack of communication and contact. Even when national and international, global and local boundaries have become increasingly porous in this era, Chinese children’s literature and its scholarship stilled remain quite unexplored and unfamiliar to many. And as the development of Chinese children’s literature accelerated since the coming of the 21^st century, it is more difficult to cast newly appeared, hugely diverse texts in a critical light, not to mention sifting through them and translating them for an international audience.

In recent years, however, the gap is gradually closing, as more translations of Chinese children’s texts are being published and received worldwide. For example, British translator Helen Wang introduced many novels and short stories by Chinese children’s author Cao Wen Xuan’s into the English-speaking world. A growing number of picturebooks created by Chinese authors and illustrators have been translated or adapted into English. In the past few years, academic works such as Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature edited by Claudia Nelson and Rebecca Morris brought together children’s literature scholarship from China and the West, examining how and why children’s literature circulates internationally. In Nelson and Morris’s book, for instance, we could see how Chinese and American scholars approach children’s literature differently, as well as demonstrate different emphasis when it comes to formulating critical arguments. As a Chinese student studying children’s literature in the U.K., I feel inspired and encouraged to see exciting ways in which literature, culture and criticism between different countries meet, interact and engage with one another, creating a dialogic space where new forms and ideas are only just waiting to be born.

This is perhaps why I often return to Emer O’ Sullivan’s book on comparative children’s literature. Her book may have been written more than ten years ago, yet many of her observations remain, in my opinion, quite relevant today. While reading, I feel that O’ Sullivan’s comparatist approach gives voice to individual children’s literatures from different cultural areas, and allows for more detailed discussions on issues such as translation, adaptation, mediation and reception across cultural borders and within the international exchange of children’s literature. O’ Sullivan also reminds us to place our analyses in specific contexts, and to avoid taking up theoretical positions and apply them as if they hold universal validity. While some of her arguments may not hold true today, I am deeply moved by the way she not only embraces the multitude national and global forces that shape children’s literature as we know it, but also proves that these forces are worthy of critical attention. O’ Sullivan uses the word ‘compare’ throughout her work, but I believe that the true meaning of comparison is not about setting a text from one culture against a text from another culture, but about creating a means of understanding, interpreting and appreciating the commonalities and differences between these texts. It is about critically evaluating the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘the other’, the familiar and the unfamiliar, domestic and foreign, without indulging in solipsistic worldviews and the comfort of established theoretical grounds. Her comparatist approach may not be perfect, yet it paves the way for a view of children’s literature criticism characterized by communication, diversity and openness.

In fact, O’ Sullivan’s arguments have a profound influence on how I think about the development of children’s literature criticism as a whole. Not only should there be more discussions on the cultural-specific status of children’s literature/views of childhood, there must also be more attempts to combine (or bring in) theories from different linguistic areas and critical traditions, a view O’ Sullivan proposed early on in her book (O’ Sullivan, 2005, p.11). Achieving this goal requires more efforts from translators, who are vital to the dissemination of texts and ideas across languages and cultures, and from scholars, who could potentially enrich their analyses by drawing from theories and critical tools from their own culture.

When I first decided to write this blog post, I was nervous about the prospect of addressing topics as complex and significant as Chinese children’s literature and children’s literature criticism. To cover the breadth and depth of these topics requires not one, but many book-length studies. Later on, I realized that however tentative my discussions may seem, words, voices and ideas remain some of the most powerful tools to bolster communication and diversity in literary, cultural and academic contexts. Words inspire words, voices bring forth voices, ideas breed ideas. Therefore, I feel grateful knowing that, as a student, I am given the chances to learn the critical language that allows me to partake in the making of new words, voices and ideas, and ultimately, to contribute to the larger conversation of children’s literature in my own way.

Key References:

Farquhar, MA (1999). Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. New York: ME Sharpe.

Nelson, C., & Morris, R. (Eds.) (2014). Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

O’Sullivan, E (2005). Comparative Children’s Literature (A. Bell, Trans.). London: Routledge.

Go here for a detailed and entertaining read on Chinese children’s literature. 

[1] Picture retrieved from: http://news.takungpao.com/mainland/topnews/2015-06/3034155.html

[2] My translation; original quote retrieved from: http://news.xinhuanet.com/book/2016-05/31/c_129030098.htm

[3] My translation; original quote retrieved from: http://www.bingxinwang.com/bingxindezuopin/141.html

[4] Bookbird: Special volume on children’s literature from China, Bookbird, vol.44, no.3 (2006).

Michelle Anya Anjirbag is a first year PhD student at the Children’s Literature Centre at Cambridge University.

I don’t remember why it happened, but about a week ago, I ended up sitting on the carpet in my living room while my roommate read to me sections as she browsed the last chapter of a critical text on touch. Now, this has nothing to do with what I think I’m researching, and beyond a mild fascination in everything, I have no basis for wanting to learn about this. However, it did not change the fact that I was on the carpet with a blanket, hugging my knees, and listening, enraptured. There is something that remains absolutely pleasurable – no matter how old we get – in being read to.

I was very lucky; I had a patient mom who filled my early world with books (though I think half the urge to have me reading early was so I would stop pestering her with requests for her to read to me). I remember reading Dr. Seuss books to friends, or to my younger sister who couldn’t get away from me, and Disney picture books to captive audiences of stuffed toys (but we skipped the scary parts of The Fox and the Hound and Bambi, the bears didn’t like those). There was such joy in being able to share the books that I was learning to love with other people, to read them with the voices I thought characters should have, to point out favorite bits of illustration. Reading to other people when young lends one a sense of power, confidence, and pride.

It wasn’t until that I was in fifth grade – so about ten years old – that I learned to appreciate being read to again. My teacher, Mr. Muzer, emphasized using his classroom to build a community where students felt nurtured and cared for. As part of this, he made a point of reading his favorite books to us, chapter by chapter, right before the end of the school day a few days a week. We were in general a rowdy class, but every time the well-worn chapter books came out ­– usually so faded and with bindings so cracked we couldn’t see the covers – we sat at our desks, curled up on backpacks or coats, the spellbound into silence. He read us The Green Book by Jill Patton Walsh, The Enchanted Mountain by Eliza Orne White, and, every once in a while, a short story by O. Henry. He was our teacher, not our parent, but it was an act that communicated to us just how cared for we were. In an education community that pushed us to grow constantly, ever more quickly and independently, at the end of the school day he cherished our childhoods.

The experience stuck with me. Years later, I found myself the one in charge of educating children, and bringing favorite picture books with me to camp in case of a rainy day. Even on a sunny day, sitting with campers in the shade of a big tree where they can feel the grass and the wind, smell the bark, hear the birds and bugs, and reading The Lorax. This wasn’t just with the five year olds, but also with the high schoolers who participated in the counselor-in-training program, and all ages in between; I’d watch good kids with big dreams and heady futures facing them melt away and relax for half an hour. When I lived with extended family for a couple months, I read all of the Roald Dahl books to my younger cousins, and passages from The Wind in the Willows. Every character had his or her own voice – down to each giant and every witch. I have no idea how much they will remember this when they get older, but it was an amazing way to bond with family much younger than I, who I had not been able to spend much time with previously.

Sharing books, the experience of reading to someone else or being read to, sticks with us. We know there is a community building and service aspect; there are plenty of programs that have volunteers read with the chronically ill or with the elderly. But it makes me wonder what we could change about the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we live, if we shared books a little more – not just discussing them, but taking the time to read to each other. I for one, plan to spend a little more time stealing soft chairs in cozy places and reading with others to see me through this degree.

What are your favorite memories of being read to, or reading to others? What made it memorable? Was it the book? The person? The experience? If I gave you a room to read to, what would you choose?

Vera Veldhuizen is a second year PhD at Cambridge, focusing on children’s war literature. She also likes cats, but mainly dogs. And baking.

Are bookish people necessarily tea people? I suppose not, and it is true that there are a few too many days when I run on caffeine fumes (and I fear I’m not the only one). It is a classic image though, the combinating of books (not Kindles!) and cups of freshly made tea, it just feels right.

