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If in the Latin American cultural environment Alina Diaconu is recognised as a wellknown and multi-awarded literary personality, the writer of Romanian origin, settled in Argentina since 1959 (when she was only 14 years old), is almost unknown in her country of origin. Although she wrote numerous novels and several volumes of poems, essays, publicist texts, interviews and even stories for children, she did not come to the attention of our literary criticism. The situation remained unchanged even after the translation into Romanian of some of her books. Except for Florea Firan (Firan 2023), even researchers of the Romanian literary exile did not pay too much attention to Alina Diaconu's creation. Therefore, the present article has a recuperative role and a precise ethno-identity stake, because from my point of view Alina Diaconu's work deserves to be (re)discovered and properly valorised. Particularly the novel El penúltimo viaje ['The Penultimate Journey'] (1989), that I analyse in the second part of the paper, can significantly widen the referential arch of the meta-exilic vector, setting a more than meritorious landmark on the map of the Romanian exile in Latin America. This ingenious mixture of dark family novel, poem of announced extinction, totalitarian dystopia and parable of uprooting and interior exile, is an excellent transnational identity card of an Argentinian prose writer of Romanian origin.

From a Dutch as well as an international perspective, eighteenth-century children’s books have received little attention from ecocritically inspired scholars so far, despite of the fact that these books structurally reflect relationships between human beings and their natural environment. I argue that these relationships are often depicted as ambiguous: human beings are connected to their environment because of both their resemblances and vital differences. Specifically focusing on two Dutch children’s books – Willem Emmery de Perponcher’s (1741-1819)Onderwijs voor kinderen (1782) and Johan Hendrik Swildens’ (1746-1809)Vaderlandsch A-B Boek voor de Nederlandsche Jeugd (1781) – I demonstrate that this ambivalent discourse fits into the didactical ambition to nurture citizens who were able to reflect on their social and political conditions and could actively contribute to socio-political improvement. De Perponcher and Swildens helped young readers to reflect on their position in a wider ecosystem, in which human beings, animals and nature exist in an equilibrium. As this equilibrium was implied to be a crucial precondition for the political social and economic harmony in Dutch society, the future stability of the ‘fatherland’ was imagined to be dependent on the ‘ecoliteracy’ of new generations: the skills to ‘read’ and understand the world as an organic whole in which everything is interconnected.

The essential elements of Ion Creanga's space are joy, innocence, happiness, spontaneity etc. The author underlines this by his words: \"the happy age\". The universal feature of this age consists in the fact that in opposition to real, ordinary life it allows the child to have no worry, because the game is the only reason. Childhood is a space of extraordinary, unique feelings and only the \"memory\" can revive them. Security and plenary feelings can also be related to this wonderful age described by Ion Creanga. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

This seminal work examines the concurrence of childhood rebellion and conformity in Bengali literary texts (including adult texts), a pertinent yet unexplored area, making it a first of its kind. It is a study of the voice of child protagonists across children's and adult literature in Bengali vis-à-vis the institutions of family, the education system, and the nationalist movement in the ninenteenth and twentieth centuries.

This book proposes a fundamental reconception of the 19th-century attitude toward the child. The Romantic ideology of innocence spread more slowly than we think, it contends, and the people whom we assume were most committed to it—children’s authors and members of the infamous “cult of the child”—were actually deeply ambivalent. Writers such as Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and J. M. Barrie often resisted the growing cultural pressure to erect a strict barrier between child and adult, innocence and experience. Instead of urging young people to mold themselves to match a static ideal of artless simplicity, they frequently conceived of children as precociously literate, highly socialized beings who—though indisputably shaped by the strictures of civilized life—could nevertheless cope with such influences in creative ways. By entertaining the idea that contact with the adult world does not necessarily victimize children, these authors reacted against Dickensian plots which imply that youngsters who work and play alongside adults (including the so-called Artful Dodger) are not in fact inventive or ingenious enough to avoid a sad fate. To find the truly artful child characters from this era, the book maintains, we must turn to children’s literature, a genre that celebrates the canny resourcefulness of young protagonists without claiming that they enjoy unlimited power and autonomy.

