Bøger af Roderick McGillis

In a series of stories this book chronicles life in a small town in the 1050s. The stories involve life on one block, moving from house to house to follow the exploits of the people, especially the children, who lived on the block. The stories wander the spectrum from fantasy to the low mimetic, but whether they are openly unreal or close to the world we inhabit, they are about memory. The voice you hear in most of these stories is the voice of someone looking back, retracing the past, inventing memories, and imagining what it was like to be back there, re-feeling and re-experiencing that circumscribed world. We can't go home again, but we can imagine going home again and we do this by cross-fertilizing memory with imagination. This is the process at work here. Interestingly, memory has a way of attracting imagination. The two mental activities - remembering and imagining - are manifestations of desire, and we know how frustratingly unending desire is. Desire by definition cannot be satisfied. To satisfy desire is to end desire and to end desire is to end movement, to cease to live. Desire is, yes, an aspect of nostalgia, the longing for home, for that place of origin. Such desire may be unhealthy, yet it may also be free-floating, looking for a place to land. If it lands, it does so only until it has refueled and then it takes off again. And so if desire lands in the past, it does so only for a while. Visiting or revisiting the past is just a way of refueling for the future. Nostalgia of this kind is restorative.

This book offers a variety of approaches to children''s literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism.The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of "otherness" and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. Section 2 presents discussions of the colonialist mind-set in children''s and young adult texts from the turn of the century. Here works by writers of animal stories in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, works of early Australian colonialist literature, and Frances Hodgson Burnett''s A Little Princess come under the scrutiny of our postmodern reading practices. Section 3 deals directly with contemporary texts for children that manifest both a postcolonial and a neo-colonial content. In this section, the longest in the book, we have studies of children''s literature from Canada, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.

But perhaps more surprisingly, children's literature is especially sensitive to such matters, and fiction for children often struggles with dark and unpleasant issues.

Voices of the Other offers a variety of approaches to children's literature that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism.

He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century's most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red Ryder. The first serious study of a body of films that was central to the youth of two generations, He Was Some Kind of a Man combines the author's childhood fascination with this genre with an interdisciplinary scholarly exploration of the films influence on modern views of masculinity. McGillis argues that the masculinity offered by these films is less one-dimensional than it is plural, perhaps contrary to expectations. Their deeply conservative values are edged with transgressive desire, and they construct a male figure who does not fit into binary categories, such as insider/outsider or masculine/feminine. Particularly relevant is the author's discussion of George W. Bush as a cowboy and how his aspirations to cowboy ideals continue to shape American policy. This engagingly written book will appeal to the general reader interested in film, westerns, and contemporary culture as well as to scholars in film studies, gender studies, children's literature, and auto/biography.