Academic literature on the topic 'JUVENILE FICTION / Reader - Chapter Books'

Anna Bugajska’s recent book Engineering Youth: The Evantropian Project in Young Adult Dystopias (2019) is an important and thought-provoking inquiry into the field of young adult literary criticism. While for the average reader, young adult narratives may be associated with juvenile tales created with an intent to provide escapist entertainment, a true connoisseur of youth literature is well aware of an immense didactic potential of this genre. Bugajska certainly belongs to the latter category as she diligently engages with young adult dystopias to highlight the immense critical power of these texts. In the following review article, the author of the paper is going to offer a brief commentary on the critical perspective that Bugajska employs to explore the notion of evantropia. The first section of this review discusses Bugajska’s volume as a part of utopian intellectual tradition, the second section postulates that ideas presented in Engineering Youth enrich literary criticism in the field of speculative fiction and children’s and young adult literature, the third section briefly discusses the layout of the volume and the content of each chapter, the fourth section presents an overview of selected core ideas that Bugajska presents in her work and in the last section the author of the paper offers his final thoughts on Engineering Youth.

Maps and Crime. Literary Maps and the Meaning of Places in Crime Series for Children In literature, and especially in crime fiction, the site of the action and the crime itself are often as crucial an element for the story as the main characters. Most theoretical approaches to crime literature have been primarily concerned with discussing genre typologies on the basis of the plot, the investigator and the investigation. Less attention has been paid to the landscape of crime fiction in both theory and analysis. In this article, I will discuss two series: Bjørn Sortland’s Art Detective Series and Martin Widmark and Helena Willis’ Whodunit Detective Agency Series. These very popular series have been chosen as examples because all the books in the series provide the readers with a map of the location of the action. In addition, both series are classified as chapter and young reader books. This means that the maps may provide strategic reading support for young and often inexperienced readers. Maps are not an uncommon peritextual phenomenon in books for children, and the maps in the series discussed here are therefore initially considered in the context of other maps in children’s literature. The article goes on to discuss how the maps and the places function as important tension-reinforcing elements in crime novels, and also as an expression of the mystery genre and the society the series represents.

The post-structuralist theory of literature brings a new concept of reading. A reader is not only a receiver who should decipher a linguistic code, but s/he becomes the subject of plural operations of reading: understanding, associations, evaluation, feelings and emotions. And the most important thing: reading can transform a reader’s mind and his/her sensibilities. This broad concept of reading gives the teacher of literature fantastic possibilities. The territory of literature is the esthetic and moral space, where a pupil can compare his/her experience with other better or worse subject. In the first chapter I try to show that the compulsion of reading books at school is arbitrary and makes the system of the policy of education invisible. I claim that a teacher (not the reading list) is the model of value of literature. S/He has no choice - texts in the classroom have my face and my voice and I have to personally confirm their advantage to life. In the next chapters (“Situations of Readings”, “Awakenings”, “Jealousy and Reading”, “Inducing to Infidelity”) I show how the teacher can produce “the event of reading”, using emotions of intimate reading. Every strategy that I describe - strategy of situational teaching - has the same question: whether a given narrative will work for good or ill in the life of other readers, after the last page has been turned. Will this fiction help form a character who is hypersensitive, properly sensitive, or insensitive; intellectually pretentious, thoughtful, or shallow; rash, bold, or timid; bigoted or tolerant? The answering to the questions means to win the battle of myself.