There is something so incredibly pleasing about the sensations of holding a book in the one hand and a cup of steaming tea in the other, even if it is impossible to find a truly comfortable position for reading. Even aesthetically it is simply pleasing. Maybe it’s because we are all secretly old(school) ladies inside (but then why are drinking tea and reading, especially when combined, gendered ideas to me? A discussion for another time, perhaps). For now let us focus on the feeling, the texture of the page in your one hand, and the warmth from your cup almost but not quite burning your hand in the other, the scent of your tea that has infused almost too long as you lost yourself in your reading, but not yet.

The problem with doing a PhD in literature (I know I make it sound like there is just one, like it isn’t a marathon you run whilst on fire) is that reading becomes work. Sure it is still a fun, interesting and enjoyable activity, but when you start looking at literature in a certain way it becomes increasingly difficult to “switch off” and return to the wide-eyed wonder I so distinctly remember from youth. I once almost set the oven on fire when my mother left me in charge of the bread (silly mistake on her part) while I was reading The Secret Garden. I devoured books in a way I cannot anymore. This is not necessarily a loss, as I have gained a much deeper understanding of and appreciation for the actual art and craft that goes into these books I enjoy so much. It does mean, however, that it does not give me energy in the same way anymore.

Why Vera, you may think, that seems like a bit of a non sequitur. To that I’d say yes, maybe it does seem that way, but stop being so impatient, it’s going somewhere, I swear.

Just reading is not guaranteed to give me pure pleasure anymore. But for some reason, the combination book-and-tea does. Something about it all just relaxes me, even when I am borderline overwhelmed by the PhD insanity. Because even though it is a burning marathon, I do like exercise, and strangely hot tea helps take the heat off of things. So to share with you all I will briefly outline my 4 PhD InsaniTea recommendations. Do mind that I am a bit of a tea purist, so these are all loose leaf teas!

Morning: Earl Grey (Anywhere)

It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s a classic. Except it isn’t actually that simple a tea. In its simplest form it is a black Chinese tea blend with essential oil of bergamot. You can also have it as a green or oolong though, which is very exciting. It’s got quite a bit of caffeine in it too, so it’s good fuel to get you started! And if you’re British or Irish and have no taste, you can let it infuse way too long, get more caffeine from it and let it go completely bitter, and add milk to it to salvage it. If you want to be weird about it, that is.

Afternoon: English Rose (Whittard) 

Oh this one is just beautiful, simply gorgeous. It is just a simple, Chinese black tea to which some genius added rose petals. The result is a tea with an easy drinking body and an incredibly strongly perfumed yet soft to the palate rosy quality to it. I like drinking this in the afternoon because it is the best tea I own for transporting myself away, a form of tea-escapism almost. It’s hard not to imagine myself as a true English Lady with absolutely nothing of consequence to do besides taking down my other socialite enemies, drinking a cup after a particularly successfully pulled off social strategic move (take that, Margaret!). If you don’t have this one you can replace it with a Lady Grey, but I don’t see why you wouldn’t run out and get you some of this.

Late afternoon/evening: Bohea Lapsang Souchong (Jing)

This is an intensely smoky number, and it actually reminds me a lot of a peated whiskey in many ways. It’s warm, intense, and comforting. Think of it as the liquid version of a roaring woodfire in your fireplace on a cold evening. It has this flavour because they dry the tea in a room above a smoldering pinewood fire. The Bohea version is a little bit more nuanced in its smoky pallet because there is more distance between the fire and the drying room (non-Bohea is dried not in a drying room but in baskets right above the fire!), but both will give you a bit of a shock if its your first time. After a long frustrating day this is exactly what I need to give me a kick in the behind and prevent me from falling asleep too soon! Plus you can use Lapsang Souchong as a cooking ingredient to add a lovely smoky flavour to whatever you’re making.

Evening/night time: Milk Oolong (Whittard again, I’m sorry)

Now we are back to relaxing, possibly with a book – if I/you can still be bothered to read at this point. This tea is an Oolong which has been fermented with milk. Because of this it has a creamy, biscuity flavour that is a bit reminiscent of those cheap Marie or Rich Tea biscuits. The scent is very strong and sweet, and to get a similar cookie level you’ll have to let it infuse for at least 5 minutes.  One of the benefits of Oolong teas is that you can use 1 filter bag multiple times, and the flavour stays strong. This one is just so easy to drink, lighter than black tea but a bit heavier than green it’s thick, it’s creamy, it’s floral, and a perfect pairing with any book! This is another one of those escapist teas that just helps me with losing myself in another world like no other.

So there you have it, teas galore!

And as lame as the meme has become, it’s especially true in cases of literature PhDs:

Andy McCormack is an MPhil student on the Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature strand at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. His undergraduate training was in English Literature, and he qualified and worked as an Early Years teacher in schools and in children’s rights and arts organisations before returning to the books.

Listening to interesting people about what interests them is one of the most agreeable ways one can spend one’s time. When these interesting people’s interests intersect with your own, it is doubly stimulating. One of the most exciting elements of living and working in Cambridge is the number of opportunities there are to attend talks and lectures by leading experts in their field: it was a treat to participate in one such opportunity at the beginning of the Easter break, when Margaret Mackey spoke at the Faculty of Education about ‘Moving Experiences: children’s literate lives in a mobile ecology’.

Professor Mackey is well-known to my colleagues studying for the MPhil in Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature at the Faculty, not least because her book One Child Reading (2016) is one of the most beautiful exemplars of the ‘auto-bibliography’: it provided me with a perfect start to my studies in the field of children’s literature (and my work towards submitting ‘essay one’ – an auto-bibliography of my own!). There is always somethings pecial about hearing a thinker whom you greatly admire speak in person, however, and professor Mackey’s talk was all the more insightful and thought-provoking as it offered glimpses of how her research takes shape, changes direction, and finds cohesion in dialogue with her research participants, students, colleagues and crucially, the wider world.

I must hold my hands up and admit to being a hopeless technophobe – I recently swapped my battered old Smartphone (on which I primarily watched music videos and tried to devise new ways of communicating solely via emoji, alethiometer-like, on Whatsapp) for an old Nokia (on which I now primarily play Snake II). I am something of an ostrich, therefore, with my head in the sand with regard to understanding the scandals which seem to break in the news every day: online data harvesting, the commercialisation/politicisation of that data, and ensuing misuse/breaches of privacy. It was educating to consider these crises from the perspectives Professor Makey offered, when she came to describe the ‘surveillance culture’ in which young people today are growing up.

It was very moving to hear Mackey, a professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta, describe the library as a place in which children should be left alone by the librarian: as a place in which children can stretch their wings and choose for themselves. It is interesting, and alarming, to think about how this choice might be changing in the current digital landscape, in which children are ‘recommended’ age and stage ‘appropriate’ texts by programmes which record how they interact with digital texts (which passages they highlight, how long they spend on certain sections) and share that information with teachers, parents, peers, pubilshers, shareholders, and who knows who else. It is also important to think about, in the wake of the real repercussions we read about in the newspapers of our culture of consumption over criticality, and the shift from technology and data sa means of recording and measuring what we do to a means of predicting and influencing us.

Professor Mackey talked about the power of fiction to linger in the reader’s imagination: about its capacity to work as a lens through which we see and interpret the world. Listening to Professor Mackey talk had the same effect on me. A by-product of listening to interesting people about the things that move them can often cause the shifting of your own perspectives on subjects both new and familiar to you: listening to and reflecting on ideas and methods different to my own often helps me to approach my own research in ways that reading books I’ve specifically hunted down for myself sometimes can’t. Professor Mackey talked about how children being allowed to tinker, or play, with texts they’ve discuvered (rather than hunted down, or been ‘recommended’ by a programme) can offer them a means for engaging with the serious work of thinking. Listening, I think, can do the same.

Emma Reay is a first year PhD student. Her research is on video games!

