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Books by Maria Nikolajeva

A collection of newly-commissioned essays tracing cutting-edge developments in children’s litera... more A collection of newly-commissioned essays tracing cutting-edge developments in children’s literature research

Time has passed since ‘having a PhD in children’s literature’ was a funny joke in You’ve Got Mail. Children’s literature research is now one of the most dynamic fields of literary criticism and of education, and has a bright future ahead – as children’s writers and publishers invent yet more forms of literature for young people, and researchers find yet more sophisticated ways of exploring them. This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children’s literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children’s poetry, picturebooks and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature.

Key Features

Features the most recent directions in children's literature theory and criticism
Introduces the leading international scholars in the field as well as new emerging scholars
Offers a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, including a mixture of empirical and theoretical research, and analyses at the intersection of education and literary studies

Third, revised edition of the highly successful handbook on children's literature from a narratol... more Third, revised edition of the highly successful handbook on children's literature from a narratological perspective. After a theoretical introduction, chapters include Plot, Theme, Setting, Character, Narration and Temporality. Textual analysis is based on a wide range of international titles.

How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfere fictional experience into re... more How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfere fictional experience into real life? Why do they care about fictional characters? How does fiction enhance young people's sense of selfhood? Supported by cognitive psychology and brain research, this ground-breaking book is the first study of young readers' cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction. It explores how fiction stimulates perception, attention, imagination and other cognitive activity, and opens radically new ways of thinking about literature for young readers. Examining a wide range of texts for a young audience, from picturebooks to young adult novels, the combination of cognitive criticism and children’s literature theory also offers significant insights for literary studies beyond the scope of children’s fiction. An important milestone in cognitive criticism, the book provides convincing evidence that reading fiction is indispensable for young people’s intellectual, emotional and social maturation.

"Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and ... more "Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world, nationhood and identity, the mapping of sexual awakening onto postcolonial awareness, hybridity and trans-racial romance, transgressive sexuality, the sexually abused adolescent body, music as a code for identity formation, representations of adolescent emotion, and what neuroscience research tells us about young adult readers, writers, and young artists.

Throughout, the volume explores the ways writers configure their adolescent protagonists as awkward, alienated, rebellious and unhappy, so that the figure of the young adult becomes a symbol of wider political and societal concerns. Examining in depth significant contemporary novels, including those by Julia Alvarez, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce, Malorie Blackman and Meg Rosoff, among others, Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.

Reviews: 'Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture is a theoretically rich collection of essays that gathers together the most compelling and provocative issues currently at play in the study of adolescent literature. Perspectives including feminism, post-colonialism, cognitive linguistics, eco-poetics, genre study, and psychoanalysis work together to demonstrate both how complex adolescent literature is and how much the field has to contribute to the expansion of post-structural literary criticism. The essays are smart, innovative, and sophisticated, making the collection one of the most significant contributions yet to appear in the field.'
Roberta Seelinger Trites, Illinois State University, USA

This title is also available as an ebook, ISBN 978-1-4094-3989-9"

Key Features

This title is also available as an ebook, ISBN 978-1-4094-3989-9"

Marvels & Tales

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

Nous signalons la parution d'un nouveau manuel consacré à la littérature pour la jeunesse: Cl... more Nous signalons la parution d'un nouveau manuel consacré à la littérature pour la jeunesse: Clémentine Beauvais et Maria Nikolajeva ont dirigé la publication du Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature (Edinburgh University Press), qui rassemble de nombreuses contributions relevant de perspectives innovantes. La recherche en littérature pour la jeunesse est désormais un domaine légitime dans le paysage académique: ce "Companion" s'inscrit dans une tradition universitaire anglo-saxonne qui,..

Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, 1997

Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, 2008

Literary texts do not appear in a vacuum. Literature in Western society has been written for seve... more Literary texts do not appear in a vacuum. Literature in Western society has been written for several thousand years, and literature written specifically for children has existed for at least two hundred years. Thousands of children’s books are published every year. Writers have usually read books by other writers or are at least aware of them. In the case of children’s writers, they are most likely to have read the major children’s classics, but they have probably also read mainstream literature. Whether conscious about this or not, writers are affected by what they read and even by what they have not read, but only heard about. Not all people today have actually read Shakespeare, but many know the plots and characters of at least the most famous plays. Literature is also disseminated through other channels, such as film, television, comics and computer games. When we read a book, we are often struck by its similarities to others we know. For instance, if we compare The Lion, the Wi...

Textual Transformations in Children's Literature, 2013

The recent publication of David Benedictus's Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (2009), the con... more The recent publication of David Benedictus's Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (2009), the controversial sequel to AA Milne's famous children's classic Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), has renewed the ongoing critical debate on one of the prominent features of children's literature: its obsession with sequels. Apart from commercial reasons, it has been frequently claimed that children enjoy repetition and predictability. This chapter discusses the artistic premises for series, sequels, and prequels, illustrating the argument with a number of contemporary “quels” to classic ...

Encyclopaideia, 2017

The first part of title of the paper is a quotation from a young adult novel by Patrick Ness, Mor... more The first part of title of the paper is a quotation from a young adult novel by Patrick Ness, More Than This (2013), in which the protagonist awakens, presumably after death, in a new place where he does not know the rules. Through exploring the unfamiliar space, the character gradually comes to insights about his true identity. The paper, based on recent studies in spatiality and cognitive narratology, focuses on the ways fiction for young readers evokes the sense of place and space that supports identity formation. Through a close reading of selected passages from texts describing characters' perception of unfamiliar space, the paper argues that fiction offers readers embodied experience of space and therefore of space-related identity.

Maria Nikolajeva beskaeftiger sig med stemme, genus og magt i bornelitteraturen. Hvilken effekt h... more Maria Nikolajeva beskaeftiger sig med stemme, genus og magt i bornelitteraturen. Hvilken effekt har det eksempelvis, nar en mandlig forfatter benytter sig af en kvindelig fortaellerstemme – og nar voksne skriver, som om de er born?

Narrative Works, 2019

Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new, sti... more Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new, stimulating approaches to literary texts and neuroscientists with new insights about human emotions, empathy, and memory through evidence from fiction. What have so far been largely neglected are the implications of cognitive criticism for the study of literature targeting a young audience, whose theory of mind and empathic skills are not yet fully developed. A cognitive approach to children's and young adult literature has to meet several challenges less relevant in general fiction. Firstly, how is a young fictional character's consciousness represented by an author whose cognitive and affective skills are ostensibly superior? Secondly, how do texts instruct their young readers to employ theory of mind in order to assess both the young protagonist's emotions and their understanding of other characters' emotions (higher-order mind-reading)? Thirdly, how can fiction support y...

Children's Literature in Education, 2019

This article considers alternatives to the established constructivist approaches to children's li... more This article considers alternatives to the established constructivist approaches to children's literature, exploring instead the potential of two relatively recent areas of inquiry, cognitive poetics and evolutionary literary criticism. The article questions the assumption, implied if not directly expressed by Peter Hollindale in Signs of Childness in Children's Books (1997), that adult writers have the prerogative to write about a child's experience because, since they once were children, a child's mind is accessible to them; that they can know what it is like to be a child. With reference to brain research, this position is untenable due to the cognitive gap between adult and child. While this binary has been strongly opposed in children's literature criticism, and while it is impossible and counterproductive to draw a clear-cut line between childhood and adulthood, Hollindale's concept of childness suggests a number of qualities that cognitive studies considers irretrievably lost when the brain is restructured during adolescence. The purpose and attraction of children's literature, therefore, lie in capturing and artistically representing these qualities.

International Research in Children's Literature, 2016

Twenty-first-century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn in strong r... more Twenty-first-century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. Cultural theories have generated fruitful approaches to children's fiction through the lenses of gender, class, race and sexual orientation, and psychoanalytically oriented theories have explored ways of representing childhood as a projection of (adult) interiority, but the physical existence of children as represented in their fictional worlds has been obscured by constructed social and psychological hierarchies. Recent directions in literary studies, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies and cognitive criticism, are refocusing scholarly attention on the physicality of children's bodies and the environment. This trend does not signal a return to essentialism but reflects the complexity, plurality and ambiguity of our understanding of childhood and its representation in ...