HUMBLE PI: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World by Matt Parker. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020. 336 pages. Hardcover; $27.00. ISBN: 9780593084687. *Humble Pi delivers a veritable potpourri of mathematical mistakes in the real world, as the title suggests. Consequently, the book may be of interest to a wide variety of readers. Mathematics educators who are looking for reasons why their students should pay attention in class will find plenty of examples to convince even the most skeptical student that mathematical mistakes can have real-world consequences. Meanwhile, readers who struggled in math class may be happy to see that even the supposed experts suffer the consequences of their own miscalculations. While the book is predominantly written in a light-hearted tone that makes it relatively easy to read for a broad audience, it occasionally is somber when real lives are put in danger due to the math going wrong. *The author, Matt Parker, is likely more well known as a YouTube mathematician. His channel "Stand-up Maths" has half a million subscribers and sixty million views. Parker's attempt to channel his high energy, "math is fun" persona into the written word is a challenging task, but he mostly delivers. For example, the page numbers count down until they reach 0, causing an error so the next page is numbered 4,294,967,295. This seemingly random large number happens to be 232 - 1; reading the rest of the book will explain why. The chapters count up from 0, except for a small chapter 9.49 which follows the chapter on rounding. Parker adds levity at the meta level as well as in the writing itself which builds on itself effectively. For this reason, readers who already are familiar with Parker's work on YouTube will likely catch some extra inside jokes. However, to be clear, the book is not simply fan fiction; it is a well-researched and thorough account of mathematical mistakes in various contexts and should appeal to a wide audience. *The content of the book is organized into chapters based on the types of mistakes: losing track of time, counting errors, geometry gone awry, unit conversions, and statistics, to name a few. If one chapter fails to capture interest, the next one delivers something fresh. While this feature is mostly true, it fails in one way. So many of the mistakes come down to computer programming errors. At the core, there is a mathematical idea at play, but the mistake comes from improperly coding that idea into a computer. The author did research a rich set of mathematical mistakes, but often it was not the mathematics that failed but the programming. As a mathematician, I was hoping for more mistakes that felt like mathematics itself going wrong. Yet I suspect that for most readers this is a distinction without a difference. *While the author is not writing explicitly from a Christian perspective, that does not mean that the book is therefore neutral or without perspective. Parker finds a deep joy in the doing of mathematics, a latent aspect of creation awaiting cultivation; he may not express it this way, but the joy is unmistakable. Many of the errors depicted in the book have led to the loss, or near loss, of human lives, sometimes in the hundreds. In a way, this book deeply values life, and one possible outcome would be that people could be more aware of mitigating such errors. In the final chapter, titled "So, What Have We Learned from Our Mistakes?," Parker writes: *"I've done a lot of research from accident-investigation reports that were publicly released, but that generally happens only when there is a very obvious disaster. Many more, quiet mathematical mistakes are probably swept under the rug. Because we all make mistakes. Relentlessly. And that is nothing to be feared. Many people I speak to say that, when they were at school, they were put off mathematics because they simply didn't get it. But half the challenge of learning math is accepting that you may not be naturally good at it, but if you put the effort in, you can learn it. As far as I'm aware, the only quote from me that has been made into a poster by teachers and put up in the classrooms is: 'Mathematicians aren't people who find math easy; they're people who enjoy how hard it is'" (p. 7). *This is a book which outlines mathematical mistakes in the hope that it could prevent some future mistakes; this hope is laudable, and it provides some levity along the way, which is sorely needed in 2020. However, the example of the UK government refusing to change the picture of an incorrect soccer ball on their signs suggests that many mathematical mistakes are likely to be commonplace. *Finally, it should be noted that the book is not only about mistakes, it also provides lots of "Wow, I didn't know that!" moments. Did you know that a year of "seasons" and a year of the earth's orbit are not the same thing? The book is peppered with vignettes such as this that keep the reader wanting more. In the end, the book is entertaining, includes a lot of fresh examples of math in the real world that STEM educators might find helpful, and is written for a broad audience. The fact that mathematics goes wrong in the modern world mostly in connection with computers is important to note; that there are so many ways for it to go wrong is fascinating. *Reviewed by Thomas J. Clark, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Dordt University, Sioux Center, IA 51250.

