East meets West: Literature for children and youth in Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature seeks contributions for a special issue on literature for children and youth in Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. The “East meets West” theme of this special issue is reflected in all aspects of life in Turkey, Cyprus, and Greece: from architecture, to politics, pop culture, food, art, music, education, and of course literature. The flows of people, cultures, religions, and languages through this geographical triangle, and their interactions within it, have historically produced both intense cultural richness and tensions. And the current effects of globalization make this richness and tension even more intense. For Arjun Appadurai, the central characteristic of global cultural processes is “the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another.” Children’s literature plays an active part in the tensions between sameness and difference, the local and the global, the national and the transnational. Comparative approaches could explore the children’s literature production, flow, and interaction within the Cyprus-Greece-Turkey triangle in order to analyze relevant literary products, phenomena, and processes. The “East meets West” special issue aspires to include articles that reach for ideas, connections, influences, and comparisons within and across national and continental boundaries, grouping diverse books together, bringing them into a constructive dialogue with each other, exploring their cultural backgrounds and webs of relations, and highlighting the richness of diversity.

• • Exploring forms of cultural exchange between literatures, languages, and cultures, in books published for children and youth, in Greece/Cyprus/Turkey

• • Looking at retellings, parodies, cross-cultural references, simple and complex forms of interaction between literature from different languages and cultures

• • Discussing the development of children’s literature in Cyprus/Turkey/Greece

• • Investigating the relationship between children’s literature and other aesthetic forms (visual arts, dance, music, cinema, the theatre, etc.)

• • Analyzing the literary images of other countries, cultures, or ethnic groups in books published for children and youth in Turkey/Greece/Cyprus

• • Examining culture-specific poetological questions in one or more of these countries

• • Looking at the formation and development of various children’s literature genres within and across cultures and linguistic areas

• • Looking metacritically at culture-specific aspects of the study of children’s literature and the manners in which it is institutionally established in one, two, or all three countries

• • Using general theories of children’s literature to study comparative aspects of works from Greece/Cyprus/Turkey

Full papers should be submitted to the editor, Björn Sundmark (bjorn.sundmark@mah.se), and guest editor, Petros Panaou (ppanaou@uga.edu) by 1 February. Please see Bookbird’s website at www.ibby.org/book-bird for full submission details.