Rethinking children’s literature lies at the heart of the mutual investigation in which the various contributors to this issue of Breac are involved. Since their emergence as a distinct branch of Anglophone print culture over the course of the eighteenth century, books for young readers have…

This is a guide to critical works on Irish children’s literature. The bibliography includes citations of books and articles on work by Irish authors and illustrators, work set in Ireland, and on children’s literature where an Irish author, illustrator, or work is discussed. The bibliography includes…

On the 23^rd of May 2015, Ireland became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. This event reversed a large part, if not all, of Ireland’s reputation for a Catholic-led conservatism concerning sexual and gender identities. I argue in this article that we can see…

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for identifying the spot in the human brain responsible for spatial orientation.[1] While not discovered yet, there is doubtless a mechanism in the brain that allows readers to orientate within fictional worlds.…

This essay examines a small selection of novels for young readers published between 1993 and 2004 which deal in a variety of ways with themes of race and migration in Ireland. Padraic Whyte has drawn attention to “the manner in which children’s texts engage with complex cultural discourses in contemporary…

“Leis an úrscéal stairiúil a mheas i gceart ní mór é a scrúdú i gcomhthéacs na ré ónar eascair sé,”[1] de réir Bhreandáin Delap. Bíonn dearcadh éagsúil ag gach glúin ar imeachtaí stair a dtíre, agus is féidir linn na dearcthaí seo a ríomh…

The dominant image of Britain in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s is largely the product of a small group of writers (for example, T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh) who concocted a potent emotional cocktail from ingredients including survivor guilt, disappointment that they had missed being part…

A Poem

Sometimes, if not all the time, thinking should start with a poem. The fate of the evocative poem “Crocodile,” by the Russian children’s poet Kornei Chukovsky, will help us focus on some of the tensions and ambiguities at the heart of the curriculum and children debate.…

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-century frescoes depicting the effects of good and bad governance in a city could be images taken from the pages of a picturebook. It is easy to construct a simple narrative based on the activities of the characters going about their everyday business, with both good…

This essay examines the rationale behind the National Collection of Children’s Books (NCCB) project, funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC), which began in December 2013 and ended in December 2015. Attention then turns to the strengths and weaknesses of the finished project to discuss how its…

Despite the fact that Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840) was not Irish and did not write children’s literature that was in any way particularly Irish, her two years, between 1812 and 1814, as a governess in Cork figure as a transformative phase in her literary life. It was in Cork that she morphed from radical…

When I was seven, my beloved Uncle Harry died. I didn’t know what to make of my grieving father’s insistence that Uncle Harry had gone to heaven, and so I kept asking, “But did Uncle Harry die?” to which my father kept repeating, “Uncle Harry went to heaven.” Neither of us seemed able to face it,…

Is féidir smaoineamh ar dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge ar dhá bhealach éagsúla. Ar an gcéad dul síos is cinéal litríochta mionteanga í a tháinig amach le linn na hAthbheochana Náisiúnta agus Cultúrtha in Éirinn ón mbliain 1880, tionscadal a raibh sé d’aidhm aige mórtas náisiúnta a chothú i measc daoine as…