Children's Literature Comes of Age, 2015

IT IS NO longer possible for one person to cover the entire range of children's literature. The g... more IT IS NO longer possible for one person to cover the entire range of children's literature. The global nature of culture today, the availability of literature from Japan, China, the Middle East, Africa, and even the English translations of the stories told by the Australian aboriginal people or the First Nations peoples of Canada and the Russian transcriptions of tundra peoples, discourage any claim to an exhaustive review. Above all, the domination of English in publishing and on the Internet contributes to a "uniformization" of the imagination, particularly in children's culture, through the mass production of films and the press. This new international order increases the responsibility of the critics and of any statement intended to define the legitimacy or distinctive signs of chaotic production; the requirements of theoretical clarity must not lead us to overlook the possible impact and consequences of every formal statement. This is why Maria Nikolajeva's attempt is provocative and stimulating for an examination of the cultural and-to a lesser degree-of the political values implicitly at stake in the field of children's literature and criticism. In Children s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic, which reflects the breadth of her culture, the finesse of her analysis, and a carefully argued thesis, she does not imagine that she can cover the entire range of contemporary children's literature; on the contrary, she modestly points out in her conclusion that "everything that has been said obviously refers to a very small portion of modern children's books, even a very tiny part of what is normally classified as quality literature" (207). However, the method she uses, the books she chooses to study, and her general approach, all reveal ARIEL:

Barnelitterært forskningstidsskrift, 2015

Contemporary picturebook theory has produced a wide range of concepts and terms for the analysis ... more Contemporary picturebook theory has produced a wide range of concepts and terms for the analysis of the various aspects of conventional picturebooks. However, as picturebooks are rapidly entering the digital age, there is an urgent need to keep picturebook theory up to date. The multimodal nature of picturebooks, that so far has predominantly implied a combination of the verbal and the visual modes, is expanding to include auditory, tactile, and performative dimensions. This article explores the ways that digital picturebooks, or apps, demand not only new approaches, but also new terminology to describe features characteristic of the new medium, as well as conventional picturebook features acquiring a new significance in digital picturebooks. These include materiality, paratexts, page layout and performance modes. Special attention is paid to the ways app developers employ the spatio-temporal affordances of digital visual texts. The article also investigates the various levels and types of user participation, in a range from merely swiping between screens to co-creating the narrative. The predominantly theoretical argument of the article is illustrated by a selection of digital picturebooks, where relevant in comparison to printed versions.

Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children's Literature Research, 2012

The paper takes as its point of departure cognitive criticism, the direction of inquiry that inve... more The paper takes as its point of departure cognitive criticism, the direction of inquiry that investigates readers' cognitive and affective engagement with literature, partly based on recent brain research. It argues that for young readers who may not yet have developed full comprehension of fundamental moral issues and who have not attained the literary competence necessary to understand fictive characters' mental processes, representation of emotions in literature may produce a problem. Since guilt is a complex social emotion, involving a reconciliation of several contradictory goals, such representation demands well-developed empathy and advanced mind-reading skills, as well as factual knowledge of relevant legislation and understanding of moral implications of crime, guild and remorse. The paper examines these issues through a reading of two texts for young audience, Forbidden (2010), by Tabitha Suzuma, and His Dark Materials trilogy (1995Á2000), by Philip Pullman. The former is totally focused on guilt, in legal as well as moral sense, experienced by two siblings who enter an incestuous relationship. In the latter, guilt is less conspicuous, yet proves on closer consideration to be a major plot engine in the protagonist Lyra's physical and spiritual quest. While Suzuma's novel has an overt educational agenda, it is ambiguous in supporting young readers' ethical position towards the protagonists' guilt. In Pullman's trilogy, guilt becomes closely connected with the fundamental philosophical issues of determinism and free will. Although Pullman does not provide any clear-cut ethical guidance either, the use of emotion discourse, or emotion ekphrasis, is more subtle, not least because the genre allows a outward projection of emotions in the form of daemons. Lyra's guilt becomes a driving engine in her maturation process. The ultimate argument of the paper is that literature provides an excellent training field for young readers' developing of empathy skills, and the vicarious experience of guilt exposes readers to a wide range of ethical questions.

