The Playful Antiquarian

The April 2006 issue of The Looking Glass is a special issue on Japanese children’s literature. It contains the following articles:

• Japanese Picture Books / Jane and Bill McCullam of Cattermole Books
• “When the myth of life began our people shared life with humans, stone to earth, fire to water, trees to sky”: Multiplicity and Commonality in Hiromi Goto’s Water of Possibility / Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
• “The Art of Emptiness”: Buddhist Nature in picture books of Miyazawa Kenji’s Donguri to Yamaneko (Wildcat and the Acorns) / Helen Kilpatrick
• Walking Along With Nature: A Psychological Interpretation of My Neighbor Totoro / Rieko Okuhara
• Analyzing Ideology in a Japanese Fairy Tale /Jane E. Kelley
• A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of Illustrated Japanese Folktales / Yukiko Tosa
• Anne of Green Gables and Japan / M. Elizabeth DeBlois

There is also an article on Philip Pullman: Elaborately Wound: Philip Pullman’s Marlowean Muse / Lisa M. Miller

This issue was the one that I hoped to submit an article to but did not have time to draft something before the submission deadline. The articles that were submitted and selected are much better than anything I could have written, though.

The April 2006 issue of The Lion and the Unicorn is a special issue on Asian American Children’s Literature edited by Dolores de Manuel and Rocío G. Davis. This issue features the following articles:

• Paying with Shadows / Laurence Yep
• The Cultural Production of Asian American Young Adults in the Novels of Marie G. Lee, An Na, and Doris Jones Yang / Monica Chiu
• Asian American Autobiography for Children: Critical Paradigms and Creative Practice / Rocío G. Davis
• “The sound of bamboo planted deep inside them:” Reclaiming Filipino American History and Identity in Lakas and the Manilatown Fish / Melinda L. De Jesus
• Writing Chinese America into Words and Images: Storytelling and Retelling of The Song of Mu Lan / Lan Dong
• Negotiated Identities and Female Personal Space in Thai American Adolescent Literature / Rahpee Thongthiraj
• Toward a Poetics of Asian American Fantasy: Laurence Yep’s Construction of a Bicultural Mythology / Celestine Woo

This issue also includes book reviews for the following books:

• Archetypes and motifs in folklore and literature: a handbook
• Dime novel in children’s literature
• Clever maids: the secret history of the Grimm fairy tales
• Brown gold: milestones of African American children’s picture books, 1845-2002
• Important books: children’s picture books as art and literature
• Elusive childhood: impossible representations in modern fiction

These articles are available online to Project Muse subscribers only. Check your local library for access to print or electronic copies.