Academic publications and academic lectures are designed for academic audiences. Platforms that follow the TedTalk formula prove that it is perfectly possible to present specialised research to non-specialist audiences, but, generally speaking, the language, format, structure, and price of academic communications do not promote the dissemination of research in The Real World. This sucks. And it especially sucks when you’re attending a two-hour leftist humanities lecture that claims to glorify and individualise the ‘voices of the masses’ and the speaker just cannot leave “ontological paradigms” and “metaleptic discursion” and “hermeneutic reduction” alone. I am a humanities student, but I couldn’t follow this scholar through her jargon jungle to arrive at her point – how could ‘the masses’ that she was hoping to represent access her ideas? This made me think about the ways in which we share knowledge within our own academic field. Academic publications and university lectures series rarely serve those beyond the Ivory Tower – but how effectively do they serve us Tower-Dwellers? Is there something inherently effective about the style and format of traditional academic publishing or can we imagine better ways to communicate with each other?
I’ve been frequently criticised for writing academic papers that are ‘too journalistic’ – as if being chatty, sarcastic, and humorous were somehow antithetical to being rigorous, informed, and compelling. I have a problem with this because I see it as mistakenly equating accessibility with superficiality: firstly, you have to know your subject area pretty well to make decent jokes about it; secondly, a ‘lively’ writing style is no less of a conscious choice and certainly no easier to master than the sterile objectivity of traditional academic prose. I write in this style because I prophetically empathise with the poor academic who may one day need to read my research to inform their own work – I want them to share in my excitement for my subject and not to choke on the dry pellet of my desiccated data.
Of course, not all academic writing is cinnamon-challenge dry (can we start the hashtag #notallacademicwriting please?) but the fact that I notice with surprised delight when a writer has made an effort to make the reading experience palatable tells me it is not the norm. Why are we dragging each other through jargon jungles? Jargon is supposed to be a linguistic short-cut so that the in-group can communicate ideas as quickly as possible: your seven-syllabled wordjaculate is the scenic route, but the scenery is really bleak and depressing. If your research is solid and your argument is strong, you shouldn’t need to hide behind the passive voice and a latinate metalanguage. Every time I see the word ‘ontology’ I read ‘onanism’, which is a fancy word for masturbation. I am not alone in this. A highly-respected academic told me that whenever she sees the word ‘hermeneutics’ she pictures neutered hermits. Right now I’m visualising castrated ascetics wanking. I hope you’re happy.

Stylistic affectations are sometimes carried over into lectures, conference papers, and symposia too, but what is worse is the format of these events. No matter how clever, how disciplined, or how interested you are in the subject – eight hours of back-to-back academic talks is torturous. I can concentrate for approximately seventeen-and-a-half minutes before my inner-entertainment system obtrudes. A translucent stage curtain is drawn between my mind and the lecturer and then a cabaret of shopping lists, half-brewed puns, and hypothetical conversations compete for my attention. My note-taking deteriorates from orderly bullet points to wildly-detailed doodles (I tend to draw recurrent circle patterns, which according to psychoanalytic personality testing means I make great lasagne). We need to do better than this. I’m not saying we need fireworks (although, that would be a fun alternative to coffee breaks), but do we need to think beyond slides on an interactive whiteboard.

To end on a lighter note, at a recent symposium at the faculty on the theme of Intergenerational Solidarity, the head of the department gave the final keynote at the end of the day. She made me snort-cackle. You would not think that someone could coax more than ‘politely glazed’ from me after a full day of papers and panel discussions, and yet this professor had me gripped for the whole hour. Why? Because she used wry humour, she told stories, she was polemical, and she was not afraid to communicate her research through the lens of her personality.

Vera Veldhuizen is a second year PhD (which terrifyingly means that she should know what she’s doing by now). Her research is on cognitive approaches to children’s war literature.

Last week I went to San Francisco to present a paper at ALA, a massive yearly conference by the American Literature Association. Although my work is not on American literature specifically, I do draw from it and I figured it would be a good idea to a) gather more knowledge on the American side of my research, and b) get to know new people from the other side of the pond. Also if I’m honest, c) I am constantly worried (a defining feature of mine which my supervisor both finds amusing and concerning) that I am not doing enough, and I grasp any opportunity to present a paper with both hands. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a wasted presentation: even if the talk is absolutely horrible and nobody understands what you are saying, it’s all practice – and in academia practice makes, well, not perfect but at least better.

I must admit I did not know anything about ALA, and the final programme was only made available shortly before. It was then, dear reader, that I found out that not only was this a general (American) literature conference – my panel was the only one on children’s literature (and affect)! This meant that through this experience, I was able to learn a couple of things about both general literature conferences – as I have only ever been to children’s literature ones – and the place of children’s literature presentations in these general literature conferences.

The thing I love most about the children’s literature community is the friendliness. True, not everyone is wonderful, and yes, conferences are tiring, so towards the end we’re all more or less running on empty. It’s not that people were unfriendly at ALA at all. However, a major difference between previous conferences I’ve attended and this one that I noticed immediately upon reading the programme, and with some shock, was that it was back to back parallel panel sessions, with no breaks planned in between. Not for refreshments. Not for networking. Not for lunch. This may very well only be the case for this conference, I cannot know, but it seems unthinkable for children’s literature scholars to be willing to go through with that kind of Spartan scheduling.
And then I noticed that, and this is something that my supervisor would absolutely love, Powerpoint presentations were very rare. Where Powerpoints, be they long or short, are definitely the norm at children’s lit events I have been to, this event featured close to none, which really forced and challenged concentration during presentations.

My panel was planned in one of the largest rooms, at 4pm on a Friday, with 10 other panels on at the same time. There were not many people there. That said, my fellow presenters were classically lovely, had interesting insights into narrative empathy, of course knew the same people as I did, and our talks were well received by those who were there. There were some talks on other panels that drew from children’s literature also, but interestingly did not put them in the context of children’s literature. Instead, they analysed and placed them in the context of American “adult” literature. This was bemusing to me. It was also interesting to see such children’s literature papers presented as a part of general literature panels, when the opposite is difficult to imagine. This is not to say that I have a hands-off attitude towards “adult” literature scholars who have an interest in children’s literature – far from it! I firmly believe that although children’s literature is a field on its own rights, it is also a definite part of literary studies in general. There are most definitely transferable skills in this regard, and mixing the fields can give rise to fruitful and challenging debates. But just imagine how wonderful it would be to see more children’s literature panels at such conferences, or to see “adult” literature scholars discussing children’s texts draw from children’s literature scholarship (which is so plentiful and vibrant)!

From this trip I have gathered (besides jetlag) an insight into the place children’s literature scholarship can have at a general literature conference, or did at least in this one. There seems to be a divide between general and children’s literature, and I think crossing it would prove to be inspiring for both sides.

Michelle Anya Anjirbag is a first year PhD student at the Children’s Literature Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

It took a better part of the first year of the PhD for me to work up the courage to start presenting my research, but I finally ripped off the Band-aid (TM) and gave my first full presentation at the Reading YA Fiction conference hosted by the Centre of Contemporary Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham

(Full disclosure: I have presented academic work previously, once in an completely overwhelming massive US regional conference while floating about between academic programs as an independent scholar trying desperately to maintain my legitimacy, and once in a five minute presentation on the subject of intergenerational solidarity in the context of my own research here at the university, which I found terrifying anyways for many reasons).

The conference itself was fascinating, with lively panels that explored topics from violence and empathy in stories featuring child murderers, to a look at the carnivalesque and the paranormal in relation to queer identities in YA fiction. The discussions probed subjects such as the use of the term “diverse” and what we mean by it, and what it means when it is commercialized, and even, how do we classify “YA literature” – is it dependent on the age of the intended audience? The age of the protagonist? The plot structure, as keynote Professor Maria Nikolajeva suggests? – and is it something new? Personally, though I recognize that in Anglo-centric fiction YA has witnessed a bit of an explosion over the past decade or so, I also recognize that this kind of fiction has been written in other languages and in other parts of the world since about the 1960s, and would problematize the assertion that “YA fiction” is some brand-new phenomenon; such a stance requires an ethnocentric and linguistically-centralized view of literature to be true rather than a transcultural one, but that is a discussion that might need to wait for another blog post...