News and AnnouncementsAs we move into the so-called “summer reading” mode (although reading is obviously not a seasonal thing for many people), here is a “summery” (pardon the pun) of some recent Canadian book awards and shortlists.To see the plethora of Forest of Reading ® tree awards from the Ontario Library Association, go to https://www.accessola.org/WEB/OLAWEB/Forest_of_Reading/About_the_Forest.aspx. IBBY Canada (the Canadian national section of the International Board on Books for Young People) announced that the Claude Aubry Award for distinguished service in the field of children’s literature will be presented to Judith Saltman and Jacques Payette. Both winners will receive their awards in conjunction with a special event for children's literature in the coming year. http://www.ibby-canada.org/ibby-canadas-aubry-award-presented-2015/IBBY Canada also awarded the 2015 Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Picture Book Award to Pierre Pratt, illustrator of Stop, Thief!. http://www.ibby-canada.org/awards/elizabeth-mrazik-cleaver-award/The annual reading programme known as First Nation Communities Read (FNCR) and the Periodical Marketers of Canada (PMC) jointly announced Peace Pipe Dreams: The Truth about Lies about Indians by Darrell Dennis (Douglas & McIntyre) as the FNCR 2015-2016 title as well as winner of PMC’s $5000 Aboriginal Literature Award. A jury of librarians from First Nations public libraries in Ontario, with coordination support from Southern Ontario Library Service, selected Peace Pipe Dreams from more than 19 titles submitted by Canadian publishers. “In arriving at its selection decision, the jury agreed that the book is an important one that dispels myths and untruths about Aboriginal people in Canada today and sets the record straight. The author tackles such complicated issues such as religion, treaties, and residential schools with knowledge, tact and humour, leaving readers with a greater understanding of our complex Canadian history.” http://www.sols.org/index.php/links/fn-communities-readCharis Cotter, author of The Swallow: A Ghost Story, has been awarded The National Chapter of Canada IODE Violet Downey Book Award for 2015. Published by Tundra Books, the novel is suggested for children ages nine to 12. http://www.iode.ca/2015-iode-violet-downey-book-award.htmlThe 2015 winners of the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Awards were selected by two juries of young readers from Toronto’s Alexander Muir / Gladstone Avenue Junior and Senior Public School. A jury of grade 3 and 4 students selected the recipient of the Children’s Picture Book Award, and a jury of grade 7 and 8 students selected the recipient of the Young Adult / Middle Reader Award. Each student read the books individually and then worked together with their group to reach consensus and decide on a winner. This process makes it a unique literary award in Canada.The Magician of Auschwitz by Kathy Kacer and illustrated by Gillian Newland (Second Story Press) won the Children’s Picture Book Category.The winner for the Young Adult/Middle Reader Category was The Boundless by Kenneth Oppel (HarperCollins Publishers).http://www.ontarioartsfoundation.on.ca/pages/ruth-sylvia-schwartz-awardsFrom the Canadian Library Association:The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier (Penguin Canada) was awarded CLA’s 2015 Book of the Year for Children Award.Any Questions?, written and illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay (Groundwood Books) won the 2015 Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Award.This One Summer by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood) was awarded the 2015 Young Adult Book Award.http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Book_Awards&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=16132The 2015 Winner of the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Awards for Best Juvenile/YA Book was Sigmund Brouwer’s Dead Man's Switch (Harvest House). http://crimewriterscanada.com/Regional awards:Alberta’s Ross Annett Award for Children’s Literature 2015:Little You by Richard Van Camp (Orca Book Publishers) http://www.bookcentre.ca/awards/r_ross_annett_award_childrens_literatureRocky Mountain Book Award 2015:Last Train: A Holocaust Story by Rona Arato. (Owl Kids, 2013) http://www.rmba.info/last-train-holocaust-storyAtlantic Book Awards 2015 from the Atlantic Book Awards SocietyAnn Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature: The End of the Line by Sharon E. McKay (Annick Press).Lillian Shepherd Award for Excellence in Illustration: Music is for Everyone illustrated by Sydney Smith and written by Jill Barber (Nimbus Publishing) http://atlanticbookawards.ca/awards/Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Award 2015:English fiction: Scare Scape by Sam Fisher.English non-fiction: WeirdZone: Sports by Maria Birmingham.French fiction: Toxique by Amy Lachapelle.French non-fiction: Au labo, les Débrouillards! by Yannick Bergeron. http://hackmatack.ca/en/index.htmlFrom the 2015 BC Book Prizes for authors and/or illustrators living in British Columbia or the Yukon:The Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize was awarded to Dolphin SOS by Roy Miki and Slavia Miki with illustrations by Julie Flett (Tradewind).The Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize for “novels, including chapter books, and non-fiction books, including biography, aimed at juveniles and young adults, which have not been highly illustrated” went to Maggie de Vries for Rabbit Ears (HarperCollins). http://www.bcbookprizes.ca/winners/2015The 2015 