bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Papering over the Cracks? Paperhouse as a 'Make-over' of Catherine Storr's Marianne Dreams
Authors: Rudd David
Published: January 2022

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All our Christmases Come at Once: War, Peace and the Fin de Siècle
Authors: Scutter Heather
Published: January 2022

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The ACTF Genre
Authors: Rutherford Leonie
Published: January 2022

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Magical Realism and Children's Literature: Diana Wynne Jones's Black Maria and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children as a Test Case
Authors: Rosenberg Teya
Published: January 2022

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Marsden and Masculinity: A Gender Analysis of Dear Miffy
Authors: Pearce Sharyn
Published: January 2022

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Reviewing Literature for Adolescents and Young Adults: Critical Pedagogy in Action?
Authors: Nixon Helen , Comber Barbara
Published: January 2022

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Fixity and Flow in Garth Nix's Sabriel
Authors: Mills Alice
Published: January 2022

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Narnia: An Affirmative Vision
Authors: Pinsent Pat
Published: January 2022

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A Review of Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature
Authors: McGillis Roderick
Published: January 2022

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'A Song in Search of a Voice that is Silent': Feminist Readings of When She Hollers and Touching Earth Lightly
Authors: McCormack Anna Beth
Published: January 2022

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Ethel Turner and the ‘Voices of Dissent’: Masculinities and Fatherhood in The Cub and Captain Cub
Authors: Nelson Claudia
Published: January 2022

In his interesting study 'Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920', Martin Crotty argues that turn-of-the-century Australians firmly rejected the androgynous, domesticated gender role that both children's fiction and the public schools had offered Australian boys in the 1870s... Work such as Crotty's should help to inspire any number of reexaminations of the masculine gender role in texts that sought to acculturate young readers before, during, and after the Great War.
Shakespeare as National Discourse in Contemporary Children’s Literature
Authors: Hately Erica
Published: January 2022

Accepting Stephens' assertions about some of the cultural functions of children's literature, this paper raises the question of what happens in contemporary children's novels when that which is marked as 'centrally important' to both the child protagonist and reader is Shakespeare. More than that, I wish to examine the cultural complexities that are raised when that child protagonist and often the implied reader is Australian.
Editorial
Authors: Bradford Clare
Published: January 2022

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Deemed Unsuitable for Children: The Editing of Oodgeroo's Stradbroke Dreamtime
Authors: Jones Jennifer
Published: January 2022

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:
Oodgeroo of the Tribe of Noonuccal, Custodian of the Land Minjerriba, spent three decades of her life in the public sphere. In the 1960s, known as Kath Walker, she established and consolidated her reputation as a pan-Aboriginal activist and 'people's poet’. Her voice was received as representative of Aboriginal experience and concerns, as she lamented the lack of civil rights, impoverished living conditions, the loss and destruction of traditional cultures and lands. Strident political poems such as ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights' and 'Oration' were first delivered at political gatherings and became catch- cries for the political struggle of organisations such as the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) and the National Tribal Council. However, for the majority of her public life Oodgeroo spurned this title as people's poet, preferring to be known as an 'Educator'.
Learning Just for the Fun of It: The Case for Video Games (Book Review)
Authors: Durrant Cal
Published: January 2022

Review(s) of: 'What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy' by James Gee (2003). New York, Palgrave Macmillan. RRP $66.00.
Situating Childhood: A Reading of Spatiality in Aboriginal Picture Books
Authors: Lunt Trish
Published: January 2022

Three picture books by Aboriginal authors, Bob Randall and Kunyi June-Anne McInerney's 'Tracker Tjugingji', and Elaine Russell's 'A is for Aunty' and 'The Shack that Dad Built' are considered arguing that they represent Australian childhoods in ways which refer to and mobilise Aboriginal conceptualisations of embodied space. The analysis of these Aboriginal picture books insists on local, specific formulations of place, which are shaped by colonialism, but which reappropriate Aboriginal spaces.
New Social Orders: Reconceptualising Family and Community in Utopian Fiction
Authors: Mallan Kerry , Bradford Clare , Stephens John
Published: January 2022

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:

The family is the cradle into which the future is born; it is the nursery in which the new social order is nourished and reared during its early and most plastic period.
(Sidney Goldstein, Marriage and Family Living, 1946)1
When Goldstein conceived the metaphor of the American family as the cradle of the future he was writing at a specific historical moment, ‘one to which the stresses of war, the uncertainties of the ensuing peace, and the emerging relationship between ideologies of the family and American national identity together lent an unparalleled ambiguity and anxiety about family life’ (Levey 2001, p.125). Nearly 60 years on, the same conditions seem still to apply not only to the United States, but also to many other countries across the globe. The linking of family to the social well-being of a nation and its individual citizens is a familiar rhetoric employed by politicians, religious leaders, social commentators, and scholars, who rely on the interplay between an actual social unit and its metaphorical extensions to produce an illusion of ‘the truth’. In a similar way, the notion of a ‘new social order’ offers the utopian promise of a better life than that which current or past social orders have provided. Again the force of the metaphor resides in its capacity to appeal to both the intellect and the emotions.
Allan Baillie’s Secrets of Walden Rising as Critical Dystopia: Problematising National Mythologies
Authors: Pennell Beverley
Published: January 2022

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:
Allan Baillie’s Secrets of Walden Rising (1996) is a novel about ‘the politics of history’ (Fernandez 2001, p. 42) and an examination of the text’s significant challenges to the dominant historical stories of its time seems appropriate as Australia’s ‘history wars’ continue. In this paper I examine the critical dystopian strategies employed in Secrets of Walden Rising to subvert some of the utopian national mythologies of white settler Australia. Baccolini (2003 p.115) argues that critical dystopias tend to be ‘immediately rooted in history’ and that the critique they carry out exposes the revisionist impulse of historical narratives and the erasures they inevitably sanction. In Secrets of Walden Rising the control of national narratives and its erasures are represented as the underside of utopian national mythologies. In this text, the dystopian discourse opposes the pursuit of agricultural profits where this requires a disregard for the sustainability of the natural landscape, critiquing the pursuit of profit when it depends upon violence and social hierarchies for its continuation. The critical dystopian conventions of the novel set up a dialogue between past and present society, between the contemporary dystopian experience of a despoiled rural Australia and the older national mythologies that construct utopian versions of ‘Australia’ as either a pastoral idyll, or as an exciting frontier gold-mining town where fortunes are made, or as a working man’s paradise. Secrets of Walden Rising is apocryphal in its closure, offering a caution for the present time with regard to environmental sustainability in the face of a society where economic imperatives remain central to its raison d’être. Baccolini and Moylan (2003, p.7) argue that traditional dystopias ‘maintain utopian hope outside their pages, if at all; for it is only if we consider dystopia as a warning that we as readers can hope to escape its pessimistic future’. However in the critical dystopia, Baccolini and Moylan (2003, p.7) argue that hope is offered within the text. Secrets of Walden Rising is bleak in closure and the cognitive engagement outside the reading of the text is part of its pleasure and pain. However insofar as the novel’s closure invites readers to note the warning signs seen by the main protagonist, Brendan, the novel offers a ‘horizon of hope’ (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, p.6) within the text.
‘Biting the hand that feeds’: Consumerism, Ideology and Recent Animated Film for Children
Authors: Hinkins Jillian
Published: January 2022

It is the intention of this paper to explore the impact of consumerism on recent children's animated film, with a particular emphasis on some of the ways in which the medium is constructed in order to sell itself, and the effect that ideologies of consumption can be seen as having on the ideologies both embedded in and overtly conveyed through filmic texts in general and including a close analysis of Dreamworks' 2006 animated film Over the Hedge.
Editorial
Authors: Dudek Debra , Ommundsen Wenche
Published: January 2022

Building cultural citizenship: Multiculturalism and children’s literature

In his influential book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (1998), Ghassan Hage compares different versions of multiculturalism using an example from a children’s book, The Stew that Grew by Michael and rhonda Gray. the book presents an allegory of Australian cultural diversity: the ‘eureka stew’ which features ingredients brought by all the ethnic groups that make up the Australian nation. According to Hage, it is an allegory fraught with ideological paradox: ‘far from celebrating cultural diversity – or rather, in the process of so doing,’ the book actually embodies ‘a White nation fantasy in which White Australians...enact...their capacity to manage this diversity.’ (p.119) He explains that although the stew is presented as the palatable blend of all the cultural influences which went into its making, it is not a mix where all cultures are equal: the Anglo character Blue is in charge of the cooking throughout; the ‘ethnics’ are reduced to the function of adding flavour.
The Hegemony of Western Categorisation and the Underdevelopmentof Children’s Literature in ‘Other’ Worlds
Authors: Duh Ming Cherng
Published: January 2022

The extent to which the development of children's literature in other countries may be dependent on Western modes of thought is discussed by exploring the problems relating to academic research in children's literature as faced by graduate students and scholars in Taiwan. The scholarship is argued to be dominated by Western nations, whose cultural products represent hegemony, by applying perspectives and metaphors from the field of sociology of development.
Embodying a Racialised Multiculturalism: Strategic Essentialism and Lived Hybridities in Hoa Pham’s No One Like Me
Authors: Dudek Debra
Published: January 2022