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Canadian Children's Literature, 2007

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The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, 2014

Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature, 2017

Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature

The twenty-first century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn, in strong ... more The twenty-first century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn, in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. While cultural theories have generated fruitful approaches to children's fiction through the lenses of gender, class, race or sexual orientation, and while psychoanalytically oriented theories have explored ways of representing childhood as a projection of (adult) interiority, the physical existence of children, albeit in their fictional worlds, has been obscured by constructed social and psychological hierarchies. Recent directions of literary studies, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies and cognitive criticism, bring back scholars' attention to the physically of a child's body and the environments within which this body exists, functions and develops. This trend, however, does not simply take scholars of children's literature back to essentialism, but reflects the complexity, plurality and ambiguity of our understanding of childhood and its representation in fiction produced ams marketed for young audiences. This article examines some of the current trends in international children's literature research with a particular focus on materiality.

Children's literature as a side effect of evolution Evolutionary, or Neo-Darwinist criticism is a... more Children's literature as a side effect of evolution Evolutionary, or Neo-Darwinist criticism is a direction of inquiry that explores the role of arts for survival and natural selection. As a theory based on biology and biopsychology, evolutionary criticism is extremely hostile toward most twentieth-century literary studies, in particular New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism and various directions of critical theory, that have been widely employed in children's literature scholarship. Instead, it claims that any study of literature and arts must take biological aspects of human existence into consideration. In this stance, evolutionary criticism constitutes a similar turn as ecocriticism, material studies, cognitive and corporeal narratology – interdisciplinary fields that bring firm scientific foundation into humanities. Evolutionary criticism draws our attention to the significance of natural and imagined orders in the history of humanity. Imagined orders, as opposed to natural orders, include

Childness Revisited. University of York, May 5, 2017

Frames of the body. Spaces and places in Children’s Literature, international symposium. Universi... more Frames of the body. Spaces and places in Children’s Literature, international symposium. University of Padua, Italy, April 20, 2017

Empathy Lab Pioneer Schools Day, March 9, 2017

Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepperp... more Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepperpot; or Heidi, fresh from her Swiss mountainside – these foreign stars of children’s literature were popular fixtures on British bookshelves at the end of the last century. So where are the new international children’s stories for tonight’s bedtime reading? (Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, September 4, 2016).

The ongoing debate about the paucity of translated books in the UK encourages publishers and book promoters to widen British children's horizons by exposing them to literature from foreign cultures. But if publishers are looking for a new Pippi they are looking in the wrong place. Contemporary Swedish children's and young adult literature has gone a long way from the idyllic Småland of Astrid Lindgren's works. They reflect the harsh reality of today's young Swedes, the anxiety and frustration of the twenty-first century.

This talk explores some recent Swedish young adult novels, discussing them against the common British cultural image of Nordic children's literature illustrated by Pippi, the Moomins and Mrs Pepperpot.

200 Years of The Nutcracker. Anglia Ruskin University. December 2, 2016

Centre for Intermediality and Multimodality, Linnaeus University, Sweden. January 24, 2017

Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepper... more Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepperpot; or Heidi, fresh from her Swiss mountainside – these foreign stars of children’s literature were popular fixtures on British bookshelves at the end of the last century. So where are the new international children’s stories for tonight’s bedtime reading? (Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, September 4, 2016).

This talk will explore some recent Swedish young adult novels, discussing them against the common British cultural image of Nordic children's literature illustrated by Pippi, the Moomins and Mrs Pepperpot.