Even more important than the information garnered through being present, for me, was the opportunity to test what I thought I knew about myself and my ability to speak coherently in front of a group of my peers. Learning to present research is just as important for apprentice-academics as learning to write chapters, or, dare I mention it, the PhD itself. And while I theoretically knew this going into this conference, I didn’t realize how shaky and underqualified I would feel in that room. And granted, not everyone will feel that way; different people are just more comfortable at different kinds of public speaking – and some people hate it altogether, which is fine, too. But when it is something that will be part of one’s job, indefinitely, it cannot be avoided just because it is disliked, or discomfiting. With that in mind, here are three lessons I learned that I will keep in mind for the next conference:

Go Short

I had, of course, timed everything out and thought I had given myself a little extra wiggle room. However, I underestimated how much I tend to ad lib, filling in all of the extra information that I had originally taken out. Two alternatives; control the nervous babble (probably unlikely without practice), or maybe plan on shortening my actual paper in order to give myself time to adjust and respond to the papers I had heard prior to mine. Also, though I had read through the paper many times, I didn’t remember to actually practice it with the PowerPoint, which, combined with the ad-libbing affected my use of time and the smoothness of the presentation.

A Conference Paper is not A Dissertation

It should go without saying, but there we are. As much as we all have a lot of amazing thoughts about all the things that we are interested in, we cannot actually fit them into a 20-minute talk. A complete, single point with multiple examples is possibly stronger than a complex point. I need to remember that while the logic makes sense to me, not everyone has been immersed in my topic to the extent I am.

Body Fuel is Brain Fuel
I mentioned that academic public speaking makes me nervous. Well, so does travel. As a result, I was simultaneously wired and exhausted heading to Birmingham. What makes exhaustion and nerves even better? Not being hungry when you’re nervous. The result? Five cups of coffee, a small plate of potato salad before speaking. It’s really not a recipe for success. The jittering was out of control; academic brains can’t work without food any more than athletes‘ bodies can. Eat breakfast. And lunch. Or by the time the keynote comes around, you’re going to not be able to take the intelligent notes or ask the intelligent questions that you want to.

This is far from a comprehensive guide to surviving conferences; just a few thoughts about what I would do the next time around based on the this first experience.

Nic Hilton is a first year PhD candidate at the Children’s Literature Research Centre at the University of Cambridge studying growth and maturation in the novels of Patrick Ness, while Madeleine Hunter is a second year PhD candidate studying convergence in twenty-first century children’s media. They have very different feelings on the childist turn. 

On May 30, 2018 the Cambridge Children’s Literature Research Centre was proud to host Dr. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and her seminar on “The Childist Turn in Children’s Literature Studies”, a follow-on from the centre’s recent International Symposium on Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Culture. This symposium was a joint venture with Anglia Ruskin University, where Deszcz-Tryhubczak is the current Marie Sklodowska-Curie visiting fellow. Both the symposium and the seminar spoke to paradigm shifts currently taking place within the field of children’s literature research and so we’ve taken the opportunity to consider what we’ve learned and debate our emerging childist turn in the context of this engaging and entertaining presentation.

Liberation – Nic Hilton

Collaboration and Liberation. These are the two words that stood out to me when Deszcz-Tryhubczak was explaining her current research project: ChildAct – Shaping a Preferable Future: Children Reading, Thinking and Talking about Alternative Communities and Times. The project involves a participatory research approach to the study of literary utopias and how adult and children inhabit, share and imagine common spaces, and is part of a larger paradigm shift happening in our field where we are becoming more metacritical of our own methodologies, particularly when it comes to empirical research. We are becoming more aware of how we can conduct research with the children we want to study, allowing the research to provide a more encompassing way of viewing the subject of inquiry by performing a convergence of the perspectives of the researcher and the children with whom she is working. ‘Working with’ is the key to this type of research, and when it is carried out successfully it can allow the co-researchers the opportunity to question and challenge established forms of interpretation.

This type of research – as well as having children being the co-creators of it – can seem very overwhelming but just listening to Deszcz-Tryhubczak really illuminated just how creative this type of research can potentially be. Collaborative knowledge production with children creates a dynamic community that is always emergent. The really exciting aspect of participatory research comes from no longer being the organising agent of the sessions. You could see the joy in letting go of what happens in Justyna’s description of her own “becoming the smog” in Un-Lun-Dun, as directed by the children. What came across most forcefully from Justyna’s description of her own experience was how extremely liberating it was to see what would happen and what could come from allowing children to take responsibility for their own input into the research. In letting go, genuine collaboration between adult and child can unfold, allowing spontaneous relationships with the children to form and thus allowing for new and creative insights into what children do with the texts we offer them.

Overall, participatory research is about belonging – creating common spaces where young people and adult readers can collaborate towards a better understanding, whether that be of their perspectives and priorities of the world and environment around them or on the more specific topics of the research being carried out. It is where research is focused on action, experimentation, and community building. However, this research is an incredibly demanding process and one that constantly evolves as the co-researchers begin to interact and develop in their understanding. The mutual learning that can take place within this type of research is not only beneficial to the adult research but also enables the child participant to gain skills that will enable them to interpret and engage with the world around them. The challenge for the researcher lies in how a researcher performs their engagement with the children that they are studying, whilst also studying them.

Burden – Madeleine Hunter

While listening to Deszcz-Tryhubczak discuss her foray into the world of child-led research, there was one word in particular that she used that has stuck in my head and that I feel captures the contradictions and complexities that are innate in our field’s current paradigm shift: burden. Deszcz-Tryhubczak used the word in relation to her discussion of how she actually went about organising and structuring her research, stressing that it was important that the children with whom she was working were not overly burdened with too much responsibility.

What does it mean to worry about the child’s burden? It was, in many ways a recurrent theme of Deszcz-Tryhubczak’s talk, especially given the nature of her current research project on literary utopias and adult and child co-imaginings of possible alternative worlds. The current generation was even at one point referred to as the “janitorial generation” – a term which was new to me and that refers to the hopes, responsibilities and obligations that we have already invested the children of today in regards to “cleaning up” (get it?) our worst excesses.

And yet, while this may indeed be their burden, the asymmetry of power between adult and child that child-led research sets out to disrupt and thus critique nevertheless persists, placing some significant obstacles between children and their attempts to manage this burden in the present. Deszcz-Tryhubczak revealed to us how a host of economic, industrial and political realities intruded on attempts by her child collaborators to address problems within their community, and the myriad conversations between herself, teachers and parents that unfolded over the children’s heads.

In child-led research the child is considered to own the research – what does this mean in practice? For Deszcz-Tryhubczak, it means that presentations from the children are played at conferences where the research project is presented and that all the participating children and their teachers are listed as authors in publications. Even though this works to the detriment of Deszcz-Tryhubczak and her academic collaborators and the scoring of their own research output, it is a burden Deszcz-Tryhubczak proudly bears and serves as a powerful example of exactly the kind of respectful and reciprocal interaction that she advocated; an act of mutual appropriation in pursuit of intergenerational cohesion.

And yet, if they own it, does that mean the children can decide how they want the research the published? Do they choose the journals and the conferences in which it will be presented? And what if they were to decide they did not want the results published at all? Such an event would indeed be an assertion of intergenerational interdependence, but one that would spell career disaster for the researchers involved and would do so because of a host of economic and industrial factors related to how academic research is funded and assessed – all of which are veiled from the children who “own” the said research.

In light of this, I maintain a scepticism about how “mutual” the mutual appropriation at the heart of the childist turn truly is. In our attempts to empower the child as a subject in our discussions of our subject, we cannot side-step the fact that these discussions unfold at our instigation, our discretion, and on our terms. After all, who is it that decides the child should be studied?

Anna Purkiss is a first year PhD student at the Children’s Literature Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Her empirical research looks at young readers’ responses to the representation of disability in contemporary children’s fiction.

On June 6, 2018, we were pleased to welcome Dr. Shalini Vohra (Sheffield Hallam University), who talked to us about her research on autism in children’s fiction. I was particularly looking forward to this as my own research has several overlaps with Vohra’s, and I was fortunate to have an excellent discussion with her beforehand.

