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Rewriting Colonial Histories in Historical Fictions for the Young: From Below and Above
- Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 50, Number 3, July 2012
- pp. 34-46
- 10.1353/bkb.2012.0097
- Article
- Additional Information
To write for the young in twenty-first-century Britain is to engage with the highly charged discourses of race, identity, and history. Accordingly, this paper examines the novels of three writers who have made the appropriation of marginalized sensibilities the central premise of their historical fictions. It considers how these writers ask what certain past events might mean for a marginalized group’s understanding of its present interests and future prospects as well as asking how to reinvent Britain’s past and present for those who are marginalized by a dominant ideology.