AustLit

Pope discusses a selection of papers from the inaugural Australian Children's Literature Association for Research conference (ACLAR) held at the University of South Australia in April 1997. The formation of this conference entitled Old Neighbours, New Visions, is driven by 'the desire by those working in the discipline to promote children's literature as a field of research in order to gain recognition for the area in mainstream literary studies and provide a source of collegial support for researchers' (45). Pope briefly discusses a number of essays from the collection, all of which 'consider various representations of Australia as a nation, and of characters and implied readers as Australian subjects; and how those representations, past and present, are encoded in children's literature' (48).