Vohra’s seminar started by signalling that anyone was welcome to stand, lie down or walk around; an inclusive note, given that the such events usually involve long periods of sitting down, which can be problematic for people with various kinds of disabilities. After an introduction which demonstrated the importance of authentic representations of disability and tackled the misconception that autistic children do not like fiction, she argued that lots of different autistic characters are needed to be able to represent autism properly and encourage understanding (which is different to knowledge). In doing so, she raised the interesting point that Mark Haddon’s (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time is used as a teacher education text during teacher training and that it has created and perpetuated stereotypes about autism. As she put it, role models are important but not if this makes an autistic child think that, like Christopher Boone, they should be brilliant at mathematics. This relates to the common trope of the ‘supercrip’ found in many portrayals of disability, which can have negative consequences for identity and self-esteem in young disabled readers who cannot match such characters’ extraordinary achievements.

Much of Vohra’s talk focused on her project developing from a session she ran at the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences, where she brought together an author, illustrator, publisher, school teachers, academics, parents and children with autism to discuss the question, ‘how is autism portrayed in children’s fiction?’. One of her key recommendations from this was the importance of collaborative writing in enabling the autistic voice to be included. This requires inclusive approaches which recognise that young people with autism are ‘experts by experience’ (Satchwell & Davidge, 2018) and move the focus from research on participants to research with them.

Here, Vohra concentrated on the collaborative writing process behind M is for Autism (2015) and its sequel, M in the Middle (2016), both of which I would highly recommend. These were written and illustrated by 72 autistic girls at Limpsfield Grange School, a residential and day secondary school for girls with communication and interaction difficulties, with the help of their creative writing tutor, Vicky Martin and sponsored by Autism Accreditation. The writing process was facilitated through drama and creative writing workshops to elicit the experiences of an autistic girl in a mainstream school setting (which the co-authors had experience of prior to starting at Limpsfield Grange). Vohra highlighted the importance of Martin listening to the girls and believing them, which relates to the principles of inclusive research. The subsequent texts were heavily edited by the girls, with some sections often verbatim, and she emphasised that it was in these editing sessions that the books gained their authenticity.

Vohra then took us through twelve key qualities of autism found in the M books, ranging from anxiety to identity formation through books and TV. I was particularly interested in the aspect of being a human with emotions, as people with autism are often depicted as being aloof and disengaged, but M is shown as feeling guilt and not wanting to let others down. Vohra also argued autism is often portrayed as a deficit but some ‘undesirable’ traits are actually positives, such as honesty, which can be mistaken for rudeness, as is shown several times in M is for Autism.  Relating to Vohra’s earlier assertion that many different characters with autism are needed for understanding, one of the final categories she explored was that every autistic individual is different. She explained that the girls didn’t want readers to think that every autistic girl is like M, which is why they introduced the character of Skye in M in the Middle.

We finished with a lively round of questions and discussions, ranging from the effect of collaborative writing on literary quality to whether genre is an important factor in representations of autism in literature. Vohra’s talk has certainly made me think about the role collaborative writing has to play in the representation of disability in children’s fiction, particularly when considering the #ownvoices movement. It has also left me considering the meaning of authenticity and its significance in portrayals of disability. These are important reflections for my own research and indeed, the many opportunities here at the Children’s Literature Research Centre to engage with scholars and peers whose research is related to my own to varying degrees constantly stimulates my thinking and helps me to develop my research project for the better.

For the article that led to Dr Vohra’s talk here at the Children’s Literature Research Centre, please see: https://theconversation.com/why-there-need-to-be-more-autistic-characters-in-childrens-books-90054

References

Haddon, M. (2003). The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. London: Jonathan Cape.

Satchwell, C., & Davidge, G. (2018). The Mismeasure of a Young Man: An Alternative Reading of Autism Through a Co-constructed Fictional Story. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1-16.

The Students of Limpsfield Grange School., & Martin,V. (2015). M is for Autism. London: Jessica Kingsley.

The Students of Limpsfield Grange School., & Martin,V. (2016). M in the Middle. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Madeleine Hunter is a second year PhD candidate studying media convergence and recombination in twenty-first century children’s media. She studies film, television, comics, toys and of course books, as well as how they all interact in the contemporary media environment. She is very tired. 

In many ways, to be an academic in the field of children’s literature is to be betwixt and between. We occupy an interesting position in the larger constellation of academia – are we educationalists or are we literary critics? Do we belong in the English Department or are we perhaps better placed elsewhere? What should be the object of our study – the book or the child? And should we just be focused on books or do other media produced for children fall within our purview?

Betweeness is a fundamental condition of our existence here at the University of Cambridge. We are, after all, a research centre populated primarily by literary critics housed in an Education Faculty – subjects of both and neither discipline – whose research reflects the increasingly mutable and malleable nature of children’s literature. We have scholars working on film, on animation, on videogames and on toys; we have literary geographers, post-humanists and eco-critics; narratologists, new materialists, adaptation theorists and critical race theorists. From the outside we may seem like a niche discipline – but we contain multitudes.

Our multiplicity is our necessity. Dedicated children’s literature programs such as ours are few and far between, eclectically dispersed across English, Education, Library Sciences, Sociology and who-knows-what-else faculties. Departments dedicated to other media forms addressed to children – film, television, video games, comics – are non-existent. We are scholars of a subject that doesn’t fit in any one particular place, and so we need to market ourselves as capable of inhabiting the multiple academic spaces upon which our research increasingly touches.

All of which brings us to the subject of interdisciplinarity: what does mean to approach research from an interdisciplinary perspective and how does one perform interdisciplinarity? These questions have been rolling around in the back of my head for a while now, inspired by a graduate symposium last October and brought more sharply into focus by working on a chapter on children’s television in the context of the digital (and also by a brief but very insightful conversation with our own Dr. Zoe Jaques – my go-to for post-PhD career advice). While it may have the ring of the industry buzzword about it, interdisciplinarity as a concept is really quite straight forward; all it means is that your research draws on work from a host of different critical and theoretical traditions. In my case, it’s children’s literary studies, intermediality and cultural memory (speaking very broadly); for others, it’s cognitive narratology and feminist literary theory; ecocriticism and embodiment; remix studies and new materialism (okay, that one’s me too – ask me about LEGO!). Defining interdisciplinarity, at least in a broad sense, is fairly simple; it’s the execution that’s the challenge.

The challenge is not so much holding the knowledge of all of these disparate fields in your head – that’s tricky too, but I like to think the feeling of knowledge overload is how I know I’m doing my job right. It’s finding ways to weave together your otherwise disparate threads into something that is intelligible to those in your field. When you enter a discipline you enter a dialogue, and when you enter a dialogue you enter a tradition. That tradition will define what constitutes common knowledge in your field and what will constitute a new approach or new information. At a more granular level, it will also define terminology – is what you study a text or a media object? What is the relationship between form and content and are these words that your intended audience will be comfortable with, or is even thinking in those terms heresy?

My meditations on this subject begun last year, in response to being told during a bilateral graduate symposium on intermediality and multimodality that the language I was using was not truly interdisciplinary. It was a criticism that manifested several times throughout the day in relation to several different papers, and while I understood the basis of the criticism I also couldn’t agree with it primarily because it spoke to a very different vision of what it means to be interdisciplinary, one that seemed to require that I gave up the language of my own field in favour of embracing one “neutral” language. No such thing exists, and even if it did, that would not make those who practiced it interdisciplinary; it would just make them a new discipline. Instead, I prefer to think of my task as finding ways to accommodate new concepts into the language of my own field – my disciplinary home, to borrow a phrase from an academic at my last institution. That means understanding your field, knowing its traditions and respecting them.

We are all participating in an ongoing dialogue, and participating means engaging and engaging requires a shared language. Otherwise, who are you talking to?

Maya Zakrzewska-Pim is a second year PhD candidate studying twenty-first century popular culture in adaptations of Charles Dickens’s novels for children and young adults.

Cambridge in summer is a very different place than during term time. True, the swarms of tourists forcing you to make dangerous bike maneuvers are still here – in even greater numbers – but without undergraduates, colleges become a lot emptier and quieter. The life of a PhD student (at least in the humanities) is quite solitary at the best of times – in summer, it becomes even more so. In an effort to combat that, we continue with our children’s literature reading group over the break, which provides a fantastic opportunity not just to stay on top of new publications in our field, but also for basic human contact with colleagues.

