|EVENT| Being Human Symposium & NCRCL Open Day

We are delighted to share two exciting events at our NCRCL coming up in May 2019. See below for more detail, including how to book your place on each day!

Being Human in YA Literatures

A symposium hosted by the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Roehampton, London.

Friday 17th May 2019
9.30am (for a 10am start) – 4.45 pm

What does it mean to be human? Identity categories such as race, religion, gender, ability, size, and age intersect in definitions of the self, shaping how we construct ourselves and are perceived by others. Humanity is also under scrutiny, as other forms of consciousness help define what we are and what we are not. A growing corpus of young adult narratives across a range of genres and media attempt to engage with the plurality of the human experience. The NCRCL’s symposium will consider how ‘being human’ is explored through YA narratives. It will feature a keynote paper from renowned YA literature critic Dr Alison Waller, and include a plenary from Dr Leah Phillips, founder of YALMCA and co-organiser of Adolescent Identities.

Tickets now available via https://estore.roehampton.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/conferences/being-human

More information on conference speakers and how to get to the University of Roehampton can be found on the Blog.

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NCRCL Open Day

An open day hosted by the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Roehampton, London.

Saturday 18th May 2019
10am – 1pm
Duchesne Building, Ground Floor, Digby Stuart Campus

PROGRAMME

10.00 Registration & refreshments

10.20 Introduction from the NCRCL team

10.30 Research Talk from Dr Karen Williams: ‘‘…an entirely new line’: The Creation and Reception of the Juvenile Christmas Annuals’

11.15 MA Poster Presentations (a chance to talk to current students about their work), refreshments, and meeting the NCRCL team

12.00 Q&A with MA/PhD Children’s Literature Alumni: Isabel MacDonald & Karen Williams

12.45 News from the NCRCL and Student Prizes

1.00 Farewell

Refreshments and cakes will be available to everyone.

NB If you would like to look around the library (and you are not a current student) you will need to sign in with photo ID for a temporary day pass, so please do remember to bring ID with you. There is a café in the library if you need more substantial refreshment than cake and biscuits!

The Open Day is free, but please book your place so that we have numbers for catering. Please contact Julia Noyce in conferencing to confirm your booking: Julia.Noyce@roehampton.ac.uk

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|CFP|4th NCRCL Conference

 In Crusoe’s Footsteps: Robinson Crusoe and the Robinsonade – A Tercentenary Appraisal

NCRCL Conference

Friday, 6^th September 2019

Digby Stuart College, University of Roehampton 

Writing in 1834, the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott observed the following of Daniel Defoe’s most influential novel, Robinson Crusoe: ‘There is hardly an elf so devoid of imagination as not to have supposed for himself a solitary island in which he could act Robinson Crusoe, were it but the corners of the nursery’ (Biographical Memoirs, 279). While Scott’s comment evidently speaks to the pervasiveness of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, it also more explicitly aligns the Robinson Crusoe story with childhood.

NCRCL Blog

This is the home of the NCRCL blog, where you will find news, updates and posts from members of the staff, students and alumni at the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature (NCRCL) at Roehampton University in west London.  You can read more about our popular MA in Children’s Literature which is run on-site and through distance learning, as well as undergraduate teaching in children’s literature in both our English and the Creative Writing departments. Please feel free to comment with questions or thoughts.

Roehampton Readers: After the Fire by Will Hill

Front Cover: After the Fire by Will Hill

Review: After the Fire by Will Hill

By Lesley Smith

After the Fire is a young adult novel which addresses the experience of belonging to an extreme religious cult.

It is loosely based on a real event – the siege of the cult known as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas in 1993. Their leader claimed he was the Messiah figure prophesied in the Bible but government forces felt the cult was a threat as it was known that they were stockpiling firearms, hence the siege which lasted 51 days. Eventually, FBI agents stormed the cult’s compound and after the ensuing battle, 76 people (including 25 children) were found to have died. The government’s handling of the Waco siege (which played out in the national and international media) was heavily criticized.

Will Hill uses this catastrophe as a springboard to explore how and why people might become involved in such a community, and what the psychological effects might be.  He calls his fictional cult the Lord’s Legion and focuses on the experience of one particular individual, Moonbeam, a survivor of the destruction of the Legion’s base. She is described as “strong, vulnerable, complicated, sarcastic and brilliant” and the indoctrination to which she has been subjected is powerfully conveyed:

“Before my mom was Banished, I believed in him, and in the Legion, with all my heart, and part of me misses – will always miss – the certainty that came with that, the power and pride that came with being part of something that was right and True.” (p218)

Hill says his work is “not intended as an attack on anyone’s religious beliefs.” It is “a story about power and corruption, and how charismatic figures can twist faith to serve their own ends.” The leader of the cult in the novel, Father John, certainly wields a lot of power, though his methods of control are often cruel rather than charismatic and it can be hard to see why his followers love him. There is some ambiguity in the presentation of his character – for instance, does he really believe in his own creed?

