Literatura. Duty. Čas ed. by Uliana Hnidets, et al. (review)

Literatura. Duty. Čas. comprises a collection of key scholarly essays on major issues of Ukrainian children’s literature in order to develop a theoretical and methodical framework for research. The book was published as a result of the Second International Symposium on the subject, which was held in Lviv in 2011, and was organized by The Ukrainian Research Center for Children’s and Young Adult Literature (URCCYL) and The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The contributors to this volume focus on a number of issues: the role of scholarly studies in children’s literature, contemporary prose and poetry for children, the concentration and depiction of historical themes in children’s books, the introduction of children’s literature into the school curriculum, comparative aspects in the study of children’s and youth literature, and literature as a tool for the establishment of reading as a critical, educative, and aesthetic skill. In the preface, Uliana Hnidets, the president of the URCCYL, highlights the main purpose of the volume, which is “to diminish a distance between literary theories and contemporary children’s literature,” and to introduce a wider spectrum into contemporary Ukrainian children’s literature by involving pedagogues, educators, psychologists, translators, writers, readers, and book publishers.

The volume is divided into two sections. The first, “Literary Criticism,” draws on the study of children’s literature from a theoretical perspective. It focuses on the context of twentieth-century Ukrainian literature for children and youth, and traces major steps of historical and contemporary interpretations of texts for children. In her article, Raisa Movchan explores the dynamic development of books for children and books that constitute children’s reading interests. She refers to Ukrainian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to trace the increasing interest in representing childhood in prose, and stresses the profound involvement of writers in creating realistic fiction about children of that particular era. She concludes that Soviet cultural politics used the psychological component of children’s literature to ideological ends, which led most Ukrainian writers to look for different approaches to reflecting reality. Halyna Bijchuk’s essay employs Wolfgang Iser’s construal of a literary work as a form of communication, and Maria Zubrytska’s interpretation of post-modern readers’ interaction with a text. Bijchuk explains the possible roles of the implied reader, presents a schema for a youth’s response to a text, and discusses its implications for classroom use. The chapter also addresses today’s publishing needs and interests, and additionally, it presents a variety of formats of contemporary picture books and evaluates their significance for young readers.

The second section, “Pedagogy and Methods,” analyzes the classical pedagogical and methodological model of classical education in Ukraine, and its potential growth in response to developments in contemporary children’s literature; the readiness of pedagogues and literature teachers to introduce contemporary Ukrainian titles and selected translated titles of world literature for children in the classroom; the need to interconnect them across the curriculum. It also stresses the aim of developing and improving the role of children’s books for children to become lifetime readers. For instance, Boris Shalahinov’s article contends that in Ukraine, the notion of child read-ership is mostly based on two recently established approaches: the methodologist’s inquiry and the publisher’s offer. He argues that education, and especially a school’s reading curriculum, should reflect and elucidate the contemporary reality of children and young adults.

In her article, Tetiana Kachak looks at the definitions of the term “children’s literature,” as well as its function in the theoretical works of Ukrainian and international scholars. Kachak’s major argument sees children’s literature as part of world literature that develops in a transnational process by absorbing new trends, styles, genres, content, modern, and postmodern patterns. She criticizes that only a handful of selected writers and books form the object of study for younger Ukrainian scholars, narrowing their perspective and remaining unable to provide a solid theoretical basis for...