'This article examines children's novels and short stories published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that feature bushfires and the ceremonial fires associated with Indigenous Australians. It suggests that British children's novels emphasise the horror of bushfires and the human struggle involved in conquering them. In contrast, Australian-authored children's fictions represent less anthropocentric understandings of the environment. New attitudes toward the environment are made manifest in Australian women's fiction including J. M. Whitfield's ‘The Spirit of the Bushfire’ (1898), Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo (1899), Olga D. A. Ernst's ‘The Fire Elves’ (1904), and Amy Eleanor Mack's ‘The Gallant Gum Trees’ (1910). Finally, the article proposes that adult male conquest and control of the environment evident in British fiction is transferred to a child protagonist in Mary Grant Bruce's A Little Bush Maid (1910), dispensing with the long-standing association between the Australian bush and threats to children.' (Publication summary)
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'This volume sees the change in Senior Editor announced in the previous number. John Stephens has stepped down after nearly a decade of leading IRCL. In that time he has taken what was little more than a concept and turned it into a highly regarded journal. This seemed a fitting moment to reflect on all that John has done, not just for IRCL, but for children's literature studies in general over a long and distinguished career. This editorial is followed by a personal profile by our Executive Editor, Mark Macleod, who has worked with John in various capacities for many years. Kerry Mallan, another colleague who has also worked closely with John, has assembled an overview of his main publications. For those new to the field, this will be a valuable introduction to the work of a fine scholar, while I am sure that many established scholars will find, as I did, that reading it sends you back to your bookshelves to be excited all over again by John's original and forensic analyses.' (Editorial introduction)
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Imagining Colonial Environments : Fire in Australian Children's Literature,
single work
criticism
(p. 1-14)
