Past IRSCL Award Winners

2023

Winner Best Monograph:

Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence In Post-Soviet Culture 
Jenny Kaminer
Cornell University Press 2022

Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture is the first in-depth study of the representation of post-Soviet adolescence in fiction, film, and drama. Kaminer's insightful work is focused on the representation and culture of post-Soviet adolescence and describes teenagers’ experiences within the culture that has emerged since the 1990s. It explores how adolescence in Russian society has transitioned from Soviet cultural myths about optimism, heroism, and the promise of youth to a more disturbing picture of adolescence as cynical, ambiguous, and violent. In this transition, the book argues, Soviet myths continue to haunt the contemporary culture of adolescence and its interpretations as nightmares. Kaminer's study is impressive in all respects. The book is an imaginative and groundbreaking study that provides new dimensions to our conception of post-Soviet childhood whilst explaining much about the present situation in Russia.  

Winner Best Edited Book:

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Zoe Jacques Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film (UP Mississippi, 2021)

2021

Growing up with America: Youth, Myth, and National Identity 1945 to Present
Emily A. Murphy
Athens: University of Georgia Press 2020

Emily A. Murphy’s Growing up with America: Youth, Myth, and National Identity 1945 to Present (University of Georgia Press, 2020) offers a rigorously researched and well-written study of the figure of youth in American literature during the Cold War. Its original argument engages with and bridges adjacent scholarly contexts, making a unique scholarly contribution to multiple fields related to youth and beyond one national context, because of its keen attention to issues of nation, identity, race, and gender surrounding the figure of the adolescent.

It rightly rejects the division between texts marketed as ‘adult’ and ‘children’s and young adult’ literature to explore the full pervasiveness of the adolescent within cultural debates about national identity while resisting the marginalization of literature for the young. It addresses issues of race and gender and shows that the adolescent became the means of renegotiating the master narrative about American exceptionalism by revealing silenced voices within this narrative. For example, while treating significant classics of American literature for young people or about young people, it also offers contrapuntal narratives written by indigenous writers to produce a stimulating and nuanced dialogue that exposes blind spots and shortcomings that mount a renegotiation of the narrative of American national identity. It persuasively argues that the role of the adolescent can help advance scholarship on national identity and closes by opening this reflection to the present day and a global scene, where activism by young people is having an impact worldwide.

Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children's Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin
Megan Swift
Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2020

Megan Swift’s Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (University of Toronto Press, 2020) treats the transformative influence of illustrations on children’s literature and reading in the Soviet Union of the 1920s-1940s with a richness and diversity of primary sources and analyses supported by ample visual evidence. Her methodology, especially the category of illustrated children’s reading and the examination of multiple illustrated versions of the same work are applicable to other contexts and may serve as an inspiration to scholars working on other national children’s literatures.

The concept of children’s reading, texts which initially were not addressed to children but during the Soviet era became available to them thanks to added illustrations, challenges the audience to look at child readers’ reading histories in a broad perspective, which is imperative in light of the current diversity of the cultural production addressed to children and adults, often across age and professional divides. She also offers insights into current public debates on children’s culture and into family and school contexts of children’s reading practices and positions the development of Soviet children’s literature against its Western counterparts, stressing its substantial achievements. In the conclusion Swift applies her approach to post-Soviet children’s literature, thereby indicating directions for further research.

2019

Crossover. Mehrfachadressierung in Text, Markt und Diskurs
Lena Hoffmann
Zürich: Chronos 2018

In her monograph, Lena Hoffmann analyses multiple address in crossover literature from the late 19th century until the present. The thesis focusses on the structures and strategies of multiple address, and contrasts that concept with ›double address‹ and other related terms.

The concept of multiple address, and therefore of crossover literature and media, can be properly comprehended only when analysed within the context of literary market strategies and the use of the term in public discourse. Lena Hoffmann develops a methodological framework along the examples of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island", Otfried Preußler's "Krabat", Michael Ende's "Die unendliche Geschichte", Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief" and Wolfgang Herrndorf's "Tschick".

The monograph therefore responds to and contradicts the common view that multiple address and crossover are synonymous with fantasy and merely catchphrases of publishers and distributors and underlines the idea that crossover can be identified as a distinct genre of fiction.

2017

Die Bilderfalle: Kanada in der deutschsprachigen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Produktion und Rezeption
Martina Seifert
Augsburg: Wißner Verlag, 2016.

Die Bilderfalle: Kanada in der deutschsprachigen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Produktion und Rezeption is the most theoretical sophisticated, methodologically rigorous and extensive application of imagology to children's literature and to translation studies so far, based on a vast research corpus of some 1,000 primary works in all (500 German children's books about Canada, and 500 translated works).

The book consists of two parts. The first reconstructs the German "image type" of Canada, as it emerges from Romantic idealizations of nature, travel accounts, and imported adventure literature. The author convincingly demonstrates that this image type (Canada is spacious, timeless/without history, wild, without people, a place where real men can prove their mettle in direct contest with unspoilt nature) remains surprisingly constant all throughout the 20th century, in spite of the major political upheavals Germany went through in the course of this troubled century.

The second part enquires into the impact of this national imaginary on the selection for and German translation of Canadian children's books. The author ties in with the latest insights in translation theory, which move beyond the criterion of faithfulness to the source text, and understand translation as a form of productive reception which is at least as much focused on the target language and culture as on the source language and culture. Finally, it also links gender studies to imagology given the fact that the German image-type of Canada is so relentlessly masculine. One reviewer commented that Martina Seifert's book sets a standard, not just for research into children's literature, but for international research into the field.

2015

Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde
Sara Pankenier Weld
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2014.

Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde offers a new approach to the Russian avant-garde. It argues that central writers, artists, and theorists of the avant-garde self-consciously used an infantile aesthetic, as inspired by children's art, language, perspective, and logic, to accomplish the artistic renewal they were seeking in literature, theory, and art. It treats the influence of children's drawings on the Neo-Primitivist art of Mikhail Larionov, the role of children's language in the Cubo-Futurist poetics of Aleksei Kruchenykh, the role of the naive perspective in the Formalist theory of Viktor Shklovsky, and the place of children's logic and lore in Daniil Kharms's absurdist writings for children and adults.

This monograph deals with an important dimension of twentieth century avant-gardism/modernism at large, i.e. their late-romantic idealization of children and childhood as major sources of inspiration for innovative art by adults.

Pankenier clearly shows how avant-garde research at large may profit from the close scrutiny of infantilist aesthetic concepts. As such, it generates some real synergies with research into children's literature and the Europen avant-garde, in which several other IRSCL members are involved, such as Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. The author addresses both modernist and avant-garde theories and theories of childhood and children's literature, puncturing essentialist myths of childhood. Importantly, this monograph builds bridges between the fields of childhood studies, children's literature studies, and inquiry into modernism and the avant-garde, which may be of use to us all.