A brief analysis of Hoa Pham's novel is presented by situating it within discourses of multiculturalism and the field of Asian-Australian Studies. The negotiation of tension in Hoa Pham's junior fiction novel 'No One Like Me' is examined and it is argued that it strategically essentialises race and gender in order to destabilise homogenised conceptions of these categories of identity.
‘Abandoned Boys’ and ‘Pampered Princes’: Fantasy as the Journey to Reality in the Harry Potter Sequence
Authors: Webb Caroline
Published: January 2022

With the publication of the seventh and final novel in the Harry Potter sequence, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), it is at last possible to judge not only the thematic agendas of the sequence but also its overarching narrative strategy. The early novels of the Harry Potter series were derided, among other things, for an apparent formulaic quality, effectively identified by critics such as Zipes. Not only did Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) demonstrably owe a large debt to the structure and characterisation of the conventional early twentieth-century British school story, but its two sequels, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), closely imitated the structure of the first, as Zipes has shown in some detail (Zipes, 2001, pp.176-77). To such critics as Zipes, this imitative structure made manifest the poverty of Rowling's invention and the consequent unoriginality of her writing.
Fantasy Motif Metaphors: Magical Powers as Exceptionality in Disney’s The Incredibles and Zizou Corder’s Lion Boy trilogy
Authors: Chappell Shelley
Published: January 2022

While works of the fantasy genre convey literal stories which make sense according to the laws of their fictional worlds, the very impossibilities of these narratives invite further readings of their ‘secondary or tertiary levels of meaning’ (Bleiler 1983, p.vii; also see McGillis 1996a, p.72; Walsh 1981, p.38). Such readings have been generated through the analytical lenses of allegory, parable, fable, symbol and metaphor. A specific focus upon the operation of metaphor in recurrent fantasy motifs enables a precise analysis of fantasy’s secondary levels of meaning. Such a methodology scrutinises fantasy’s engagement with cultural assumptions and ideas, highlighting the ideological implications of fantasy and thus verifying fantasy’s inherent relevance to reality. This article aims to illustrate the value of this methodology by analysing the motif of magical powers as exceptionality in Disney’s The Incredibles (2003) and Zizou Corder’s Lion Boy trilogy (2003-2005).
The Real Lies: The Simulacrum in Catherine Fisher’s The Oracle
Authors: Free Anna
Published: January 2022

Fiction written for children and young adults has absorbed postmodern culture in many ways, overtly in some picture books, and more covertly in other young adult fiction. One aspect of postmodernism is concerned with what is real, what is more real, and what constitutes the simulacrum. the simulacrum concerns the surface of things, the ability to copy, and (in a postmodern sense) the ability of the original to disappear. examples of this in young adult cultures exist in abundance, and yet even though the text chosen for this paper is set in an imagined world it illuminates the confrontation between the real and the unreal for the postmodern young adult subject. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard (1994) and Jacques Derrida (1974), I investigate the simulacra and the surfaces that represent belief and social order in Catherine Fisher’s The Oracle (2003), where Mirany provides a sceptical subject position for young adult readers. I argue that peeling back the layers of representation, looking under the surface, reveals only more surface and more representation, making ‘surface’ (or ‘outer face’) a tautology. the ‘realness’ of the surface is deceptive. What can be seen with the eye, or touched with the hand is no longer trustworthy.
Behind the Bum: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Andy Griffiths’ Bum Trilogy
Authors: Mills Alice
Published: January 2022

Anal jokes abound in Andy Griffiths’ trilogy of novels for children, The Day My Bum Went Psycho (2001)1, Zombie Bums From Uranus (2003) and Bumageddon (2005). The titles of the second and third volumes give a fair idea of the quality and makeup of these jokes: they generally take the form either of double entendres (Uranus or “your anus”, a joke likely to be lost on American readers because in the USA “anus” is a taboo word and Uranus is therefore mispronounced “urinous”) or anal transmogrifications of common words (Bumageddon for Armageddon). Such jokes can be found on almost every page of the trilogy, sometimes more than once on a page. To date, Griffiths’ Bum trilogy has received scant critical attention with the exception of Yvonne Hammer’s ‘Interrogating the Humanist subject in Carnivalesque Quest Novels’ (2006); but its extreme focus on matters anal in both wordplay and plot invites scrutiny from those theoretical perspectives that take an interest in the scatalogical. In this paper I shall be considering the trilogy’s fondness for anal jokes and bums from three such perspectives, those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud.
'There's a Black Boy Dead and a Migloo Holding a Gun': Death, Aboriginality and History in Australian Adolescent Literature
Authors: James Kathryn
Published: January 2022

