On Saturday 5th December a symposium was held on Irish Children’s Literature and Culture in the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin, organised by Dr Susan Cahill. The symposium was funded through the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) in UCD.
The IVRLA has been involved in digitally preserving material currently residing in UCD repositories, and providing access to the digitized material through their website, which is currently being expanded to include a research area where connected pilot projects – including Cahill’s on Irish women writers of children’s literature 1870-1940 – will be showcased. Cahill discussed this project in her paper which aims to delineate a literary history of women’s writing for children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper focused on writers L.T Meade and Rosa Mulholland.
As the IVRLA also has an educational component which aims to use the digitised content as a teaching and research resource and also explores the possibilities of digital technologies in the classroom, a workshop was organised on the 2nd December to bring together the digitised material and a group of primary school children to explore questions of writers’ lives and archives.
Oisin McGann and St Brigid's Sixth Class at the National Library of Ireland
The workshop was organised by UCD, Children’s Books Ireland, and children’s writer Oisin McGann, who led the workshop, and it was held in the National Library of Ireland with a group of sixth-class girls from St Brigid’s NGS, Glasnevin. McGann discussed the workshop at the symposium and read out some of the girls’ contributions which included a re-write of a passage from an L.T Meade novel and an editor’s letter to a writer of their choice.
Session 2 of the symposium consisted of papers by Valerie Coghlan and Ciara Ni Bhroin. Coghlan’s paper, entitled “The Liminality of the Bog in Irish Children’s Literature” which surveyed the cultural resonances of depictions of bogs in Irish children’s literature from Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey (1934) to Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child (2008). Coghlan argued that the bog represents, especially in more recent literature, a liminal space that facilitates imaginative engagements with other spaces, times and identities, particularly those most troubling.
Ciara Ní Bhroin’s paper, “Mythologizing the Present – Modern Retellings of Irish Myths for Children” asked why certain myths, such as the Children of Lir, persist in modern retellings. Reasons suggested included the choice made by writers after independence in terms of constructing the new nation, whether certain myths lent themselves to Christianisation, and the fact that the most popular myths are also, relatively, the most recent. Ní Bhroin also pointed to recent changes in retellings including a renewed focus on the god Lugh.
The symposium concluded with a paper by Dr Mary Shine Thompson entitled, “A Bend of the Road: Children’s Literature Studies in Ireland” which surveyed the trajectory of children’s literature studies in Ireland pointing at important achievements made in the field including the establishment of ISSCL and the associated graduate network, outlining gaps in scholarship such as a focus on drama and poetry, and projecting future developments including engagements with the virtual world.
Thompson also raised the question of which methodologies are best suited to children’s literature studies, an issue which was taken up by the roundtable discussion, led by Valerie Coghlan. The participants included Celia Keenan (Director of the MA in Children’s Literature at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra), Dr Patricia Kennon (Froebel College of education, President of IBBY Ireland, and editor of Inís) and Dr Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (children’s writer as Elizabeth O’Hara and Fellow in Creative Writing, UCD).
Issues discussed included the problems of children’s book reviewing given the very small community involved, and the place of new media. In response to this last issue Keenan stated that she was torn between the view expressed by Kimberley Reynolds in Radical Children’s Literature (2007) on the one hand, who embraces the radical potential of new media, and on the other hand, Jack Zipes’s warning against the commercialisation and financial exploitation of children’s literature.
Lastly, both Thompson and Keenan acknowledged that Irish children’s literature studies would have to answer Jacqueline Rose’s contention that children’s literature suffers from the difference between writer and addressee. The roundtable also discussed whether YA fiction was essentially patronising and debated the issue of hopeful endings in books for children and teenagers.
