Ecocritical Perspectives on Children's Texts and Cultures. Nordic Dialogues ed. by Nina Goga, Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Bjørg Oddrun Hallåsand Aslaug Nyrnes (review)

This book delivers on its promise to bring Nordic children's literature into dialogue with international trends in ecocriticism. The book's primary research question, "How is nature represented in Nordic children's literature?," is explored through seventeen lively chapters grouped into five subsections: ethics and aesthetics, landscape, vegetal, animal, and human. These overarching themes enable intriguing discussions of children's literature in relation to ecocritical terms such as the pastoral and the postpastoral, the posthuman, and the Anthropocene, and the roles of animals and plants in children's literature. The Nordic figure of the "capable child," who enjoys a pragmatic and energetic physical closeness to nature, is encountered in several of the chapters, amid explorations of the ways in which Nordic children's literature inherits and subverts international environmental tropes.

The introduction deftly situates the book within ecocritical literary criticism and provides a thorough overview of previous work on children's literature and ecocriticism, which has primarily focused on American, British, and Australian literatures. The essays that follow reference a wide range of ecocritical perspectives, while drawing frequently from Greg Garrard's influential Ecocriticism. The book considers contemporary Nordic children's literature (including digital narratives) alongside a handful of classic and contemporary international texts. The broad range of genres includes picturebooks, poetry, middle-grade fantasy fiction, dystopian young adult (YA) fiction, a TV documentary series, and digital storytelling apps. Several of the chapters speculate that the texts they analyze may contribute to the formation of ecocitizens, while chapters 15 and 16 engage more closely with real children to uncover how they speak about and move through the natural world.

A major strength of the book is its integrated thematic structure, which is achieved partly through its deployment of its main conceptual tool, "The Nature in Culture (NatCul) Matrix." The tool enables a visual, graphical representation of the way texts, or elements within them, celebrate or problematize nature, from either anthropocentric or ecocentric perspectives. The matrix consists of a y-axis, which points up to "Celebrating nature" and down to "Problematizing nature." This intersects with an x-axis, which points left to an "Anthropocentric horizon" and right to an "Ecocentric horizon." The axis is ringed by a zone named "techne," which the authors say signifies a third dimension, taken from rhetorical theory, referring to the "intentional crafting of self, world and society," which draws attention to the fact that "all children's and YA texts are already mediated, hence are crafted, representations of nature" (Boellstorff 13). The authors present the matrix as an "organic thought figure," which has evolved over time and is open to further revision.

As a visual tool, the NatCul Matrix might be particularly well suited for conference presentations and discussions, but it nevertheless encapsulates some central tensions of ecocritical analysis, while identifying notably few truly "ecocentric" texts. The tool helps diagnose how texts situate themselves in relation to nature and culture, but it is used most interestingly when employed to interrogate paradoxes and contradictions within texts themselves. One example is Lykke Guanio-Uluru's analysis of the Norwegian picturebook character Gubbe, an anthropomorphized log, who represents both harmony with nature and a child's view of the world, while being himself a severed "dead" portion of a tree. Another is Nina Goga's analysis of Frida Nilsson's The Ice Sea Pirates. The NatCul Matrix helps her to track the transformation of the protagonist Siri's perspectives throughout the narrative.

The essays, which encompass a variety of topics, localities, and theoretical positions, each refer to the matrix, which ensures that the chapters speak to each other and come together in a thoroughly workshopped, critically sound collection. The research questions of each essay are clearly stated, and the end of each essay articulates...