In 'Preying on the past: Contexts of some recent neo-historical fiction', Peter Pierce argues that, over the last five or so decades, Australian historical fiction has turned away from 'unconstrained and idealistic affirmations about Australia's future' to empathise instead with those figures in the historical landscape who were previously marginalised: 'victims of imperialism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism' (1992, p.307). This trend is particularly applicable to historical literature for younger readers, which now often tries to renegotiate history by providing a counterpoint to the metanarratives of the past (Stephens 2003, xii-xiii). Reflecting and responding to developments in the disciplines of historiography and, more generally, the humanities, texts in this genre are representative of the attempt to interrogate monolithic versions of Australian history - often called the 'three cheers' view - in which positivity, achievement and the peaceful settlement of the nation are key themes. At issue in these novels is thus the redressing of past wrongs, particularly with respects to the violent aspects of colonisation when so many members of the Indigenous population either died or were forcibly displaced. Each of the three adolescent novels I focus upon in this paper - Melissa Lucashenko's 'Killing Darcy' (1998), Gary Crew's 'No Such Country' (1991) and Mark Svendsen's 'Poison Under Their Lips' (2001) - is equally idiosyncratic in its approach to narrativising Australia's problematic colonial past.
Female Subjectivities in Postcolonial Literature
Authors: Harris Joanna
Published: January 2022

Reading postcolonial theory prompts the question posed by Leela Gandhi: 'How can the historian/investigator avoid the inevitable risk of presenting herself as an authoritative representative of subaltern consciousness?' (1998, p.3), which arises naturally out of Gayatri Spivak's challenging essay 'Can the subaltern speak?' (1985). Keeping this in mind, it seems necessary to preface any writing about postcolonial literature designed for a young adult readership with a statement of position. The crucial element which informs such writing is after all governed by location, in terms of ideological perspective, as well as geographically. Since the texts proposed for investigation are published by and written for a Western audience, and I am myself educated in a Western humanist tradition, I ought to be aware of the influence of this tradition on my perspectives and judgements. The processes of writing texts exploring cultural difference and the literary-critical practices of evaluating the success of such texts alike form part of a counterhegemonic movement attempting to redress a long history of imperialism, a movement which seeks to promote a feminist postcolonial perspective.
Manipulating the Next Generation: Translating Culture for Children
Authors: Epstein B.J.
Published: January 2022

Translators are interpreters of culture; they are the ones who make a source text and the culture that informs it available to a target readership, and they therefore have a certain amount of power over the readers. This is doubly the case when it comes to children's literature, as children do not always have the ability to recognise in what ways a text is being manipulated. Since adults write, edit, publish, translate, purchase, and teach literature for children, they are thus the ones who construct culture for them. The works adults choose to translate and how they do so can reveal what they think is appropriate or important for children, and why.When texts have culture-specific features, translators, whether for adults or children, have to consider the target audience. One major issue here is whether the readers will recognize or should learn about these aspects of the source culture. This is, in essence, the question of domesticating versus foreignisation, or, put another way, whether to bring the reader to the text or the text to the reader. In my studies of children's literature, I have found that translators tend to domesticate or change more than they would for adult readers, and this creates a very different, perhaps even manipulative, reading experience for the target audience. Since children's literature and its translation can be said to be a power play between adults and children (Rose 1993, p.2), the question then is: 'In what way adults (ab)use their power?'.
Imagining the New Indian Girl: Representations of Indian Girlhood in Keeping Corner and Suchitra and the Ragpicker
Authors: Superle Michelle
Published: January 2022

The capacity of young girls to represent a healthy new beginning is nothing new to children's literature. One need look no further, for example, than two classics: Frances Hodgson Burnett harnessed this figure's power with Mary in 'The Secret Garden' (1911), as did C. S. Lewis with Lucy in 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' (1950). Yet the way young girl characters are positioned in contemporary, English-language Indian children's novels by women writers does seem new; these 'new Indian girls' function to represent a modern, postcolonial India in which gender equality is beginning to find a happy home. Setting up a binary which positions societal values from pre-colonial and colonial India as backwards and problematic, these children's novels demonstrate the value of girls in postcolonial India - at least some girls, according to some writers.
‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury’: ‘Tail’-Telling, Imperialism and the Other in Alice in Wonderland
Authors: Webb Caroline
Published: January 2022

The review and analysis of Lewis Carroll's Alice - both 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking-Glass' are discussed. Alice portrays a child immersed in Victorian cultural perceptions of race and in contemporary English attitudes to the Other.
‘The Queen Had Only One Way of Settling All Difficulties. . . “Off with His Head!”’
Authors: Abate Michelle Ann
Published: January 2022

