Discourses of Home and Homeland in Irish Children's Fiction 1990-2012

In the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children's fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and of unprecedented growth in Irish children's literature. Close readings of selected texts by five award-winning authors are linked to social, intellectual and political changes in the period covered and draw on postcolonial, feminist, cultural and children's literature theory, highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of home and the value of children's literature as a lens through which to view culture and society as well as an imaginative space where young people can engage with complex ideas relevant to their lives and the world in which they live. Examining the works of O. R. Melling, Kate Thompson, Eoin Colfer, Siobhán Parkinson and Siobhan Dowd, Ciara Ní Bhroin argues that Irish children'sliterature changed at this time from being a vehicle that largely promoted hegemonic ideologies of home in post-independence Ireland to a site of resistance to complacent notions of home in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Ciara Ní Bhroin is a founding member and former president of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature. She lectured for many years in English language, literacy and literature at the Marino Institute of Education, an associated college of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. She has published a range of articles and book chapters on children's literature and is co-editor of What Do We Tell the Children? Critical Essays on Children's Literature (2012).

Auteur

Ciara Ní Bhroin is a founding member and former president of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature. She lectured for many years in English language, literacy and literature at the Marino Institute of Education, an associated college of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. She has published a range of articles and book chapters on children's literature and is co-editor of *What Do We Tell the Children? Critical Essays on Children's Literatur*e (2012).

Contenu

CONTENTS

1 Introduction

2 Home Childhood and Children's Literature

Changing Concepts of Home

Home, Homeland and Childhood

Irish Children's Fiction: Home, Homeland and Decolonization

3 Recovery of Origins: Myths of Homeland and Return in the Fantasy Fiction of O.R. Melling

Nostalgia and Essentialism

Mother Ireland and the Female Returnee

Unity and Duality

The Viability of Ireland as Home

4 Continuity and Change: The Tradition / Modernity Dialectic in the Construction of Home in Kate Thompson's The New Policeman and Creature of the Night

Positioning Thompson in an Irish Literary Tradition A Place Called Home

Tradition, Modernity and the Unhomely Mother, Home and Male Subjectivity

5 Internationalization or Globalization? Myth Technology and Mobility in Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl Series

Globalism, Internationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Technology and Power

Mobility and Privilege

Home, Boundedness and Surveillance

6 Inclusions and Exclusions: Debunking Myths of Home and Homelessness in the Fiction of Siobhán Parkinson

Re-visioning the Past

Debunking the Myth of the West as Home

Voices from the Edge

Sameness and Difference

7 Unhomely Secrets in the Work of Siobhan Dowd

Transgressive Females, Home and the Close-Knit Community

Borders, Partition and Male Subjectivity

Myths of Mother(land) and Return

Secrets, Revelations and the Possibility of Home

8: Conclusion

Index