This talk sets the emergent digital literature in a broader evolutionary context, beginning with ... more This talk sets the emergent digital literature in a broader evolutionary context, beginning with the the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago and further to the invention of writing and the invention of printing. Building on Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, the talk explores the much-discussed difference in engagement with printed and digital literature from a posthuman perspective. It suggests that the implications of the new medium goes beyond multi-literacy skills but affects storytelling as such, and that the (im)balance of cerebral hemispheres is gradually changing toward the dominance of the right hemisphere. As a result, the postmillenial generation's brains are going through a major cognitive change that both reflects and adjusts to digital storytelling, including its aesthetic, social and neurological aspects.

Fiction portraying disabled protagonists invites readers to use their imagination to consider a h... more Fiction portraying disabled protagonists invites readers to use their imagination to consider a human condition beyond their own life experience; a condition so fundamentally different from their own that there are hardly any common points to identify or empathise with the characters. This talk will discuss how texts targeting young audiences may potentially enhance their cognitive and emotional literacy by activating and stimulating imagination, attention and memory. Advocates of cognitive literary theory that underpins my research claim that it is not merely a new direction of inquiry, but a completely new way of thinking about literature. The talk will demonstrate how, by using the cognitive toolkit, we can think in a new way about representation of disability, and by extension, about representation of other themes and issues in literature. While most cognitive literary studies work on the assumption that readers possess cognitive skills required to engage with fiction, this may not be the case with young readers whose cognitive skills are in the making. The predominantly theoretical argument will be supported by examining three recent young adult novels: The White Darkness, by Geraldine McCaughrean, She is Not Invisible, by Marcus Sedgwick, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon. I will focus on two mutually dependent questions: firstly, how disability is represented, and secondly, how the texts are constructed narratively to optimise readers' cognitive and affective engagement.

The twenty-first century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn, in strong ... more The twenty-first century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn, in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. While cultural theories have generated fruitful approaches to children's fiction through the lenses of gender, class, race or sexual orientation, and while psychoanalytically oriented theories have explored ways of viewing/representing childhood as a projection of (adult) interiority, the physical existence of children, albeit in their fictional worlds, has been obscured by constructed social and psychological hierarchies. Recent directions of literary studies, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism and cognitive criticism, bring back the scholars' attention to the physically of a child's body and the environments within which this body exists, functions and develops. This trend, however, does not simply take scholars of children's literature back to essentialism, but reflects the complexity, plurality and ambiguity of our understanding of childhood and its representation in fiction produced ams marketed for young audiences. The talk will examine some of the current trends in international children's literature research with a particular focus on body and place.

The 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for identifying the spot in the human brain responsi... more The 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for identifying the spot in the human brain responsible for spatial orientation. While not discovered yet, there is doubtless a mechanism in the brain that allows readers to orientate within fictional worlds. Such orientation is possible through life-to-text projection, when readers transfer their experience of real places onto fiction; and through text-to-life projection, when they learn how to navigate real worlds through reading experience. This talk will explore the affordances of fictional texts written and marketed for young readers, which enhance their understanding of fictionality and stimulate attention, imagination, memory, and other aspects of cognitive activity. The talk will bring together recent research within cultural geography, cognitive criticism and children's literature.

In his study of brain laterality, The Master and His Emissary (2008), Iain McGilchrist proposes a... more In his study of brain laterality, The Master and His Emissary (2008), Iain McGilchrist proposes a hypothesis about historical periods' preference for different art forms and directions as a result of interplay between cultural development and the evolution of the human brain. One of his observations points at the tangible trend toward the dominance of the left cerebral hemisphere over the right one, beginning in the fifteenth century in the Western world, when written language gradually gained supremacy over oral and visual communication. Based partially on McGilchrist's book, Hugh Crago's Entranced by Story (2014) offers a fascinating exposé of readers' engagement with fiction, connected to individual rather than historical brain development, in particular the varying dominance of right or left cerebral hemispheres at different age. A combination of these two approaches has far-reaching consequences for general thinking about multimodality and learning. While we should be cautious about making definite statements before we have reliable experimental research, it is gratifying to speculate how brain laterality potentially affects young learners' preference for visual or verbal narratives; how the cerebral hemispheres process visual and verbal information in different manners; and how multimodal narratives can be used to enhance learners' cognitive and emotional literacy.