On June 27, we decided to fight the hot weather with a Batman version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Batman – the solitary millionaire – is, obviously, Scrooge. Or is it so obvious? The graphic novel does a great job in featuring the Joker in just the right moments to make you wonder who Scrooge is. The Joker’s presence haunts the text throughout – the villain that Batman is chasing, and the employer who makes the life of this iteration’s Bob Cratchit hell. Some of us wondered whether the narrator, whose informal voice is represented by a typography strongly recalling Comic Sans, might even be the Joker himself.

Instead of the Joker, however, we find it is Bob telling the story to his Tiny Tim. The fact that this story is told brings the adaptation closer to Dickens – he is, after all, so strongly linked with performativity, his novels would have been read aloud by whole families when they were first published in their serialized form, and the association of A Christmas Carol with the festive season effortlessly evokes the idea of sharing tales by the fireside.

Bob’s relationship with the Joker, however, puts in to question his ‘goodness’. In Dickens’s novel, we have no doubt that he is one of the good guys, but in this graphic novel the boundary between good and evil is blurred throughout. Batman is not the only one who undergoes a change, from something like a villain to something like a hero. Bob himself goes from doing the Joker’s bidding to helping Batman in stopping him. I say “something like”, because what is emphasized here are the choices that people make – good and bad ones, which make us neither all good or all bad, but simply human. Both Batman (despite being a superhero) and Bob are, at the end of the day, a mix of both extremes.

The illustrations evoke a modern American city, with a dose of Victorian architecture thrown in for good measure, merging art deco with art nouveau, and presenting everything in an atmospheric and striking play of light and shadow. The ghost of Christmas Past is here represented by Catwoman, Superman plays the role of the ghost of Christmas Present with an angelic, fiery light surrounding his frame – and it all begins with Robin as Marley kicking off the hauntings. Robin’s appearance, however, is only reported to the reader, which I feel is a particularly disappointing missed opportunity, not just because of the dynamic between Batman and Robin(s), but because it is such an evocative scene in Dickens’s tale.

While the graphic novel supplies plenty of topics for discussion for readers familiar with Batman and/or A Christmas Carol, it is a confusing and not quite fulfilling text for anyone unfamiliar with either of these narratives. Much of our conversation centered around what we knew about the texts adapted, and sharing this knowledge in order to appreciate this text better. While this is a defining aspect of all adaptations, (personally) I find those which also work effortlessly as independent texts to be the most interesting.

The graphic novel’s conclusion reveals Bob asking Tim (and the reader): “What’s the moral of the story?”. It seems to be a simple enough question, but especially for children’s literature scholars, it brings with it a complicated array of arguments about didacticism and children’s literature. The implication that there must be a moral also seems at odds with the nuanced representation of human nature throughout the narrative, which instead of asking for a single conclusive response, highlights the complex process of reasoning which lies behind people making the decisions that they do.

“That’s how it starts, sir. The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men…cruel.”

Alfred Pennyworth

Katy Day just passed her PhD viva here at Cambridge, and is putting off finishing her minor corrections by writing this blog post. You may remember her as the blog czar from a couple years ago; then again, you might not.

I feel very connected to the Cambridge Symposia on Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature—I think I’m the only person, besides, of course, our chair Maria Nikolajeva*, who can claim that they’ve been to all four of them. The first two years I presented, last year I organized, and this year I chaired a panel, so I’ve got a wide perspective on how this conference has evolved—much like cognitive narratology itself.

A long, long time ago (in 2014), in a classroom far, far away (from where the symposium is now held), the first Cambridge Symposium on Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature happened. Of course, we didn’t call it the first one at the time—we just called it a symposium. I was a little baby scholar who was in the throes of writing my master’s thesis. I was enamored with cognitive narratology (though I called it cognitive poetics then), and was using theory of mind in my master’s thesis; I was awestruck meeting these eminent academics, whose names I was citing over and over again. Roberta Seelinger Trites (who gave the keynote), Kimberley Reynolds, Peter Hunt, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer—the list goes on. Everyone was kind and welcoming, even if at that first symposium not everyone was completely buying into this whole cognitive approach to literature thing.

Four years later, and while there are still cognitive skeptics, cognitive narratology is much more accepted as a theoretical approach to children’s literature. To shamelessly steal from my thesis, cognitive narratology studies the idea that the brain affects how we read fiction, and the fiction we read changes our brains. It merges the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and literature to create “a cross-disciplinary approach to reading” (Nikolajeva, 2014a, p.4). Our minds seem to be hardwired for narrative understanding, and when examined cognitively, “fiction emerges as an evolutionary adaptation that recalibrates the mind, sharpens social cognition, and offers multiple benefits” (Oziewicz, 2015, p.54). Fiction provides vicarious experiences of imagined spaces and situations that can help shape our perceptions of the real world, our social others, and the self (Fong, Mullin, and Mar, 2015, p.10).

If you want to study cognitive narratology more, a good place to start is with the person who gave the keynote this year: Lisa Zunshine. It’s almost a requirement to discuss her in your work if you do cognitive narratology. She literally wrote the book Why We Read Fiction (spoiler: it’s to discover stuff about other people, and in turn to learn about yourself). Her talk delved into complex embedded mental states in fiction aimed at children from ages 1-2, 3-7, and 8-12.

If you look at the slide next to Lisa*, you can see an illustration of a person thinking of what a person is thinking about what a person is thinking about what a person is thinking. That is embedded cognition. Complex embedded cognition is when there are three or more mental states under consideration—something Lisa states is not common in our everyday lives, but is common in fiction.

She determined that in for fiction intended for 8-12 year-olds, it’s easy to find three-level embedded cognition, though it does not appear as frequently as it does in “adult” fiction. For example, it can be found in Winnie-the-Pooh when Pooh is trying to look like a rain cloud to trick the bees into letting him steal their honey; the reader thinks that Pooh imagines that the bees will think that he is a rain cloud, and therefore not a threat. In fiction for 3-7 year-olds, there’s usually one complex mental embedment that is repeated throughout the book; for instance, in The Gruffalo, a tiny mouse tricks the big scary Gruffalo into thinking that he is the terrifying one. Thus the reader knows that the mouse thinks that the Gruffalo perceives that the mouse isn’t scary, but the joke is that while the mouse tricks the Gruffalo into thinking that the other animals are scared of the mouse, the reader knows it’s really the Gruffalo that is scary. (You can see where talking about embedded mental states can become confusing—one attendee brought up the Friends episode where Rachel and Phoebe learn about Monica and Chandler’s relationship, but “they don’t know we know they know we know”…and so on.) Lisa concluded her talk with discussing fictional books for 1-2 year-olds, stating that while there weren’t complex mental embeddings, there were representations of mental states; this was somewhat surprising, seeing as neuroscientists have previously stated that theory of mind (the ability to understand that others have mental states) doesn’t develop until around age 3 or 4. But it makes sense when viewed in the context of the latest research, which states that 15-month-olds do indeed show understandings of false-belief; that is, to recognize that others can have beliefs about the world that are divergent from our own.

Basically, her talk was fascinating; unsurprising, seeing as she’s one of the cognitive literary scholars. And here’s the thing—the rest of the talks were fascinating, too! But you know the other thing? Blog posts are meant to be short(ish), and I don’t have the word count to sum up all the great discussions that we had. I do, however, have some pictures, so I’m going to post those and let you get a feel for the symposium that way. And maybe be a little bit jealous that I’ve had the chance to witness the growth of both this symposium and this theoretical field—both of them have knowledgeable, critical, and welcoming proponents, and (getting sappy here) it’s been amazing to see this journey.

 Malin Alkestrand discussing cognitive scripts and aetonormativity in The Cursed Child. Spoiler alert: adult Harry is kind of a jerk.

A slide from Natalia Kucirkova’s presentation about how personalized books may or may not foster empathy in child readers.

 Sarah Mears, co-founder of Empathy Lab, discussed what the organization does and how it helps to foster empathy by, in part, getting children to read fiction.

 A response received from a child participant from Empathy Day—kind of like it’s showing that reading fiction really can help foster empathy…

 It was such a beautiful day in Cambridge that we had lunch outside!

