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Delhi at Eleven, a compendium of four short films made with video cameras by eleven-year-old Indian schoolchildren in 2012, is filmed from a child's perspective – literally, in the low positioning of the single camera, and mentally, in the nature of the close attention paid to the details of events and relationships. The films create strikingly individual images of the filmmakers' world and offer sharply observed comments on the restrictions upon subjective agency and well-being in children's lives. The children were given limited training in how to make a film and completed some exercises designed to encourage them to think about the nature of a shot, framing, sequence, order, and structure. They received some mentoring in selecting footage to include and exclude. My discussion here explores the interrelationship of cognitive mapping, social ecology, and cinematic space in these films. These four films offer perspectives on urban livelihoods, marginality, class, gender, kinship, household economy, poverty, and modernity, and are thus particularly informative about how children can map their society.

Adaptation is often a transcoding into a different set of conventions, and here we argue that print to film adaptations introduce and depend upon a bundle of conventions and techniques which are already globalised and hence facilitate cross-cultural understanding more than print media might do. Films for children and young adults seldom reach a cross-cultural audience, but we contend that this is a consequence of uni-directional globalisation rather than any barriers constituted by the films themselves. In an analysis of narrative conventions and cinematic techniques in film adaptations from China, South Korea and Japan we show that cinematic features enable boundary crossing and ensure childhood experiences are intelligible cross-culturally. These features are broadly of two kinds: elements of narrative, especially global scripts, and cinematic techniques of cognitive and technical kinds. Scripts, whether of general types such as a children's film structure or cause-and-effect structure, or thematic types such as the triumph of the underdog, are widely recognisable. We examine conceptual metaphors, which are intrinsic to human cognition, the visual strategy of emotional mirroring, and film as a metonymic mode which sustains a deeper significance while requiring minimal decoding activity on the part of viewers and promoting mutual understanding between cultures.

The nexus of the conceptual domains of cognitive mapping and social ecology offers a constructive methodology for examining some aspects of Young Adult fiction, and in this article I explore what I see as the possibilities of this conjunction. On the one hand, social ecology (also referred to as ecocultural theory or the bioecological model) impacts upon representations of subjectivity within YA fiction, and on the other, the literal and metaphorical interpretations of space and place enabled by cognitive mapping function as a framework to structure discussion of the relationship between ecology and subjectivity. Because mapping is an activity performed both by characters within the text and through narrator–narratee transactions, it has a narrative function that mediates the core social ecology foci of proximal processes, characterisation, ecocultural orientation and the experience of temporality. Taking examples from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, David Almond's The Fire-Eaters and John Green's Paper Towns, the article explores some of the interactions between key cognitive and social processes and the narrative structures within which they are expressed.

Built in 1929, the Western Australian State War Memorial was not the grand structure that many wanted, and its construction was hindered by the resounding failure of two appeals for funds from an a...

Social movements taken up in children's literature since the 1960s have foregrounded the ethical concerns of changing societies in a range of areas that includes environmental and ecological issues. While philosophers align ethical responsibility with a need to be impartial, fiction will routinely violate impartiality because of social and emotional attachments deemed desirable for personal and general well-being. Such attachments are rendered strongly in children's fiction because of the textual dominance of heavy character focalisation in both first person and third person narratives, and thence a basis for reader response analogous to an interpersonal relationship. Questions of ethics, attachment and representation come together in a recent strand, or sub-genre, in environmental literature in which issues in environmental ethics are explored by constructing a parallel between ecoconsciousness and interpersonal human relationships of various types according to the age of the participant characters. A common narrative strategy in such texts is to construct parallel narratives underpinned by a metonymic interrelationship, whereby threatened or damaged nature is matched by threatened or damaged lives. The thematic outcome blends an interweaving of nature and culture with a more pragmatic environmentalism than usually pertains in children's texts.

Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, Australian children's literature responded to a conservative turn epitomised by the Howard government and to new world order imperatives of democracy, the market economy, globalisation, and the IT revolution. These responses are evidenced in the ways that children's fiction speaks to the problematics of representation and cultural identity and to possible outcomes of devastating historical and recent catastrophes. Consequently, Australian children's fiction in recent years has been marked by a dystopian turn. Through an examination of a selection of Australian children's fiction published between 1995 and 2003, this paper interrogates the ways in which hope and warning are reworked in narratives that address notions of memory and forgetting, place and belonging. We argue that these tales serve cautionary purposes, opening the way for social critique, and that they incorporate utopian traces of a transformed vision for a future Australia. The focus te...