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award (MYRCA) was awarded to Ultra by David Carroll. http://www.myrca.ca/Camp Outlook by Brenda Baker (Second Story Press) was the 2015 winner of the SaskEnergy Young Adult Literature Award. http://www.bookawards.sk.ca/awards/awards-nominees/2015-awards-and-nominees/category/saskenergy-young-adult-literature-awardFor more information on Canadian children’s book awards check out http://www.canadianauthors.net/awards/. Please note that not all regional awards are included in this list; if you are so inclined, perhaps send their webmaster a note regarding an award that you think should be included.Happy reading and exploring.Yours in stories (in all seasons and shapes and sizes)Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and commic books and graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta and is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. She is a professional storyteller and has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

Smith Milway, Katie. Mimi's Village and How Basic Health Care Transformed It. Toronto, ON: Kids Can Press, 2012. Print.Mimi’s Village is part of the CitizenKid series, a collection that seeks to inspire children to be better global citizens. Based on Katie Smith Milway’s experiences working for non-profit organizations, the story is set in Western Kenya – a real-world context that is vividly supported by Eugenie Fernandes’ colourful full-page illustrations of flora, fauna and village life.Told in simple one-page chapters, this story introduces children to the health challenges experienced by Mimi and her family: unsafe drinking water, a child’s life-threatening illness, and travel through the night to a distant health clinic. As the story develops, readers begin to see that small steps can radically improve health in the village: clean water, vaccinations and mosquito nets. Perhaps most importantly, Mimi’s inspirational role – she asks her father, “Could you build a clinic too? Maybe then a nurse would come” – demonstrates that children can make meaningful contributions to their communities. This theme is carried into the book’s final seven pages, which include the story of a “real village health worker,” as well as concrete suggestions that answer the question, “How can you help?”The writing in this book is not the strongest and the title may not inspire child readers. In addition, younger readers will benefit from reading this with an adult. These shortcomings are, however, fully mitigated by Mimi’s engaging story and the book’s two important messages: simple public health measures will dramatically improve the lives of many children living throughout the world; and children everywhere can positively impact their world. This juvenile nonfiction book will make a compelling addition to any library collection.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Shelagh K. GenuisShelagh K. Genuis is an Alberta Innovates–Health Solutions Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health. Although an avid reader of biography, she has never stopped reading children’s fiction.

McAllister, Ian, and Nicholas Read. The Sea Wolves: Living Wild in the Great Bear Rainforest. Vancouver: Orca, 2010. Print At first glance, The Sea Wolves is a small coffee table book. It is not, however, just a pretty photographic exploration of the wolves that inhabit The Great Bear Rainforest. It is a very long opinion piece written expressly to convince readers that wolves are not “the big bad wolf” of stories; rather, we should all love and respect them. Authors Ian McAllister, a founding director of both the Raincoast Conservation Society and Pacific Wild, and Nicholas Read, a journalist, pull no punches in their attempt to sway the reader. While the book does present facts about the wolves and their environment, many of them likely accurate, the authors make sweeping statements and claims which they require the reader to accept at face value. For example, though the authors state that there is “a great deal of evidence to suggest that over-fishing, fish farms and climate change have all played a role in [the wolves’] decline,” this statement does not direct the reader to any evidence. Part of the purpose of the book is to educate the reader about the wolves; however, it is also clearly designed to manipulate the readers’ emotions. The authors attempt to get the reader to identify with the wolves through anthropomorphizing the animals and by drawing extensive parallels between the lives of wolves and the lives of people. For example, they state that the reason that wolves save the “tastiest deer” for their young pups “could be because, just as in human families, wolf families like to spoil their babies.” Furthermore, throughout the book, the authors choose emotionally-laden words and images, stating, for example, that wolves “have been persecuted by humans, with a kind of madness,” or that they “romp on the beach in the ocean foam that burbles off the waves like bubble bath.” Each interpretation of the wolves’ behaviour seems designed to achieve the desired effect of garnering sympathy for the creatures. While there is nothing wrong with writing a polemic against the dangers to wolves and their environment, this book is presented by the publisher as juvenile non-fiction for ages 8 and up. Children in upper elementary or even junior high school grades may have difficulty distinguishing between facts and strongly-worded opinions presented in a book labelled as non-fiction. Recommended: Three stars out of fourReviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