This article, on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), reveals the new interpretive possibilities that emerge about this classic fantasy when the character of the Queen of Hearts—along with her murderous mandate ‘Off With their Heads!’—is moved from the background to the forefront of consideration. In a detail that has been overlooked in previous scholarship, state-sanctioned executions were a vivid social reality and the subject of heated public controversy in England during the period when Carroll conceived and composed Alice. Throughout the nineteenth century but especially during the 1860s, the humanity, efficacy and even wisdom of the practice were discussed in popular newspapers, among British citizens, and by elected officials. In this chapter, I make a case that, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll weighed in on this debate. The Queen of Heart’s repeated, impulsive and usually absurd calls for various individuals to be executed satirize this longstanding civic practice and add a new, and previously neglected, area of cultural commentary within the novel: the anti-gallows movement.
‘Something of You that You Couldn’t Tell Me with Words’: Music, Affect, and Social Change in Gregory Maguire’s I Feel Like the Morning Star and Emma Trevayne’s Coda
Authors: Braithwaite Elizabeth
Published: January 2022

‘Music’, laments eighteen-year-old Anthem in Emma Trevayne’s Coda (2013), ‘used to be a voice against injustice. And now it is the injustice’ (p. 89, emphasis in original). The capacity of music to change people’s psychological and physiological states is a major part of how the dystopian authorities in the post-disaster society into which Anthem was born keep control over their citizens. This ability that music has to influence people individually or as a group is also an important mechanism, however, in the overthrow of those same authorities. Music as a tool for facilitating action against injustice is also explored in Gregory Maguire’s I Feel Like the Morning Star (1989), from which the quotation in the title of this paper is taken. Various real-world examples also show how music has been closely entwined with social revolution, such as in the overthrow of British monarch James Stuart in the seventeenth century (see Harol 2012, p. 583), the twentieth-century civil rights movement in America (see Friedman xv), the 2011 toppling of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, and also the removal from authority of Husni Mubarak in Egypt (see LeVine 2012, p. 794). Anthem’s statement about music as a voice against injustice invites the reader to see the young man’s struggle against the repressive Corporation as part of a long line of revolutions in which music has played a major role. Both I Feel Like the Morning Star and Coda show how tonal-rhythmic patterns coded by a given culture as ‘music’ (see Elliot 2000, p. 85) can inspire social and individual change by bringing people closer to a sense of who they intuit themselves to be and by facilitating intrapersonal and interpersonal communication at a level deeper than words, which positions those involved to challenge the stultifying and life- threatening dystopia in which they live.
Boy Meets Music: Affective and Ideological Engagements in David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy, Love is the Higher Law, and Two Boys Kissing
Authors: Hutton Rebecca
Published: January 2022

Music is a source of both affective and social power. As ‘a medium with a capacity for imparting shape and texture to being, feeling and doing’ and a ‘resource for social agency’ (DeNora 2000, pp. 152–153), the experience of audible music can be particularly productive. To consider musical references as they appear in prose fiction, at first glance, seems to consider an engagement far removed from the cognitive and bodily experience of listening to music, and therefore its productive potential. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre (2002), however, employs a Bakhtinian approach to musical reference in fiction narrative when she theorises how music can function as part of the heteroglossia of the novel. As ‘an equally vibrant language within the literary text’, she argues, musical reference offers another site ‘to engage social struggles’ (pp. xviii – xix). Scholars have further argued that references to music in young adult fiction can enter into textual processes of ideological positioning, the construction of subjectivity, and the negotiation of adolescent identity at individual, social and political levels.1
Haunted by Humans: Inverting the Reality of the Holocaust in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief
Authors: Yarova Aliona
Published: January 2022

Inversion in The Book ThiefIn Gabriel García Márquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings a strange angel-like man appears in the human world. A different kind of other-worldly visitor features in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief 1. In this text it is Death who takes a journey into the hellish realms of Nazi Germany to discover the humanity of the humans who were dehumanised in the Holocaust. The Book Thief is the story of a nine-year-old Liesel Meminger who lives in Germany during the escalation of World War II. The novel has several levels of the plot development: Liesel’s life during war; her relationships with her foster parents Hans and Rosa, the other residents of their neighbourhood, and a Jewish fist-fighter Max, who avoids deportation by hiding in her home; Liesel’s book thievery (as the title suggests) and the power of storytelling. The novel is set in a realistically depicted German town and could belong to the genre of historical realism were it not that Liesel’s story is narrated by the other-worldly character: Death. Death is the only unreal character in this otherwise realistic novel, and though he does not interact with real human characters, we see all the events through his eyes. This ‘magical’ narrator unveils a broader history of the war and the Holocaust by questioning: What is real? What is normal? What is humane? The inversion enables Zusak to present horror that would otherwise be too complex to grasp. As Hegerfeldt comments: ‘The world is an absurd place where [...] anything is more believable than the truth. Magic realist fiction proposes that such a topsy-turvy reality requires a similarly inverted approach’ (Hegerfeldt 2005, p. 339).
A Narrative Experiment: From the Revived Oral Tradition in Haroun and The Sea of Stories to Staccato Gaming in Luka and The Fire of Life
Authors: Lee Yiyin Laurie
Published: January 2022