Series Editor's Foreword. Preface. 1. Making Boys Appear: The Masculinity of Children's Fiction, Perry Nodelman. 2. Picturing the Male: Representations of Masculinity in Picture Books, Kerry Mallan. 3. "A Page Just Waiting to be Written on": Masculinity Schemata and the Dynamics of Subjective Agency in Junior Fiction, John Stephens. 4. Redeeming Masculinity at the End of the Second Millennium: Narrative Reconfigurations of Masculinity in Children's Fiction, Beverley Pennell. 5. Reframing Masculinity: Female-to-Male Cross-dressing, Victoria Flanagan. 6. Come Lads and Ladettes: Gendering Bodies and Gendering Behaviors, Kimberley Reynolds. 7. Masculinity as Social Semiotic: Identity Politics and Gender in Disney Animated Films, Robyn McCallum. 8. Making the Invisible Visible: Stereotypes of Masculinity in Canonized High School Literature, Ingrid Johnston and Jyoti Mangat. 9. Challenging the Phallic Fantasy in Young Adult Fiction, Kerry Mallan. 10. Queering Hereotopic Spaces: Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy and Peter Wells' Boy Overboard, Beverley Pennell and John Stephens. 11. Trigger Pals: A Case History, Roderick McGillis. 12. Masks and Masculinity in James Barrie's Peter Pan, Monique Chassagnol. 13. Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction: A Comparative Study, Rolf Romoren and John Stephens. Bibliography. Index.

Stephens John. Writing By Children, Writing For Children: Schema Theory, Narrative Discourse and Ideology. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 73, fasc. 3, 1995. Langues et littératures modernes - Moderne taal-en letterkunde. pp. 853-863.

C. S. LEWIS'S judgement on the Assembly of Ladies, that 'what the writer really wants to describe is no inner drama with loyalty as its heroine, but the stir and bustle of an actual court',' has set the pattern for subsequent commentary, which begins with the assumption that the poem is only hampered by its allegorical form.2 In other words, it is felt that the poem's only claim to critical attention lies in the peripheral detail rather than in the central theme. While I do not wish to deny that the poem is generally weak in its use of allegory, I think that the author's purpose would be more adequately represented if critical attention were redirected from the naturalistic detail to the symbolic action. Such a reconsideration is desirable for two reasons. First, critical opinion of the Assembly having remained static since Lewis wrote, there has been perpetuated a misapprehension of what the central theme is: namely, 'the complaints of wronged ladies against their lovers'.3 Secondly, the poem largely fails not only because its has been forced into a contemporary dominant form which ill suits its author's bent, but more particularly because much of its execution is inferior to its intellectual basis, which has consequently received less than merited attention. From the use of a conventional allegorical form the writer derived a structuring complex consisting of three elements-the dream framed by pertinent waking experience; the journey; the assembly -and he seems to know well enough the kind of uses these have. The weakness lies in a failure to interrelate these elements, which results partly from an inability to sustain long stretches of imaginative writing on any level but the naturalistic, and partly from the way a chain of semiarticulated archetypal patterns emerges as the actual shaping agent for the poem. The effect of these patterns is my main concern in this paper. The praise given by Lewis to the opening stanzas was well placed,4 especially if we consider their thematic implications as well as the admirable

Two film retellings of fairy tales from the 1990s exemplify how familiar fairy tales can be reshaped to address major cultural preoccupations. On the one hand, the utopian narrative Ever After affirms neohumanistic values such as deep memory, knowable origins, and teleology in narrative and culture. In contrast, The Grimm Brothers' Snow White is postmodernist and dystopian, hybridizing apocalyptic and Gothic narrative structures and themes, and drawing on modern phenomena such as "the beauty myth," to present characters playing out an old story to an outcome which resists both teleology and closure.

In recent decades, the debate about the role of the reader in the creation of "meaning" in a literary work, if viewed diachronically, has tended to shift from a position in which the "meaning" was seen as inhering in the work itself as object, with the reader as passive recipient, to one in which the reader's subjective response to the unfolding text is the action which is crucial. Hence variability of interpretation is inevitable, since no two readers bring the same range of cultural and experiential associations to the language of a text. While this last point is irrefutable, there has been a tendency lately to ignore the third person in the triad which makes up any reading of, say, a poem - the author. In the New Critical reaction against quasiautobiographical, pseudo-historical approaches to poetry, the text virtually came to obliterate the author and, more recently, the death of the author has been triumphantly proclaimed as the corollary of reader response criticism. Yet a significant contribution to the whole concept of the role of the reader can be made by studying a writer's successive drafts. Unless a poet, for example, can be questioned as to the purpose of his revisions, his reasons for altering the text remain a matter of speculation. On the basis of the alterations themselves, however, in both the specific change and its effect on the larger context - on the altered interactions of diction, syntax, imagery, rhyme and rhythm or shifts of focus in spatial and temporal dimensionssome of the ways the poet works to place constraints upon reader response can be brought out. For any change, no matter how trivial it seems, will influence, both qualitatively and cumulatively, the nuances of "meaning" expressed and affect the manner and extent to which the reader is persuaded to participate in the creation of meaning. Many illuminating examples are to be found in the revisions of Wilfred Owen's poetry and, while we would generally concur with