Provides a discussion of a character's ascent from a spiritual dark night toward an illuminating encounter with grace and love forcefully depicted by Katherine Paterson. (HOD)

Examines some of the interesting features of the use of food in Blyton's works, which were written during World War II. (HOD)

Comments on the design of a novel's cover, "The Cure for Death by Lightning," and how it mirrors what is inside the book--it recreates a scrapbook belonging to the adolescent protagonist's mother. Finds the use of color and baking smells significant in the novel. States that the protagonist eventually realizes she needs a scrapbook of…

Argues that Andre Norton's "Octagon Magic" is neither a conventional girls' book, nor a witch tale, nor a time fantasy but rather a unique coming-of-age story best understood within the context of theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Mary Belenk, and Jean Baker Miller. (TB)

Studies the public responses to Andrea Dworkin's novel "Mercy" (about rape specifically and the sexual abuse of women in general). Suggests that Dworkin's "Mercy"--like other controversial cultural texts--fostered a type of literary public sphere and that defining these spheres as "war zones" does not foster open debate or a common space for…

Beidler defends "The Crown of Columbus" against criticisms of its best-seller qualities and applauds its universality, playfulness, and thought-provoking qualities. Hoy views the novel as revisionist history contained within a seemingly frivolous narrative, a polyvocal protean voyage of discovery with humor and self-referentiality as its…

Considers in detail "a safe place" in two popular children's novels. Concludes that a crucial thematic aspect becomes one of balance--balance between reason and imagination, reality and fantasy, the finite and the infinite--and that the safe places created in these stories are built out of a reasoned solution to a problem. (PA)

Orson Scott Card's school stories in outer space, "Ender's Game" and "Ender's Shadow," purportedly occur at the same time and tell the "same" story, but from the perspectives of two different child protagonists. Scenes in "Ender's Shadow" even reproduce text from "Ender's Game." Nevertheless, 14 years elapsed between the publications of the two…

The Harry Potter series focuses upon the toilet as a site for heroic action and a threshold between worlds as well as a more traditional place for boys to be bullied and girls to weep. This article offers a Kristevan reading of the toilets as abject in Harry Potter, and shows how this concept helps us make sense of wider issues within the series,…

Gives norms and advice on the analysis of the modern Spanish novel. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

Proceedings of a conference of international Orwell experts gathered at the Library of Congress are presented in this collection. The collection is divided into four sections, corresponding with the four conference sessions: "What Orwell Really Wrote"; "Orwell: The Man"; "'Nineteen Eighty-Four': The Book"; and…

The Appalachian "Tale of Red Emmy" presented in the novel "Oral History" by Lee Smith (1983), reveals both an Irish origin and an American transformation. Granny Younger, one of Smith's narrators, tells of a curse visited on four generations of the Cantrell family after Almarine Cantrell chanced upon the witch Red Emmy in the…