English Literature

This paper examines the interaction of the visual and verbal texts for picture books and illustrated chapter books published in Japan. Japanese picture books are produced in both left-to-right and right-to-left gross textual directions. Visual-verbal interactions are examined for both directions, and the same kinds of interaction are found as for picture books produced in mono-directional languages such as English. Chapter books, however, are conventionally published in a right-to-left format. This means that unless some kind of action is taken by publishers, there is likely to be a conflict of direction between the visual and verbal texts. The publishing choices made for chapter books are discussed in terms of Even-Zohar’s literary polysystem theory, and the reading effects of these choices are discussed in terms of Venuti’s concepts of domestication and foreignization in translation.

Key words: translation, picture book, illustration, foreignisation, polysystem.

A discussion of the changes made to Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The changes were made in order to avoid possible racism in the presentation of the Oompa-Loompas as black African Pigmies. The changes actually made in the text are discussed in relation to changes which were not made, and this provides a way of analysing the political sensitivities of Dahl, his publishers and his critics.

In The Fourth Horseman, Kate Thompson makes the very unusual choice of including Aikido as a named, non-generic martial art. Martial arts are common in children's literature, but usually as a simple mechanism for allowing children to overcome larger, stronger opponents (often adults). The actual martial art chosen is generally not very usually important to the narrative. However, in this story, the specific choice of Aikido is central to the narrative, and the perceived qualities of Aikido as a martial art support the ideological and thematic elements of the story.

The paper closes with comments from Kate Thompson who was kind enough to answer some of my questions about her choice of Aikido in this story.

The written text of picturebooks is often deceptively simple. However, as Riita Oittinen (2003) shows in her analysis of Swedish, German and Finnish translations of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), picturebook text can be more complex, or more carefully written than it at first appears. Oittinen examines sentence length and punctuation in relation to rhythm for reading aloud. This study follows and extends her analysis for the Japanese translation. The Japanese translation is dramatically different from the original text – much more so than the translations studied by Oittinen. The conclusion highlights that the Japanese translation is nonetheless a very popular and long selling text within its target culture.

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

This is another thing I wrote for our department journal. It arose out of a growing irritation with the use of Wall's (1991) classifications of implied readers in children's literature. It is, I think, an important topic, but it didn't seem to have any natural home – which is why I put it in the department thing.

The full citation is:
Cheetham, Dominic. 'Audience in Children's Literature.' English Literature and Language 49 (2013): 19-30.

This investigation examines a collection of historical fiction for children linked by setting (late Victorian London) and protagonists (Sherlock Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars, the children who assisted Holmes with his investigations). Common deviations from historical probability are treated as significant changes and are discussed in relation to the general study of historical fiction. It was found that the collected stories use similar stereotypes and show common choices which shift the content of the stories away from the most likely historical situation of late Victorian “Street Arabs.”

This paper examines the common prevalence for parodic books for children (especially picture books) which have parodic references likely to be unknown to child readers. I reject the argument that such texts are simply double audience texts with the parody for the adults and the base story for the children, and instead introduce arguments in favour of a more complex reading experience which retrospectively changes as children gain more and more world knowledge, allowing them to experience a postponed but potentiated experience of the parody.

Bi-modal input, experiencing a text both visually and aurally, can be a great aid to comprehension and memory. Better understanding of texts leads to better memory for content and can result in greater enjoyment of texts. Bi-modal experience can also help the integration of different brain areas thereby improving predictive and reconstructive aspects of language comprehension.

Extensive reading of children’s literature can be seen as one of the most powerful means to acquiring a large working vocabulary for both first language learners and second language learners. However, for foreign language learners, children’s literature has a less positive image. For foreign language learners the most commonly recommended reading is of graded readers. Corpus research has shown that work for children has a wide range of rare words, comparable to adult literature, and this leads to the argument that children’s literature puts too great a comprehension and memory strain on foreign language learners, and is an inefficient learning tool compared to graded readers. This paper reviews existing research and examines the arguments for children’s literature in language learning in terms of some features of naturalistic child reading behaviour, and the stylistic choices of writers for children. Replication of child reading behaviours in conjunction with the aid to comprehension and memory inherent in stylistic choices, combined with motivational and practical considerations, are argued to make children’s literature an equal, if not superior choice as extended reading material for foreign language learners.

Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes are two of the most famous characters in popular British culture. In this paper I examine the links between the two in terms of their actors, their writers, and their personal attributes. The strongest connection seems to be in the people who write stories of Doctor Who and also of The Baker Street Irregulars.

'The Amazing Maurice in Japanese and German: A Contrastive Study of Domestication Strategies and Ideology in Translation' English Language and Literature. Vol 53, 2017. pp 29-63.

This abstract is added for this page and is not part of the published paper.

In this paper I make an analysis of Japanese and German translations of Terry Pratchett’s 'The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents' in relation to, i) textual modifcation, ii) intertextual connection, iii) humour, iv) narrative and character voice. The paper uses Hollindale’s (1988) model of ideology as a framework to examine changes in translation as reflections of the personal, cultural and linguistic pressures which influence translator choices.

Literary translators and translation, when noticed at all, have a poor public image inconsistent with the evidence of skill and effort shown in translators’ essays, postscripts and interviews, and with the respect shown to literary translation practice in translation studies in general. This article suggests that much of this negativity results from the entailments, or logical implications, of the dominant conceptual metaphors of translation: movement and replacement. Conceptual metaphors powerfully shape perceptions and expectations, but unlike consciously applied metaphors their effects go largely unnoticed. By comparing the current dominant metaphors of translation to an alternative of “translation as performance” we can see that many of the common concepts of translation are entailments of metaphor rather than intrinsic features of translation. The performance metaphor is used as a contrast because it has very different entailments, thus highlighting the effects of the current metaphors and also providing a possible alternative for translators and students of translation.

In Julius Caesar Shakespeare reproduces one of the pivotal moments in European history. Brutus and Mark Antony, through the medium of their forum speeches, compete for the support of the people of Rome. In the play, as in history, Mark Antony wins this contest of language. Critics are generally agreed that Antony has the better speech, but also that Brutus' speech is still exceptionally good. Traditionally the question of how Antony's speech is superior is argued by examining differences between the two speeches, however, this approach has not resulted in any critical consensus. This paper takes the opening lines of the speeches as the only point of direct convergence between the content and the rhetorical forms used by Brutus and Antony and argues that Brutus' opening tricolon is structurally inferior to Marc Antony's. Analysis of the following rhetorical schemes in Brutus' speech reveals further structural weaknesses. Shakespeare gives Brutus a speech rich in perceptually salient rhetorical schemes but introduces small, less salient, structural weaknesses into those schemes. The tightly structured linguistic patterns which make up the majority of Brutus' speech give an impression of great rhetorical skill. This skilful impression obscures the minor faults or weaknesses that quietly and subtly reduce the overall power of the speech. By identifying the weaknesses in Brutus' forms we add an extra element to the discussion of these speeches and at the same time display how subtly and effectively Shakespeare uses rhetorical forms to control audience response and appreciation.