Victoria Nesfield & Philip Smith 
Representing Childhood and Atrocity 

Atrocity presents a problem to the writer of children’s literature. To represent events of such terrible magnitude and impersonal will as the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, or the Rwandan genocide such that they fit into a three-act structure with a comprehensible moral and a happy ending is to do a disservice to the victims. Yet to confront children with the fact of widescale violence without resolution is to confront them with realities that may be emotionally disturbing and even damaging. Despite these challenges, however, there exists a considerable body of work for and about children that addresses atrocity. To examine the ways in which writers and artists have attempted to address children’s experience of atrocity, this collection brings together original essays by an international group of scholars working in the fields of child studies, children’s literature, comics studies, education, English literature, and Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies. It covers a broad geographical range and includes works by established authors and emerging voices.

Table of Content

List of Illustrations



Introduction


Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith




Part 1: Late Twentieth-Century Genocides



1. Children’s Humanitarian Arts and the Genocide in Darfur: Drawing Loss and Atrocity


Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba



2. Framing the Unframeable:
Deogratias and the Horror of Genocide


Kaitlyn Newman



3. Tracing Trauma: Childhood, Innocence and Memory in Cypriot Children’s Literature since 1974


Maria Chatzianastasi




Part 2: The Holocaust



4. Beyond the Ovens: The Changing Nature of Holocaust Children’s Literature


Barbara Krasner



5. Gendered Behavior in Uri Orlev’s and Kathy Kacer’s Literature about the Holocaust for Children


Rosemary Horowitz



6. A Sonnet of Atrocity: A Consideration of a Poem Written by a Child at the Terezín Concentration Camp


Mary Catherine Mueller




3: Dictatorships



7. Communism for Children: Fiction Mediation and Representations of Past Wrongdoings


Simona Mitroiu



8. The Uses of Allegory to Tell Youth Disappearance and Mortality under Spain’s Dictatorship in Ana María Matute’s 1956
Los niños tontos (
The Foolish Children)


Lora L. Looney



9. Confronting Atrocity Through Geometry: Franco’s First Illustrated Biography


María Porras Sánchez




Part 4: Institutions and Domestic Structures



10. Picture Books and Parrhesia: Canadian Residential Schools and Answering the TRC’s Calls to Action


Caroline Bagelman



11. Hidden Atrocities in Cinematic Representations of Chinese Girlhoods


Chengcheng You



12. Nursery Atrocities: The Australian Children’s Classic
The Magic Pudding


Jayson Althofer and Brian Musgrove



13. Freedom in Fiction: Trickster Tales and Enslavement in the United States


Megan Jeffreys



Contributors

Index

About the author

Victoria Nesfield is Lecturer in Religion at York St John University in England.
Philip Smith is Associate Chair and Professor of English at Savannah College of Art and Design. Together they are the coeditors of
The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel’s Literary Works, also published by SUNY Press.