 The panelists from the afternoon session from l-r: Jessica Mason, Chloe Harrison, Marcello Giovanelli, Ben Morgan, and Naomi Rokotniz. Don’t be mad that I didn’t get individual shots of their papers—I was chairing this session! I was distracted!

 The round table discussion at the end of the day was led by Maria Nikolajeva (second from right), and guided by (from l-r) Laura Tosi, Shalini Vohra, and Joe Sutliff Sanders.

*While it is usually a sign of respect to refer to a scholar by their last name, because I have met these people it feels rude to call them “Nikolajeva” or “Zunshine” in a blog post. I therefore refer to them by their first names in this context (though in my thesis I do the opposite).

Anna Purkiss is a first-year PhD student at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge. Her empirical research looks at young readers’ responses to representations of disability in contemporary children’s fiction.

Westgate Gatehouse / Westgate Gardens / Canterbury

Last week, along with two of my fellow PhD students, Vera Veldhuizen and Anna Savoie, I traveled to Canterbury to attend a four-day international conference at the University of Kent: “Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities”. The aim of this interdisciplinary conference was to foster dialogue between the arts, humanities and cognitive sciences, considering how findings from neuroscience can influence our understanding and analysis of literature, art, music, artefacts, dance, drama and film.

In terms of this approach to children’s literature, as Katy Day succinctly explained in her excellent blog post, ‘cognitive narratology studies the idea that the brain affects how we read fiction, and the fiction we read changes our brains’ (Day, 2018, para.3). This was the first conference I have attended that was not focused solely on children’s literature, and it was the biggest that I have participated in so far, with 154 papers across 54 panels from contributors from around the world. As there is no way I can give a full account of all the talks in this blog post, I will share a few personal highlights.

The first was the panel given by Ellen Spolsky (University of Bar-Ilan) and Lisa Zunshine (University of Kentucky) who were (quite rightly!) introduced as two of the most influential scholars in the field. Spolsky’s paper was steeped in complicated theory, but it deftly explored and presented her ideas through an analysis of 16^th century revenge tragedies. She examined how Theory of Mind, ‘our ability to explain people’s behaviour in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires’ (Zunshine, 2006, p.6*), is a description of the brain dealing with uncertainty about things it needs to know at a psychological level. In contrast, predictive processing hypothesis (PPH), which describes how neurological systems work to keep our bodies alive, is working at a neurological level.  On the other hand, social contracts, agreements which enable a community to work efficiently, function at a socio-political level. She argued that all three of these combined prompt us to pay attention to ‘news’ (which includes fiction) so we can act for our own self-preservation.

Meanwhile, Zunshine discussed the fantasy we have that people’s involuntary body language can betray their innermost feelings: embodied transparency. She illustrated this through looking at several paintings (Soap Bubbles by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon-Chardin; Portrait of a Young Man with a Green Book by Giovanni Cariani) and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. I found the idea of sadistic benefactors, who force others into revealing their feelings through body language while sincerely believing they are doing something good, to be particularly interesting. Another fascinating idea is the assumption that when someone is in the audience of a play, they let their guard down because they assume that no-one is watching them. Zunshine concluded by arguing that embodied transparency does not exist in real life (excluding particularly socially impoverished situations), but it’s used significantly in fiction.

Soap Bubbles by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon-Chardin; Portrait of a Young Man with a Green Book by Giovanni Cariani

Of particular interest for my research was a paper given by Rose Turner (Kingston University). She examined how, rather than being a single entity, empathy is in fact a multidimensional skillset. Existing research on the connection between empathy and reading fiction, however, has only looked at a few of these skills. She also explored how reading experiences differ between genre and medium, and argued that it is unlikely that the relationship between fiction and empathy is wholly contingent on the reading process, as non-fiction readers score lower on self-reported empathic traits. Turner’s preliminary findings suggest that different genres are associated with different empathic abilities. Interestingly, comedy was associated with all empathic traits measured, which makes sense, considering the complex nature of comedic narratives. This indicates that both the medium and empathic content are important. I will be very interested to follow the progress of this study and Turner’s research, which made me consider how quantitative studies could support my own qualitative research.

There is so much more I could write about: from a fascinating keynote by Eric Clarke (University of Oxford) on the role of music in encouraging intergroup empathy to my experiences chairing a panel on physical and cognitive artefacts. However, I will conclude with some reflections on the role of children’s literature in this conference.

Over the course of the four days, there were papers on Peter Pan, and the implications of reading consciousness research for child readers, along with the panel in which Vera, Anna and I presented on ‘Opportunities for Empathy in Representations of Conflict and Minorities in Young Adult Fiction’. Although our panel was only attended by our lovely chair and another helper, this can be attributed at least in part to the six other panels taking place at the same time, and to our newness to the field. Everyone I spoke to was very interested in my doctoral research. All of this suggests that the wider field of cognitive approaches is beginning to recognise the value of considering child readers and children’s literature.

Indeed, my experience at this conference is testament to the value of cognitive approaches to children’s literature and the wider cognitive approaches field interacting with each other. Not only did I meet and make valuable connections with scholars in many fascinating areas of study, but the panels I attended and discussions I had have clarified how I will be using cognitive approaches in my own research. Our own 4^th Cambridge Symposium on Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature the next day emphasised this, with highly esteemed scholars, who usually use cognitive poetics to analyse general literature, referring to examples from children’s literature such as The Hunger Games and The Gruffalo in their papers. I very much hope that this crossover and collaboration will continue in the future.

* Zunshine, L. (2006). Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

Madeleine Hunter is a second-year PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge. She studies adaptation and media convergence in twenty-first century children’s media and culture. None of her texts involve mermaids. Yet. 

*Here be Spoilers

I love mermaids.

I always have. I grew up in Australia, so it goes without saying that the sea has always been a big part of my life – whether it’s swimming in the surf down at Barwon Heads and Ocean Grove, navigating the rock pools down at Point Lonsdale, swimming with dolphins off the west coast, snorkeling along the Great Barrier Reef (RIP) or celebrating New Year’s in the savage tranquillity of Diamond Bay.

I was born the same year Disney released their adaptation of The Little Mermaid. I’m old enough to have grown up in the era of the VHS and the video store and I can still remember going in there with my mother to return a copy we’d borrowed only to immediately run around to the children’s section and grab another for the next week. I loved Ariel – to the point that I dyed my hair red and have allowed my life to slowly morph into a living cosplay of the hipster-Ariel meme

I also had my own little copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s text, retold by Deborah Hautzig and illustrated by Darcy May; a book designed to help me ‘step-into-reading’ that I kept reading well into my teens, time again enraptured by Andersen’s sweet, sad story. Needless to say, when Nic Hilton suggested looking at Louise O’Neill’s The Surface Breaks, a recent reimagining of the text, I not only said yes, I scheduled that reading group for my birthday and made sure we would be out on the water for the day.

It took me a very long time to realise what it was about The Little Mermaid that made it so powerful for me. There are myriad readings and discussions of the text that frame the text as a parable of feminine oppression – a tale about where exactly your desire will get you, girls. It’s easy enough to see why: read enough of Andersen’s stories and you’ll notice he has a habit of writing his female characters out of the reproductive order; of making female bodies shrink (Thumbelina);  decompose (The Girl who trod on the Loaf); dissipate (the Marsh King’s Daughter) or evaporate (The Little Mermaid). Andersen may have loved women (and a few men, it must be added) but I don’t think he liked them very much; I still remember having to hold back a snort of laughter when my colleague, Dr. Victoria Tedeschi, gave a talk about Andersen’s women, only to be asked if she thought he might have been a feminist.

No. No he wasn’t.

And the Disney text is seen as following in much the same vein – girl mutilates her body  to win a man’s approval; worse, she gives away her voice, because “it’s she who holds her tongue who gets her man!” and oh, isn’t it interesting how totally okay the prince is with having a silent partner…

This is the point in the conversation at which The Surface Breaks steps onto the stage. O’Neill’s text reads very much as an attempt to grapple with Andersen’s text and its legacy; to confront the figure of the little mermaid and what she has come to embody to so many young women, particularly in the wake of the great Disney diffusion.

The result is a blood-letting.