Since the last decade review of the fathering literature in 2000, scholars across numerous disciplines such as demography, family studies, medicine, nursing, law, psychology, social work, and sociology have continued to produce a steady stream of work on fathering and father-child relationships. This literature is reviewed selectively with a focus on key developments, persistent challenges, and critical directions for future research. Significant developments include greater availability of large and nationally representative dataseis to study fathers; expansion and evaluation of U.S. federal policy regarding fathers; thoughtful consideration of conceptualization and measurement of fathers' parenting; growth in research on coparenting, maternal gatekeeping, and fathering; increased attention to issues of diversity in fathering; and awareness of the effects of fathering on men's development. Persistent challenges and critical new directions in fathering research include full and routine inclusion of fathers in research on parenting, improved assessment and appropriate data analysis, adherence to evidence-based portrayals of fathers' roles in children's development, generation and use of scientific evidence to guide policy-making, and sustained attention to diversity and fatherhood. These should be priority areas of focus as fathering research proceeds into the next decades of the 21st century.

Children’s literature has spent decades on the psychiatrist’s couch, submitting to psychoanalysis by scores of scholars and popular writers. Freud in Oz suggests that psychoanalysts owe a significant and largely unacknowledged debt to books ostensibly written for children. Kenneth B. Kidd argues that children’s literature and psychoanalysis have influenced and interacted with each other since Freud published his first case studies.

Beowulf as Children's Literature brings together a group of scholars and creators to address important issues of adapting the Old English poem into textual and pictorial forms that appeal to children, past and present.

Within the Euro-American literary tradition, Gothic stories of childhood and adolescence have often served as a tool for cultural propaganda, advancing colonialist, white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. This book turns our attention to modern and contemporary Gothic texts by hemispheric American writers who have refigured uncanny youth in ways that invert these cultural scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Conde to N. Scott Momaday and Carmen Maria Machado, Gothic conventions become a means of critiquing pathological structures of power in the space of the Americas. As fictional children and adolescents confront persisting colonial and neo-imperialist architectures, grapple with the everyday ramifications of white supremacist thinking, navigate rigged systems of socioeconomic power, and attempt to frustrate patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, the uncanny and the nightmarish in their lives force readers to reckon affectively as well as intellectually with these intersecting forms of injustice.

01 02 Postcolonial Fiction and Disability explores the politics and aesthetics of disability in postcolonial literature. The first book to make sustained connections between postcolonial writing and disability studies, it focuses on the figure of the exceptional child in well-known novels by Grace, Dangarembga, Sidhwa, Rushdie, and Okri. While the fictional lives of disabled child characters are frequently intertwined with postcolonial histories, providing potent metaphors for national 'damage' and vulnerability, Barker argues that postcolonial writers are equally concerned with the complexity of disability as lived experience. The study focuses on constructions of normalcy, the politics of medicine and healthcare, and questions of citizenship and belonging in order to demonstrate how progressive health and disability politics often emerge organically from writers' postcolonial concerns. In reframing disability as a mode of exceptionality, the book assesses the cultural and political insights that derive from portrayals of disability, showing how postcolonial writing can contribute conceptually towards building more inclusive futures for disabled people worldwide. 08 02 'Clare Barker's Exceptional Children is a very timely and distinctive book, which makes a strong ethical argument for a critical negotiation of postcolonial studies and disability studies through some illuminating readings of the figure of the child in postcolonial fiction.' - Stephen Morton, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Southampton. 02 02 This book is the first study of disability in postcolonial fiction. Focusing on canonical novels, it explores the metaphorical functions and material presence of disabled child characters. Barker argues that progressive disability politics emerge from postcolonial concerns, and establishes dialogues between postcolonialism and disability studies. 19 02 First book to focus on postcolonial literature and representations of disability - surprisingly common feature of this kind of literature Brings together critical debates in the fields of postcolonial studies and disability studies Wide-ranging geographical focus of the book – includes discussion of writers from New Zealand, Pakistan, India, Zimbabwe and Nigeria Discusses canonical figures in postcolonial fiction (eg, Rushdie, Okri) 04 02 Acknowledgements Introduction 'Decrepit, Deranged, Deformed': Indigeneity and Cultural Health in Potiki Hunger, Normalcy, and Postcolonial Disorder in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not Cracking India and Partition: Dismembering the National Body The Nation as Freak Show: Monstrosity and Biopolitics in Midnight's Children 'Redreaming the World': Ontological Difference and Abiku Perception in The Famished Road Conclusion: Growing Up Bibliography Index 13 02 CLARE BARKER Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, UK. 31 02 This book explores the representation of disabled children in postcolonial fiction, establishing interdisciplinary engagements between postcolonial studies and disability studies