Walker, Niki. Why Do We Fight?: Conflict, War, and Peace. Toronto: Owlkids Books, 2013. Print.In this work, Niki Walker explores the general nature of conflict. She relates basic aspects of international politics - the existence of power elites, the formation of alliances, the rise of disputes - to the politics of school life. Along the way, she defines such terms as “negotiation,” “mediation,” “arbitration” and “sanctions.” She mentions examples of 20th century warfare: the post WWII Cold War, the Suez Crisis, and outlines the history of the current crisis in Afghanistan. The role of the United Nations is discussed. Most impressive is her insertion of pertinent quotes; for example, the chapter entitled “Cooperation or Combat?” begins with the words of Indira Gandhi: “You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.”Walker is an experienced writer of non-fiction for children and this work demonstrates her typical proficiency. The book is well organized with good transitions between successive chapters. The index is rather brief, but the terms therein are consistent with the text. There is an informative list of sources.In a departure from her usual literary style, Walker occasionally attempts to use trendy language. There is a risk here: the vernacular of today’s young reader may be rejected as dated by tomorrow’s. This quibble aside, the book is highly recommended for use with upper elementary students. In particular, it could be a useful resource for Remembrance Day activities. Reviewer: Leslie AitkenHighly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special and university collections. She is the former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered cocktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peacocks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peacocks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basement of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. Thus food in both the real world and in the imagined world serves to nourish and sustain us in these ways. References Adams, Riley. Delicious and Suspicious. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Finger Lickin’ Dead. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Hickory Smoked Homicide. New York: Berkley, 2011. Baltazar, Lori. “A Novel About Food, Recipes Included [Book review].” Dessert Comes First. 28 Feb. 2012. 20 Aug. 2012 ‹http://dessertcomesfirst.com/archives/8644›. Berkeley, Anthony. The Poisoned Chocolates Case. London: Collins, 1929. Bishop, Claudia. Toast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Dread on Arrival. New York: Berkley, 2012. Brady, Jacklyn. A Sheetcake Named Desire. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Cake on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Berkley, 2012. Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Capella, Anthony. The Food of Love. London: Time Warner, 2004/2005. Carroll, Kent in Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Childs, Laura. Death by Darjeeling. New York: Berkley, 2001. –– Shades of Earl Grey. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Blood Orange Brewing. New York: Berkley, 2006/2007. –– The Teaberry Strangler. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Collins, Glenn. “Your Favourite Fictional Crime Moments Involving Food.” The New York Times Diner’s Journal: Notes on Eating, Drinking and Cooking. 16 Jul. 2012. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/your-favorite-fictional-crime-moments-involving-food›. Coyle, Cleo. On What Grounds. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Murder Most Frothy. New York: Berkley, 2006. –– Holiday Grind. New York: Berkley, 2009/2010. –– Roast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Christie, Agatha. A Pocket Full of Rye. London: Collins, 1953. Dahl, Roald. Lamb to the Slaughter: A Roald Dahl Short Story. New York: Penguin, 1953/2012. eBook. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. In Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors, Vol. CCXXIX. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838/1839. Duran, Nancy, and Karen MacDonald. “Information Sources for Food Studies Research.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 2.9 (2006): 233–43. Ephron, Nora. Heartburn. New York: Vintage, 1983/1996. Esquivel, Laura. Trans. Christensen, Carol, and Thomas Christensen. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, romances and home remedies. London: Black Swan, 1989/1993. Evans, Jeanne M. The Crime Lovers’s Cookbook. City: Happy Trails, 2007. Fluke, Joanne. Fudge Cupcake Murder. New York: Kensington, 2004. –– Key Lime Pie Murder. New York: Kensington, 2007. –– Cream Puff Murder. New York: Kensington, 2009. –– Apple Turnover Murder. New York: Kensington, 2010. Greenwood, Kerry, and Jenny Pausacker. Recipes for Crime. Carlton: McPhee Gribble, 1995. Greenwood, Kerry. The Corinna Chapman Recipe Book: Mouth-Watering Morsels to Make Your Man Melt, Recipes from Corinna Chapman, Baker and Reluctant Investigator. nd. 25 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.allenandunwin.com/_uploads/documents/minisites/Corinna_recipebook.pdf›. –– A Question of Death: An Illustrated Phryne Fisher Treasury. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Halmagyi, Ed. The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2012. Haywood, B. B. Town in a Blueberry Jam. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Town in a Lobster Stew. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Town in a Wild Moose Chase. New York: Berkley, 2012. Hyzy, Julie. State of the Onion. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Hail to the Chef. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Eggsecutive Orders. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Buffalo West Wing. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Affairs of Steak. New York: Berkley, 2012. Israel, Andrea, and Nancy Garfinkel, with Melissa Clark. The Recipe Club: A Novel About Food And Friendship. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. McHenry, Jael. The Kitchen Daughter: A Novel. New York: Gallery, 2011. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind. London: Pan, 1936/1974 O’Reilly, Brian, with Virginia O’Reilly. Angelina’s Bachelors: A Novel, with Food. New York: Gallery, 2011. Payany, Estérelle. Recipe for Murder: Frightfully Good Food Inspired by Fiction. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Peacocks Tearooms. Peacocks Tearooms: Our Unique Selection of Teas. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.peacockstearoom.co.uk/teas/page1.asp›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. “A Taste of Conflict: Food, History and Popular Culture In Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 79–91. Risson, Toni, and Donna Lee Brien. “Editors’ Letter: That Takes the Cake: A Slice Of Australasian Food Studies Scholarship.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 3–7. Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930/2003. Schmidt, Shannon McKenna, and Joni Rendon. Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009. Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo: A Novel. New York: St Martin’s, 1982. Spang, Rebecca L. “All the World’s A Restaurant: On The Global Gastronomics Of Tourism and Travel.” In Raymond Grew (Ed). Food in Global History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. 79–91. Taylor, Timothy. “Food/Crime Fiction.” Timothy Taylor. 2010. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.timothytaylor.ca/10/08/20/foodcrime-fiction›. The Moat Bar and Café. The Moat Bar and Café: Welcome. nd. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://themoat.com.au/Welcome.html›. Wenger, Shaunda Kennedy, and Janet Kay Jensen. The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature, and the Passages that Feature Them. New York: Ballantine, 2003/2005.

Introduction When a text is said to be re-appropriated, it is at times unclear to what extent this appropriation is secondary, repeated, new; certainly, the difference between a reiteration and an iteration has more to do with emphasis than any (re)duplication. And at a moment in the development of crime fiction in France when the retranslation of now apparently dated French translations of the works of classic American hardboiled novels (especially those of authors like Dashiell Hammett, whose novels were published in Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire at Gallimard in the decades following the end of the Second World War) is being undertaken with the ostensible aim of taking the French reader back (closer) to the American original, one may well ask where the emphasis now lies. In what ways, for example, is this new form of re-production, of re-imagining the text, more intimately bound to the original, and thus in itself less ‘original’ than its translated predecessors? Or again, is this more reactionary ‘re-’ in fact really that different from those more radical uses that cleaved the translation from its original text in those early, foundational years of twentieth-century French crime fiction? (Re-)Reading: Critical Theory and Originality My juxtaposition of the terms ‘reactionary’ and ‘radical’, and the attempted play on the auto-antonymy of the verb ‘to cleave’, are designed to prompt a re(-)read of the analysis that so famously took the text away from the author in the late-1960s through to the 1990s, which is to say the critical theory of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Roland Barthes’s work (especially 69–77) appropriated the familiar terms of literary analysis and reversed them, making of them perhaps a re-appropriation in the sense of taking them into new territory: the text, formerly a paper-based platform for the written word, was now a virtual interface between the word and its reader, the new locus of the production of meaning; the work, on the other hand, which had previously pertained to the collective creative imaginings of the author, was now synonymous with the physical writing passed on by the author to the reader. And by ‘passed on’ was meant ‘passed over’, achevé (perfected, terminated, put to death)—completed, then, but only insofar as its finite sequence of words was set; for its meaning was henceforth dependent on its end user. The new textual life that surged from the ‘death of the author’ was therefore always already an afterlife, a ‘living on’, to use Jacques Derrida’s term (Bloom et al. 75–176). It is in this context that the re-reading encouraged by Barthes has always appeared to mark a rupture a teasing of ‘reading’ away from the original series of words and the ‘Meaning’ as intended by the author, if any coherence of intention is possible across the finite sequence of words that constitute the written work. The reader must learn to re-read, Barthes implored, or otherwise be condemned to read the same text everywhere. In this sense, the ‘re-’ prefix marks an active engagement with the text, a reflexivity of the act of reading as an act of transformation. The reader whose consumption of the text is passive, merely digestive, will not transform the words (into meaning); and crucially, that reader will not herself be transformed. For this is the