Dr Sue Walsh

The Junior African Writers Series

This project is a continuation of the research I’ve done most recently on the publishers’ archives for the African Writers Series but aims to allow me to bring together my existing and long-standing expertise in postcolonial children’s literature and my more recent work on the Heinemann archives.  This will involve investigating the uncatalogued HEB material on the Junior AWS alongside working on the manuscripts of the same series that are held at SOAS.

Irony and the Child

This project builds on already published work and concerns the question of irony in children's literature and its use in relation to figurations of childhood. Classically one of the ways of dealing with the presence of irony in children's literature has been to posit the theory of "dual readership", where irony is read as the marker of an adult audience or readership, alongside that of the child. In this is embedded the notion that irony is not appropriate to, or addressed at, the child reader, and my question with respect to this is about the grounds upon which this assumption is made, and what its implications are for ideas about readers and child readers specifically. What too are the implications of not reading irony as indicating an adult readership? If irony disrupts or challenges any notion of language that sees it as simply or straightforwardly meaning what it says, the elimination of irony from texts for children implies a particular conception of the child's relationship to language and it is the implications of this that I wish to address further.

The Hieroglyphic Animal

This project is involved in exploring the implications of what seems an odd and apparently out of place set of references and allusions to hieroglyphs and other ancient Egyptian cultural artifacts in American nature essays and realistic wild animal stories of the 1880s-1910s. These images of ancient Egypt seem to be a residue of the influence of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman and of an early to mid-nineteenth century Egyptomania, and they are also appear to be bound up with notions about human-animal kinship, the origins of language and ideas about primitiveness and race. It is these ideas, especially as related to ideas about animal language and the representation of Native Americans, that I want to explore in the animal stories and nature/wilderness writing of authors such as John Muir, John Burroughs, Jack London, Ernest Thompson Seton, William J. Long and Charles G.D. Roberts.