In an attempt to represent the hybrid culture of a postcolonial India, Salmon Rushdie strives for aesthetic experiment and political assertion through his signature technique, magical realism. Compared to Rushdie’s other works, his two books for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010), seem light-hearted and fairy-tale-like, as child protagonists miraculously solve their problems through magic (the novels will hereafter be referred to as Haroun and Luka). These two novellas, written by Rushdie to entertain his sons, Zafar and Milan, illustrate how child protagonists can understand and solve problems in their world by exploring magical worlds and restoring the importance of storytelling. The two novellas also reflect Rushdie’s consistent worry about young people tasked with diversifying personal, cultural, and political discourses so as to improve society and enrich culture.
‘Sorry, I Don’t Speak Bear’ Voice, Agency, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Disney-Pixar’s Brave
Authors: Viswanath Tharini
Published: January 2022

This paper draws on Kristeva’s theories on abjection, studies on motherhood, and children’s literature scholarship to better understand the relationship between Merida, the adolescent protagonist, and her mother, Elinor, in the Disney-Pixar film Brave. At first glance, it seems as though Merida has a strong voice, and by standing up to her parents and refusing to go through with the betrothal they have arranged, it does seem as if she has agency and an established subject position as a headstrong tomboy. During the course of the film, however, Merida feels the need to silence her mother (by turning the latter into a bear) in order to be heard. Although Elinor is a bear for almost half the film, I argue that the maturity and subjectivity of the adolescent protagonist as daughter and princess come not just from a sense of agency, but also as a result of the bond she shares with her mother, a feature often missing from Disney princess films. I begin by examining the queen’s transformation into a bear (which is at once masculine, sexual, monstrous, and abject), and what that entails for both Merida and Elinor. Given that teen transformations traditionally reflect anxieties about becoming “the wrong kind of adult,” I am interested in examining the underlying reasons behind the adult mother’s transformation (Waller 2009, p. 44). Finally, I analyze the process of female community building, both with regard to speech (and consequently, silencing), and the rituals of feeding and eating.
Dead Funny? The Ideological Use of Humour and Comedy in Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017
Authors: Miller Alyson , Hutton Rebecca , Braithwaite Elizabeth
Published: January 2022

The threat of environmental devastation, and the speed with which humanity is damaging the planet, are widely viewed as serious concerns in the twenty-first century. Yet the gravity which accompanies interpretations of such issues can also serve as ‘a fruitful starting point for humor’ born of ‘incongruence[s] between the serious and the non-serious’ (Lyyktimäki 2015, p. 178). In Saci Lloyd’s young adult novels The Carbon Diaries 2015 and The Carbon Diaries 2017, humour and comedy contribute to each text’s attempts to encourage implied young adult readers to engage critically with the threat of ecological devastation, even though the questions of how to reduce the likelihood of ecological disaster most effectively on a broad scale, and how best to bring about responsible use of the environment, are problems which are still a long way from being answered
“Why would a dead girl lie?”: Hannah Baker as Willful Child ‘come to voice’ in 13 Reasons Why
Authors: Moore Amber
Published: January 2022

This paper examines representations of hostile and benevolent sexism in the young adult novel 13 Reasons Why (Asher, 2007), and how the female protagonist, Hannah Baker, resisted such manifestations of rape culture. Hannah exercised such resistance by taking on a willful girl-child (Ahmed, 2014) subject position through the creation of her métissage of taped testimonial messages recorded for thirteen peers who in some way influenced her death by suicide. As such, her project enabled Hannah to ‘come to voice’ (hooks, 1994) particularly in response to three sexist characters – Tyler, Bryce, and part-time narrator, Clay.
Contemporary History: First Nation Australian Representations in Nanberry: Black Brother White
Authors: Stanton Sophie
Published: January 2022

Representations of First Nation Australian and Torres Strait Islanders (First Nation Australians) in children’s literature have gone through many changes since the first literature for children published in the late 1800s. These representations often conformed to and perpetuated negative stereotypes that have changed with the social and political landscape. Given the degree of cultural investment in children’s and young adult literature it is important to work towards a landscape in which negative stereotypes give way to representations reflecting deeper inter-cultural understandings. In this context, the analysis of contemporary texts representing First Nation Australians has an important role to play.

