AustLit

'The World War I Gallipoli campaign in modern Turkey in April 1915 was calamitous from the outset, with the amphibious assault by British and Allied forces landing well off course. Australia's first major military engagement since achieving nationhood in 1901, its chief success would become their stealth evacuation, which saw seventy thousand men covertly withdrawn over nine days and nights in December 1915. The campaign was ultimately futile and deemed immaterial to the outcome of the war. Such an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire would seem an unlikely source for a national myth. It lacks, for example, “the psychic reassurance of triumph over the sources of threat” and the defeat of enemies that Graham Dawson identifies as a key psychic and social function of adventure narratives and soldier heroes (282). Yet, the ill‐fated Gallipoli campaign is popularly held in Australia's cultural imagination as the “birth of a nation” for a former colony then still under the yoke of the British Empire. In Australian politics and culture, the youthful nation's presumed character was forged in war and embodied in the deeds of its young men, in spite of ultimate defeat.'  (Introduction)

'Scholars have placed considerable importance on the study of contemporary children's and young adult (YA) comics, and this collection of twenty critical essays furthers that endeavor. As editors of Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays, Michelle Abate and Gwen Tarbox make a sensible case as to why there needs to be a continuation of scholarship of children's and YA comics. Since the beginning of the twenty‐first century, there has been a boom in the number of publications inside this genre. This explosion of material has reached young readers in school libraries and classrooms. While the field of comics studies continues to blossom, little attention has actually been given to children's and YA comics in contemporary times. Most comics scholars have tended to focus on comics aimed at young adults before the twentieth century. This work helps fill this hole in comics scholarship.' (Introduction)