power of reflexive reading—when one reads text as text (and not ‘losing oneself’ in the story) one reconstitutes oneself (or, perhaps, loses control of oneself more fully, more productively); not to do so, is to take an unchanged constant (oneself) into every textual encounter and thus to produce sameness in ostensible difference. One who rereads a text and discovers the same story twice will therefore reread even when reading a text for the first time. The hyphen of the re-read, on the other hand, distances the reader from the text; but it also, of course, conjoins. It marks the virtual space where reading occurs, between the physical text and the reading subject; and at the same time, it links all texts in an intertextual arena, such that the reading experience of any one text is informed by the reading of all texts (whether they be works read by an individual reader or works as yet unencountered). Such a theory of reading appears to shift originality so far from the author’s work as almost to render the term obsolete. But the thing about reflexivity is that it depends on the text itself, to which it always returns. As Barbara Johnson has noted, the critical difference marked by Barthes’s understandings of the text, and his calls to re-read it, is not what differentiates it from other texts—the universality of the intertext and the reading space underlines this; instead, it is what differentiates the text from itself (“Critical Difference” 175). And while Barthes’s work packages this differentiation as a rupture, a wrenching of ownership away from the author to a new owner, the work and text appear less violently opposed in the works of the Yale School deconstructionists. In such works as J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host” (1977), the hyphenation of the re-read is less marked, with re-reading, as a divergence from the text as something self-founding, self-coinciding, emerging as something inherent in the original text. The cleaving of one from and back into the other takes on, in Miller’s essay, the guise of parasitism: the host, a term that etymologically refers to the owner who invites and the guest who is invited, offers a figure for critical reading that reveals the potential for creative readings of ‘meaning’ (what Miller calls the nihilistic text) inside the transparent ‘Meaning’ of the text, by which we recognise one nonetheless autonomous text from another (the metaphysical text). Framed in such terms, reading is a reaction to text, but also an action of text. I should argue then that any engagement with the original is re-actionary—my caveat being that this hyphenation is a marker of auto-antonymy, a link between the text and otherness. Translation and Originality Questions of a translator’s status and the originality of the translated text remain vexed. For scholars of translation studies like Brian Nelson, the product of literary translation can legitimately be said to have been authored by its translator, its status as literary text being equal to that of the original (3; see also Wilson and Gerber). Such questions are no more or less vexed today, however, than they were in the days when criticism was grappling with translation through the lens of deconstruction. To refer again to the remarkable work of Johnson, Derrida’s theorisation of textual ‘living on’—the way in which text, at its inception, primes itself for re-imagining, by dint of the fundamental différance of the chains of signification that are its DNA—bears all the trappings of self-translation. Johnson uses the term ‘self-différance’ (“Taking Fidelity” 146–47) in this respect and notes how Derrida took on board, and discussed with him, the difficulties that he was causing for his translator even as he was writing the ‘original’ text of his essay. If translation, in this framework, is rendered impossible because of the original’s failure to coincide with itself in a transparently meaningful way, then its practice “releases within each text the subversive forces of its own foreignness” (Johnson, “Taking Fidelity” 148), thereby highlighting the debt owed by Derrida’s notion of textual ‘living on’—in (re-)reading—to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of translation as a mode, its translatability, the way in which it primes itself for translation virtually, irrespective of whether or not it is actually translated (70). In this way, translation is a privileged site of textual auto-differentiation, and translated text can, accordingly, be considered every bit as ‘original’ as its source text—simply more reflexive, more aware of its role as a conduit between the words on the page and the re-imagining that they undergo, by which they come to mean, when they are re-activated by the reader. Emily Apter—albeit in a context that has more specifically to do with the possibilities of comparative literature and the real-world challenges of language in war zones—describes the auto-differentiating nature of translation as “a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements” (6). In this way, translation is “a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change” (Apter 6). Thus, translation lends itself to crime fiction; for both function as highly reflexive sites of transformation: both provide a reader with a heightened sense of the transformation that she is enacting on the text and that she herself embodies as a reading subject, a subject changed by reading. Crime Fiction, Auto-Differention and Translation As has been noted elsewhere (Rolls), Fredric Jameson made an enigmatic reference to crime fiction’s perceived role as the new Realism as