The structure of the story is highly effective and scaffolds a thrilling and emotive drama. The protagonist is being cared for in a rehabilitation centre and she is interviewed daily by a psychiatrist, Dr Hernandez, who wants to help her and Agent Carlyle from the FBI who has been tasked with finding out what really happened inside the compound. The past, consequently, is filled in for the reader through flashbacks prompted by their questions. At first Moonbeam cannot trust them but her gradual opening up serves to show her beginning to come to terms with what has happened and suspense is created because the reader knows all along that there are terrible things she has not yet revealed. It takes time for her to be able to talk about the events and her feelings, and there are some things that she cannot even bear to think about. Guilt, loyalty and the remains of indoctrination limit her revelations. We can see the barriers in her mind. Some readers may find this a little heavy-handed at times – perhaps there are too many hints at dark secrets:

“But then I think about my mom and Nate and the boxes and the locked door in the basement of the Big House. I think about my Sisters running towards the Governments with rifles in their hands and the five gunshots and what I found and what I did.” (8 things here!)

However, the atmosphere of life in the compound is skilfully portrayed and the whole novel provides a truly immersive and thought-provoking experience. Hill portrays ordinary people and how they might behave in extraordinary circumstances. On p424, Agent Carlyle says of the members of the Legion: “I don’t think they were stupid or vicious or weak. I think they were misled, and I think what happened to them could happen to anybody, given the right set of circumstances.”A key theme is how we can know what is real and who to trust, but ultimately After the Fire is a powerful and superbly well-written story of survival.

|CFP|Tilburg University, the Netherlands

Call for papers: Beyond Boundaries. Authorship and Readership in Life Writing.

A two-day conference held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 24 and 25 October 2019.

In ‘The Limits of Life Writing’ David McCooey (2017) argues that in life-writing studies, the concept of limits or boundaries plays a central role. Since the rise of auto/biography studies in the 1970s and 1980s critical attention has been paid to generic limits and the limits concerning the auto/biographical subject. With respect to the former, discussions have evolved in particular around the boundaries between literary and factual writing, and between verbal, graphic, audio-visual and digital forms of life writing. In regard to the latter, academics since the 1990s have given attention to the expansion of auto/biographical subjects previously marginalized, which has deepened, among other things, the cross-cultural understanding of experience and identity. This expansion of auto/biographical subjects, but also the rise of social media as a medium for life writing have contested the limits of selfhood.

|NEW MONOGRAPH| ‘Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics’ by Alison Waller

Alison Waller is a Senior Lecturer at the NCRCL, University of Roehampton. She specialises in the practice of remembering and rereading childhood fiction, asking how adults negotiate relationships with books from their past.

 

Alison Waller’s excellent new monograph, Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics, is now available!

Click this link to go to Bloomsbury’s purchase page.

Front cover of Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics.

 

You can also hear about Alison’s ideas and her academic journey while writing Rereading Childhood Books on Episode Two of the Critical Attitudes podcast, hosted by Dr Nathan Waddell.

 

 

Roehampton Readers: Wed Wabbit by Lissa Evans

Review: Wed Wabbit by Lissa Evans

By Julie Mills

Wed Wabbit is a fantasy story told with humour, exploring serious themes including grief, anger, dealing with emotions, change, fears, leadership. Positive play and imagination, co-operation and friendship are positive themes. “Know yourself” might be the motto for this is a moral tale.

Image via David Fickling Books

It is a super compulsive read, good for readers of the younger age group (9/10 or younger if read aloud, upwards). An adventure story with a great narrative, it uses mystery, puzzles and the journey quest as plot movers and includes a map of the land of the Wimblies. This is the land into which Fidge and her cousin Graham are hurled, following the near fatal accident to Fidge’s sister Minnie, whose favourite toy Wed Wabbit has recently taken over the idyllic, but stiflingly structured, land where the different coloured Wimblies live. This is a realisation and subversion of Minnie’s favourite story book The Wimbly Woos and a leap into the imaginative world of the pre-schooler.

Fidge soon realises that there is something rotten in the state of Wimbly Woo: “the prettiness seemed painted on. Nasty things were happening here” (p57). She is driven by the need to return Wed Wabbit the toy to her dangerously ill sister, but in the process leads a motley team of life sized toys to liberate the land of Wimblies not only from the tyranny of Wed Wabbit but from previous weak leadership and stereotyped expectations of its citizens.

2019 NCRCL Scholarships – NOW CLOSED

We are pleased to announce that the current round of applications for our annual scholarships in children’s literature is open (studies commencing October 2019).