O’Neill gives us a sea where conformity reigns and where mermaids are seen and not heard – unless it is to sing for the entertainment of others; where an authoritarian Sea King ranks his daughters by how attractive he finds them and jokes about how “if they weren’t his daughters…” O’Neill gives us a prince who is handsome but immature, whose selfishness leads him to hurt and discard the women who love him, and a sea witch who is more akin to a fairy godmother, albeit one who practices a ‘tough love’ approach to wish fulfillment.

For O’Neill, The Little Mermaid is a tale about the loss of the female voice, about suffering in silence. In The Surface Breaks, O’Neill focuses on the violence men do to women and the violence women do to themselves and one another under patriarchy. Men are either date-rapists or enablers whom women are powerless to stop so long as they remain trapped in seemingly unending sexual competition with one another. Every character in this text is a monster of the world’s own making. As O’Neill’s little mermaid, Muirgen, finds herself wondering at the text’s conclusion: “A mermaid or a monster? What is the difference?”

The Surface Breaks views the little mermaid’s decision as a mistake, one born from a tragic inability to understand either the world in which she lives or herself. It’s not a bad reading of Andersen’s text, and there’s certainly many with whom it will resonate. But it’s my reading; it doesn’t capture what for me is most powerful in this text As our own Professor Maria Nikolajeva was at pains to point out to our undergrads this year, the little mermaid’s longing to be a human superseded her encounter with the prince – he is in some senses, a means to an end. And even if he wasn’t, if it truly was a text just about a teenage girl falling hopelessly in love with a boy to the point that she sacrifices everything to be with him, to read that as shallow, to see that as unworthy of critical heft, is to come perilously close to what another colleague of mine back in Melbourne, Dr Athena Bellas, once described to me as girl-shaming: the sustained trend of attacking things that girls like as being dumb and frivolous based on the fact that girls like them. Want an example? Take a look at this 2015 GQ interview with One Direction. You should only need to get as far as “we all know the immense transformative power of a boy band to turn a butter-wouldn’t-melt teenage girl into a rabid, knicker-wetting banshee” to get the general idea…

For me, The Little Mermaid has always been a story about longing, and for more than just the romantic. It is a longing for recognition, for acceptance and to be more than what she is. What the little mermaid so important to me when I was younger and what keeps her so close to my heart even now is that even though she is silent she is not invisible. She is still wanted, still valued, still loved. Even though she’s quiet, she’s still deemed to be good and even desirable company – you can read that as a commentary about male narcissism and female silence if you want, but to a painfully shy little girl and later a teenager with some pretty serious social anxiety, that was everything.

Even though she is silent, the little mermaid remains charming, warm, graceful, beautiful. And it’s not enough. It was never going to be enough and for reasons that actually have very little to do with her. That’s where the tragedy of the story is. She is rejected and unlike so many others would, she does not let that rejection turn to resentment; instead she embraces her fate, not because she is too passive to do otherwise, but because she accepts that every choice leading up to this moment has been her own. This is what she wanted. She didn’t get it, but that doesn’t mean the wanting was foolish or wrong.

The sneaky thing about autonomy is that it includes the right to make bad decisions. The moral of The Surface Breaks seems to be that in an oppressive culture we’re all monsters anyway so why not just lean into it? It’s an understandable moral but it’s one which doesn’t leave much room for autonomy. O’Neill’s mermaid doesn’t escape the good/bad woman dichotomy, she just chooses to occupy the other side – I’m not convinced that’s anymore of a choice. But then, I’m also not convinced that it’s Muirgen – or Gaia, or Grace as she’s also known – who is the actual little mermaid at the heart of the text; it’s her mother. Muirgen’s longing is not for the human world itself but for the mother who disappeared into it after rescuing her own human prince. Muirgen seeks to find this woman so she that she might understand both her world and herself – the purpose of all good fairy tales, really.

Nic Hilton is a first-year PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge studying growth and maturation in the novels of Patrick Ness. No major disasters befell her on the walk…which makes a change.

Vera Veldhuizen is a second-year PhD at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge, researching empathy, ethics, and justice in children’s war literature. Her current coping mechanisms are cooking and baking, cats, rowing, and hard-earned scoops.

Running to the Hills to Escape the Desk

The thought of walking away from your desk can be a terrifying experience for any academic. The guilt of not being near your beloved computer, disconnected from the internet and, worst of all, not being able to just quickly check that one reference to make sure your thinking was clear, can leave you comatose with fear. How can I leave? I didn’t hit my word count yet! I know that I’ve not read enough articles. I simply cannot leave right now. I should be writing! Yes, the thought of running away from your desk can be painful. Very. Painful. But in that process of cutting the invisible academic desk strings there lies liberation. Moving away from the space that confines you is a way of opening up your own research, and whilst that is scary it is something that we as academics need to embrace. It seems glaringly obvious when you think about it: if you’re feeling stifled and restricted then it will inevitably show in your writing.

The same four walls, the blank screen, the pile of ever growing books and journals – they are not going to go away, and yet staying there is just as painful as leaving. So when the CRCLC decided to go to Hadrian’s Wall, it presented us with a simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating opportunity to switch up our perspectives on our research and grab some fresh air while doing it. We were going to blow the cobwebs away and take time to breathe whilst engaging in free academic talk. We were making the decision to look after our wellbeing, and in turn, our research.

Creative and Academic Writing

While academic writing is our jam, when you are still looking at a blank page it can cause untold spiralling. So where do you start?

First, we changed our environment and our expectations of what we thought ‘work’ should look like. Every walking day of the trip had a theme proposed by a different scholar, who would then host a seminar at the end of that day’s walk linked to their respective research interests and expertise. For instance, Nic’s theme was “Time” (which we wittily renamed to “In the Nic of Time”), which not only links well to her own work on maturation and time as a social construct, but is a concept that is also central to most children’s literature research. The idea behind this format was not only to allow Nic to explore her own work through discussion, but also to hear how others would apply the same theories and ideas in their own research. By engaging with one another, our perspectives began to shift and that shift is important. The shackles drop and the research becomes fresh and inviting again. As we were at the wall, the boundaries that we had previously found stifling were expanding. The blank page doesn’t feel as scary as it used to, even if it has not yet been defeated.

Secondly, we turned seminar tasks on their head, finding more ways that we as intrepid explorers of the wall could free our writing. The seminar was not limited to challenging walks and academic conversation: a central part of each seminar was a creative writing task.
Although as academics we are by definition also writers, that does not mean that we are comfortable or skilled at creative writing as well. At first, we were both quite nervous about the creative writing element of the walking seminar – especially because we had to read our writing out loud to everyone else! However, this exercise was arguably the most fruitful and exciting element of the whole experience.

Creative writing can be equal parts scary and fun. Being put on the spot amongst your brilliant peers, having to write something, anything, quickly and out of nowhere and then having to read it out loud is a challenge. If, like us, you are not quite comfortable with creative writing, it might feel like you’re going to present something very silly and that makes no sense at all. Yet it is because it was terrifying that it was so exciting to immediately notice the effects it can have not only on your academic writing, but on your thinking as well. Doing these types of tasks, forcing you to think about something seemingly random and to just write is quite liberating, in two distinctive ways. Firstly, it forces you to think differently about your writing and your ideas than you would in an academic context. As academics and PhD students we have a tendency to get extremely focused on one single thing, which can be limiting for our work and even lead to getting incredibly and frustratingly stuck. The skill of being able to put ideas together is key to both creative and academic writing, and stringing ideas together on the spot is a great way to train that skill and gain confidence while doing it. Secondly, by producing something on the spot this type of task also helps to show you that you can write.

Since we’ve been back home we’ve found it easier to tackle the blank page. At some (or even many) points during the PhD, or any form of academic writing, you will probably hit a wall and feel unable to write a single word. Staring at the empty screen is par for the course and can, at times, feel like its slowly sucking out your soul. On the spot writing, however, be it academic, or creative, fills that empty screen by forcing words onto it. Even though you will probably have to redraft or even delete what you just wrote, it breaks the writer’s block, proving to you that yes, you can write. Discussing your research in a new environment with your colleagues frees your mind and opens up different paths for your approach, showing that you do actually know what you are talking about, and yes, you can write.