The article, based on a crossdisciplinary framework of cultural geography and children's literatu... more The article, based on a crossdisciplinary framework of cultural geography and children's literature theory, discusses three children's novels set on islands: Kensuke's Kingdom (1999), by Michael Morpurgo, Gullstruck Island (2009), by Frances Hardinge, and Midwinterblood (2011), by Marcus Sedgwick; all of which operate within ambiguous fictional worlds and use ambiguous narrative perspective. While the island topos and the presence of maps are prominent features in children's literature, the three texts illustrate different approaches to the employment and function of maps. In each text, the issues of belonging/not belonging, othering, time/space connections and interactions, mythical and contemporary world, nature/culture, displacement and spatial marginalisation are emphasised through the maps that acquire a substantially more prominent part of the narrative than in most conventional children's novels.

This paper will explore the impact of digital books on the formation, maintenance and ongoing ch... more This paper will explore the impact of digital books on the formation, maintenance and ongoing change of literary canons. The easy availability of e-books with expired copyright is one kind of evidence of certain books' status as classics. The existence of various versions (at various prices) of the same book confirms this status. The digital revival of once popular books that have fallen into oblivion demonstrates the power of digitalisation in retrospective re-configuration of canons. The emergence of digital epitexts, such as websites, social network pages, educational sites and fan sites, add to this process. The selection principles, or absence thereof, for producing picturebook apps from existing picturebooks, is yet another indication of their canonical position.

In contrast, the immediate availability of newly published books in digital editions affects current canon formation, since the existence of a digital version contributes to the commercial value of the book, its circulation to a maximum of readers, and, albeit to a lesser degree, the attention it receives from the critics and practitioners. By extension, texts that only appear in digital versions, may in the future create a specific, parallel canon of their own. (The vast area of self-publishing will not be discussed).

The paper does not aspire to offer a comprehensive overview of the area, since it is not only immense, but changing day by day. Instead it will raise some fundamental questions about re-conceptualising canons, including national canons, academic canons, school canons, and popular canons, in the age when the role of the audience in canon formation is more prominent than at any other time in human history.

The works of Mikhail Bakhtin have been widely employed in international research on children's li... more The works of Mikhail Bakhtin have been widely employed in international research on children's literature since the late 1980s when they became available outside Russia. The research community not only seized the various parts of Bakhtin's theoretical framework as fruitful tools for examining texts produced and marketed for young audience, but in the first place realised the significance of Bakhtin's theory of the novel for holistic approaches to children's literature as an art form. Firstly, children's literature is inescapably heteroglot, since it is built on the coexistence of and conflict between the adult and the child discourse. This is not merely reflected in the text through the cognitive discrepancy between the adult and child narrative subjectivities, but also in the inevitable asymmetical power positions, reminiscent of other heterological discourses, such as feminist, queer and postcolonial, where Bakhtin's ideas have similarly been creatively utilised. However, secondly, children's literature is also inherently carnivalesque, since it allows temporary empowerment of the disempowered (children), sanctioned by those in power (adults). While the social norms disrupted by carnival in children's literature are typically re-established, the carnivalesque structure has a strong subversive and transformative potential, textual as well as extratextual. Thirdly, children's literature is consciously and consistently dialogical because of its integral eclecticism, drawing on folktales, mainstream literature and popular culture, apart from its own rich intertextuality. Children's literature, more than any other kind of literature, is transnational and transgenerational. Finally, the specific chronotope of childhood, with its restricted spatiality and temporality and its focus on futurity, reflects Bakhtin's concept of incompleteness as the foremost characteristic of the polyphonic novel. Bakhtin-inspired research of children's literature has produced a substantial body of work, some of which will be introduced in this panel.