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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'What would you do if you were the only one in a deserted city? Where would you go, and what would you do?
The Empty City taps into a fantasy that many of us have had as children to be allowed to explore, unhindered, the ordinarily crowded environment of a shopping centre.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
From Page to Stage : The Man of Many Talents Tells a Universal Story
2013
single work
column
— Appears in: Brisbane News , 26 June - 2 July 2013; (p. 23) -
y
Playing with Picturebooks : Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque
Houndmills
:
Palgrave Macmillan
,
2012
Z1909588
2012
single work
criticism
"Postmodernism has played a significant part in the development of playful and experimental picturebooks for children over the past 50 years. Playing with Picturebooks offers fresh insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on picturebooks for children, covering a wide range of international picturebooks predominantly from the 1980s to the present. It represents a significant contribution to current debates centred on the decline of the effects of postmodernism on fiction and detects a shift from the postmodern to the postmodernesque. Playing with Picturebooks draws on a wide range of critical perspectives in examining postmodern approaches to narrative and illustration. Chapters discuss how metafictive devices enable different modes of representation, offer different perspectives to authorised version of history, and promote difference and ex-centricity over unity. Playing with Picturebooks is essential reading, not only for academics in the field of children's literature, but also for researchers, teachers and students." (Back cover)
-
Strolling Through the (Post)modern City: Modes of Being a Flâneur in Picture Books
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Lion and the Unicorn , January vol. 36 no. 1 2012; (p. 56-74) 'The city and the urban condition, popular subjects of art, literature, and film, have been commonly represented as fragmented, isolating, violent, with silent crowds moving through the hustle and bustle of a noisy, polluted cityspace. Included in this diverse artistic field is children's literature—an area of creative and critical inquiry that continues to play a central role in illuminating and shaping perceptions of the city, of city lifestyles, and of the people who traverse the urban landscape. Fiction's textual representations of cities, its sites and sights, lifestyles and characters have drawn on traditions of realist, satirical, and fantastic writing to produce the protean urban story—utopian, dystopian, visionary, satirical—with the goal of offering an account or critique of the contemporary city and the urban condition. In writing about cities and urban life, children's literature variously locates the child in relation to the social (urban) space. This dialogic relation between subject and social space has been at the heart of writings about/of the flâneur: a figure who experiences modes of being in the city as it transforms under the influences of modernism and postmodernism. Within this context of a changing urban ontology brought about by (post)modern styles and practices, this article examines five contemporary picture books: The Cows Are Going to Paris by David Kirby and Allen Woodman; Ooh-la-la (Max in love) by Maira Kalman; Mr Chicken Goes to Paris and Old Tom's Holiday by Leigh Hobbs; and The Empty City by David Megarrity. I investigate the possibility of these texts reviving the act of flânerie, but in a way that enables different modes of being a flâneur, a neo-flâneur. I suggest that the neo-flâneur retains some of the characteristics of the original flâneur, but incorporates others that take account of the changes wrought by postmodernity and globalization, particularly tourism and consumption. The dual issue at the heart of the discussion is that tourism and consumption as agents of cultural globalization offer a different way of thinking about the phenomenon of flânerie. While the flâneur can be regarded as the precursor to the tourist, the discussion considers how different modes of flânerie, such as the tourist-flâneur, are an inevitable outcome of commodification of the activities that accompany strolling through the (post)modern urban space' (Author's abstract). -
Untitled
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: Reading Time : The Journal of the Children's Book Council of Australia , November vol. 51 no. 4 2007; (p. 18)
— Review of The Empty City 2007 single work picture book -
Books Children's
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 22 - 23 September 2007; (p. 26)
— Review of The Empty City 2007 single work picture book
-
Theatre of Imagination
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 8 - 9 September 2007; (p. 26)
— Review of The Empty City 2007 single work picture book -
Books Children's
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 22 - 23 September 2007; (p. 26)
— Review of The Empty City 2007 single work picture book -
Untitled
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: Reading Time : The Journal of the Children's Book Council of Australia , November vol. 51 no. 4 2007; (p. 18)
— Review of The Empty City 2007 single work picture book -
Strolling Through the (Post)modern City: Modes of Being a Flâneur in Picture Books
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Lion and the Unicorn , January vol. 36 no. 1 2012; (p. 56-74) 'The city and the urban condition, popular subjects of art, literature, and film, have been commonly represented as fragmented, isolating, violent, with silent crowds moving through the hustle and bustle of a noisy, polluted cityspace. Included in this diverse artistic field is children's literature—an area of creative and critical inquiry that continues to play a central role in illuminating and shaping perceptions of the city, of city lifestyles, and of the people who traverse the urban landscape. Fiction's textual representations of cities, its sites and sights, lifestyles and characters have drawn on traditions of realist, satirical, and fantastic writing to produce the protean urban story—utopian, dystopian, visionary, satirical—with the goal of offering an account or critique of the contemporary city and the urban condition. In writing about cities and urban life, children's literature variously locates the child in relation to the social (urban) space. This dialogic relation between subject and social space has been at the heart of writings about/of the flâneur: a figure who experiences modes of being in the city as it transforms under the influences of modernism and postmodernism. Within this context of a changing urban ontology brought about by (post)modern styles and practices, this article examines five contemporary picture books: The Cows Are Going to Paris by David Kirby and Allen Woodman; Ooh-la-la (Max in love) by Maira Kalman; Mr Chicken Goes to Paris and Old Tom's Holiday by Leigh Hobbs; and The Empty City by David Megarrity. I investigate the possibility of these texts reviving the act of flânerie, but in a way that enables different modes of being a flâneur, a neo-flâneur. I suggest that the neo-flâneur retains some of the characteristics of the original flâneur, but incorporates others that take account of the changes wrought by postmodernity and globalization, particularly tourism and consumption. The dual issue at the heart of the discussion is that tourism and consumption as agents of cultural globalization offer a different way of thinking about the phenomenon of flânerie. While the flâneur can be regarded as the precursor to the tourist, the discussion considers how different modes of flânerie, such as the tourist-flâneur, are an inevitable outcome of commodification of the activities that accompany strolling through the (post)modern urban space' (Author's abstract). -
y
Playing with Picturebooks : Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque
Houndmills
:
Palgrave Macmillan
,
2012
Z1909588
2012
single work
criticism
"Postmodernism has played a significant part in the development of playful and experimental picturebooks for children over the past 50 years. Playing with Picturebooks offers fresh insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on picturebooks for children, covering a wide range of international picturebooks predominantly from the 1980s to the present. It represents a significant contribution to current debates centred on the decline of the effects of postmodernism on fiction and detects a shift from the postmodern to the postmodernesque. Playing with Picturebooks draws on a wide range of critical perspectives in examining postmodern approaches to narrative and illustration. Chapters discuss how metafictive devices enable different modes of representation, offer different perspectives to authorised version of history, and promote difference and ex-centricity over unity. Playing with Picturebooks is essential reading, not only for academics in the field of children's literature, but also for researchers, teachers and students." (Back cover)
-
From Page to Stage : The Man of Many Talents Tells a Universal Story
2013
single work
column
— Appears in: Brisbane News , 26 June - 2 July 2013; (p. 23)
Last amended 3 Apr 2019 14:12:48
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