This paper analyses Nanberry: black brother white by Jackie French, published in 2011. Nanberry is of interest as it is a contemporary, critically-acclaimed young adult novel. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the representations of the First Nation Australian characters in the novel with reference to analytical frameworks put forward by Bradford (2001) and Lucashenko (2000/2009).

Nanberry introduces alternative narratives about the colonisation of Australia and its impacts by using artistic licence, by the adoption of First Nation Australian perspectives and also the perspectives of other historical figures of whom little to no primary evidence of their lives survives to the present day. Nanberry balances historical research with artistic licence and has an implied young, modern day readership. The intersection of these three factors, has resulted in conflict and incongruities between the characters, the plot and even the cover image. This paper argues that these incongruities and conflicts are highly problematic in relation to the representation of First Nation Australian experience.
No Traveller Returns: The Liminal World as Ordeal and Quest in Contemporary Young Adult Afterlife Fiction
Authors: Masson Sophie
Published: January 2022

In recent years, fiction specifically set in or about the afterlife has become a popular, critically acclaimed subgenre within contemporary fiction for young adults. One of the distinguishing aspects of young adult afterlife fiction is its detailed portrayal of an alien afterworld in which characters find themselves. Whilst reminiscent of the world-building of high or quest fantasy, afterworlds in young adult afterlife fiction have a distinctively different quality, and that is an emphasis on liminality. Afterlife landscapes exhibit many strange, treacherous qualities. They are never quite what they seem, and this sense of a continually shifting multiplicity is part of the destabilisation experienced by the characters in the liminal world of the afterlife. Inspired by traditional but diverse images of afterlife, afterworld settings also incorporate aspects of dream-space as well as of the real, material world left behind by the characters. The uncanny world of the dead is not just background in these novels, but crucial to the development of narrative and character.

In this paper, it is argued that the concept of liminal place is at the core of the central ordeal and quest of characters in young adult afterlife fiction. It explores how authors have constructed the individual settings of their fictional afterworlds and examines the significance of the liminal nature of the afterworlds depicted in young adult afterlife fiction.
Look Who’s Talking – Quantifying the Lasting Effects of Fracture-Driven Interactions
Authors: Senters Chad , Harper Rachel , Jayakumar Swathika , Leonard Dick , Warren Mark , Woodroof Robert
Published: January 2022

Fracture-driven interactions (FDI’s) occur on most modern drilling and completion programs. These well-to-well interactions can be of benefit, but it is often difficult to quantify the lasting effects of these interactions and benchmark it for comparison.

The approach for quantifying the effects of fracture-driven interactions in this paper is to compare the magnitude and duration of communication events identified by chemical tracers for wells in a specific basin. Metrics are established to compare communication between projects to determine the effects of "common contributors" to significant fracture-driven interactions. The common contributors compared in this paper are well spacing, depletion effects from prior production, perforation cluster design, geologic features, and stimulation treatment design.

A "Communication Intensity" metric (CI) is established to quantify the amount of communication taking place on a particular pad or project. This is computed for hundreds of projects across a basin or multiple basins. The CI is used as a performance indicator to compare current project-level communication to area or basin-level benchmarks. Case histories are presented in this paper that utilize the CI metric to determine the effects of common contributors of well communication to established basin benchmarks. In addition to project-level communication, localized (well-level) communication events are investigated to determine the cause of the individual event and if any preventative or mitigative strategy could have been applied in the job design or execution phase.

Few if any industry benchmarks are available to compare the immediate, intermittent, and lasting effects of fracture-driven interactions (FDI’s) on a project or well level. The results of this paper outline a process for comparing projects to optimize well spacing and fracturing treatment design, as well as reflect on known and unknown features contributing to significant interactions.
An Investigation of Candidate Mechanisms for Hydraulic Fracture Swarming through High-Fidelity Numerical Modeling
Authors: Joseph Morris , Fu Pengcheng , Sherman Christopher , Wu Hui , Huang Jixiang , Fu Wei
Published: January 2022

