In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Global Perspectives on Death in Children's Literature ed. by Lesley D. Clement and Leyli Jamali
  • Nithya Sivashankar (bio)
Lesley D. Clement and Leyli Jamali, eds. Global Perspectives on Death in Children's Literature. Routledge, 2015.

Lesley D. Clement and Leyli's Jamali's Global Perspectives on Death in Children's Literature is an anthology of eighteen essays, which collectively provide insight into diverse representations and interpretations of death in children's literature from several countries around the globe. This edited collection is divided into six parts, featuring three chapters each, and it includes contributions on texts set in places including the United States, Canada, England, Colonial India, Iran, the Soviet Union, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Poland, Sweden, and Germany. The first two sections—"Adapting Death for Changing Contexts" and "Ritualizing Death and Life after Death"—"most directly address death within the framework of transmitting values and beliefs" (Clement 3). The remaining four thematic clusters—which deal with politicizing, visualizing, symbolizing, and playing with death—engage with how children's texts and children themselves challenge conventional notions of death in various cultures.

In her introduction, "Flying Kites and Other Life-Death Matters," Clement acknowledges that even though the essays in the collection are intended to provide a range of global perspectives on death, "western constructions of death, children, and childhood have infiltrated many corners of the globe" (5). She goes on to provide an overview of studies that have been conducted in the West on the topic of death and children's texts and clarifies that "[d]eath was certainly not 'the ultimate taboo' in [Western] children's literature before the twentieth century" (5). In keeping with Clement's discussion on death and children's texts produced in the West, Part I of the volume comprises essays on representations of dying and mourning in contemporary retellings of Anglo-Saxon epics (Beowulf); adaptations of Greek and Roman myths (Rick Riordan's Olympus series); and Bulgarian fantasy literature. By contrast, the first two chapters in Part II, engage with works of literary realism. Hossein Sheykh Rezaee et al. analyze Persian children's literature portraying the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq to suggest that they glorify sacrifice and "reveal that holy death—the ritualization of death and afterlife through martyrdom—is both a reflection and consequence of the social and political climate" of the periods during and after the war (62). Denise Dávila, in her chapter in the same section, employs sociocultural theory to examine seven picture books about el Día de los Muertos that are widely circulated in libraries in the United States and Canada. She argues that these texts not only "offer tourist lenses that help readers to be voyeurs as [young Mexican] children and families respond to the deaths of loved ones and prepare for the night vigil in the cemetery," but also reflect and reaffirm "Anglo ideologies around death" (84). According to Dávila, some of the ways through which [End Page 436] the authors and illustrators of these texts reify dominant beliefs and practices surrounding death are by suggesting that the Day of the Dead is "a variation" of Halloween (76) and by perceiving "death as a permanent state," which denies the deceased the ability "to reunite annually with the living" (81).

Part III, which is composed of essays on the politicization of death, is perhaps the strongest section in the anthology. Urvi Mukhopadhyay surveys Bengali children's books and journals produced during the colonial period in India to scrutinize the impact of the sociopolitical conditions on the representations of death in these texts. She points out that "contending colonist and nationalist projects" played an important role in the production of "literary representations of death, which shifted from that of ultimate punishment for disobeying colonial masters to the notion of. . . [heroic sacrifice], eulogized in nationalist rhetoric" (102). In her chapter titled "A New Normal: Death and Dying in a Soviet Children's Magazine, 1941–1945," Julie K. deGraffenried studies images and texts in Murzilka, a monthly magazine that was established in 1924 and continues to be available in Russia even today. She performs an analysis of the issues that were circulated during...

pdf

Share