Many have attributed the success of hydraulic fracturing in unconventionals to the development of increased reservoir contact area through complex fracture networks with significant shear-enhancement of flow on preexisting natural fractures. Core samples recovered in recent field experiments have revealed large numbers of subparallel hydraulic fractures (swarms) that provide an alternative explanation for the enhanced stimulated surface area. We argue that understanding the mechanisms behind the development of this stimulated surface area is key to optimizing the stimulation of unconventional resources. We investigate potential phenomena that could lead to fracture swarming. First, we consider whether "swarming" is indeed a correct term. We show that the null hypothesis that the hydraulic fractures are actually randomly placed cannot be rejected with significant confidence. We next investigate several mechanical explanations for the genesis of closely-spaced fractures (branching, poromechanics, variations in situ stress orientation, and near wellbore effects associated with perforations). Our analysis eliminated all mechanisms other than near wellbore effects to be the primary cause for the observed closely spaced hydraulic fractures.
A First Step for Fracturing: Successful Real Time Brain Calibration Lays the Foundation for Predicting Fracturing Outcomes
Authors: Karthik Mahadev , Andrea Kuesters , Andrew Czeropski , Yue Hu , Juan Vergara
Published: January 2022

Fracturing utilizes significant heuristics and biases in their execution. A pressure history match, changing simulator inputs to match actual field test, is limited by rig time and capacity of a human brain. A virtual agent or brain can quickly iterate across small step sizes for a wide range of inputs to find optimal real time solutions. The ability to match pressures in real time will allow time and cost savings on minifrac tests and reverse outs. More importantly, the virtual brain can learn from past mistakes, get better over time (reinforcement learning), never forget past tests, and compare pressure signatures from vast historical data. This would be the foundational step for predictive ability on frac treatments that would eventually automate operational decision making. This also allows for consistent execution and serves as a design aid in service of building enduring capability for completion engineers.

This agile project is currently the only reinforcement learning/machine learning project that interfaces with the reservoir within Wells at bp. A reward function that uses root mean square error between the brain's prediction and actual field data is used as the basis to reward or punish the brain i.e., reinforcement learning. Blind training of the brain was utilized on several deployments in the field. This led to a better understanding of the data engineering requirements to feed real time data to the virtual machine. As a result of the deployment, two brains in series are being run, one for pad fluid and one for frac fluid with proppant. By obtaining a real time calibration with pad, the cost of diagnostic tests is eliminated. More importantly, the brain can significantly shorten the learning curve for new engineers and help avoid typical execution mistakes. Finally, the vast memory capacity of an agent and its ability to compare various pressure traces in short time frames can eventually be used for predictive ability as the technology matures.

This project is acknowledged as a groundbreaking project within bp and industry. The concept can be replicated at scale to various other petroleum engineering operations given the vast amount of historical data available in various disciplines.
Azimuthally Resolved Wellbore Strain Measurements: A Powerful New Fracture Diagnostics Method
Authors: Zheng Shuang , Elliott Brendan , Sharma Mukul
Published: January 2022

In this paper, we present a novel fracture diagnostic method to determine the geometry of multiple propagating fractures. The method relies on the measurement of the Azimuthally Resolved WEllbore Strain Tensor (ARWEST) as a function of time at multiple locations in an observation well.

A pad-scale fracturing simulator is used to simulate dynamic fracture propagation in a treatment well. The geometry of the monitoring wellbore is represented with a very fine (millimeter scale) computation mesh to capture the impact of the propagating fractures on the monitoring wellbore. The axial and radial strain at different locations along the wellbore is computed as a function of time as the fractures approach the observation wellbore. These measurements together with the wellbore pressure response are interpreted to obtain the height, length and width of the fractures as well as the cluster efficiency of the stage.

The emergence of peaks in the strain and pressure monitoring data clearly detects the arrival of each fracture. As the fracture approaches the monitoring well, the tensile strain measured within the wellbore in the axial direction increases, the compressive strain in the radial direction increases and the sealed wellbore pressure increases. As the fracture intersects the wellbore, the tensile strain in axial direction decreases and compressive strain in the radial direction decreases. The sealed wellbore pressure further increases. When the treatment is complete, both the magnitude of the monitored strain and pressure decrease. The major axis of the oval wellbore is oriented towards the tip of the propagating fracture. The wellbore ovality, therefore, provides a direct measure of the location of the fracture tip in 3-D. The results obtained from these azimuthal wellbore measurements can be interpreted with the aid of the simulations to provide a new low cost facture diagnostic method.

This new 3-D fracture diagnostics method allows us to infer (a) the location of the fracture front, (b) estimate the geometry (length, height, width) and (c) determine the cluster efficiency by monitoring the strain tensor as a function of time along an observation well. The results presented here will allow operators to integrate the measured casing strain tensor and the sealed wellbore pressure data. Such a diagnostic method opens the possibility of real-time fracture diagnostics and optimization.