part of his plenary lecture at “Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory”, a conference held at the University of Wollongong on 6–8 December 2012. He suggested, notably, that one might imagine an author of Scandi-Noir writing in tandem with her translator. While obvious questions of the massive international marketing machine deployed around this contemporary phenomenon come to mind, and I suspect that this is how Jameson’s comment was generally understood, it is tempting to consider this Scandinavian writing scenario in terms of Derrida’s proleptic considerations of his own translator. In this way, crime fiction’s most telling role, as one of the most widely read contemporary literary forms, is its translatability; its haunting descriptions of place (readers, we tend, perhaps precipitously, to assume, love crime fiction for its national, regional or local situatedness) are thus tensely primed for re-location, for Apter’s ‘subject re-formation’. The idea of ‘the new Realism’ of crime, and especially detective, fiction is predicated on the tightly (self-)policed rules according to which crime fiction operates. The reader appears to enter into an investigation alongside the detective, co-authoring the crime text in real (reading) time, only for authorial power to be asserted in the unveiling scene of the denouement. What masquerades as the ultimately writerly text, in Barthes’s terms, turns out to be the ultimate in transparently meaningful literature when the solution is set in stone by the detective. As such, the crime novel is far more dependent on descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life (in a given place in time) than other forms of fiction, as these provide the clues on which its intricate plot hinges. According to this understanding, crime fiction records history and transcribes national allegories. This is not only a convincing way of understanding crime fiction, but it is also an extremely powerful way of harnessing it for the purposes of cultural history. Claire Gorrara, for example, uses the development of French crime fiction plots over the course of the second half of the twentieth century to map France’s coming to terms with the legacy of the Second World War. This is the national allegory written in real time, as the nation heals and moves on, and this is crime fiction as a reaction to national allegory. My contention here, on the other hand, is that crime fiction, like translation, has at its core an inherent, and reflexive, tendency towards otherness. Indeed, this is because crime fiction, whose origins in transnational (and especially Franco-American) literary exchange have been amply mapped but not, I should argue, extrapolated to their fullest extent, is forged in translation. It is widely considered that when Edgar Allan Poe produced his seminal text “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) he created modern crime fiction. And yet, this was made possible because the text was translated into French by Charles Baudelaire and met with great success in France, far more so indeed than in its original place of authorship. Its original setting, however, was not America but Paris; its translatability as French text preceded, even summoned, its actualisation in the form of Baudelaire’s translation. Furthermore, the birth of the great armchair detective, the exponent of pure, objective deduction, in the form of C. Auguste Dupin, is itself turned on its head, a priori, because Dupin, in this first Parisian short story, always already off-sets objectivity with subjectivity, ratiocination with a tactile apprehension of the scene of the crime. He even goes as far as to accuse the Parisian Prefect of Police of one-dimensional objectivity. (Dupin undoes himself, debunking the myth of his own characterisation, even as he takes to the stage.) In this way, Poe founded his crime fiction on a fundamental tension; and this tension called out to its translator so powerfully that Baudelaire claimed to be translating his own thoughts, as expressed by Poe, even before he had had a chance to think them (see Rolls and Sitbon). Thus, Poe was Parisian avant la lettre, his crime fiction a model for Baudelaire’s own prose poetry, the new voice of critical modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. If Baudelaire went on to write Paris in the form of Paris Spleen (1869), his famous collection of “little prose poems”, both as it is represented (timelessly, poetically) and as it presents itself (in real time, prosaically) at the same time, it was not only because he was spontaneously creating a new national allegory for France based on its cleaving of itself in the wake of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s massive programme of urbanisation in Paris in the 1800s; it was also because he was translating Poe’s fictionalisation of Paris in his new crime fiction. Crime fiction was born therefore not only simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two, in the self-différance of translation. In this way, while a strong claim can be made that modern French crime fiction is predicated on, and reacts to, the auto-differentiation (of critical modernity, of Paris versus Paris) articulated in Baudelaire’s prose poems and therefore tells the national allegory, it is also the case, and it is this aspect that is all too often overlooked, that crime fiction’s birth in Franco-American translation founded the new French national allegory. Re-imagining America in (French) Crime Fiction Pierre Bayard has done more than any other critic in recent years to debunk the authorial power of the detective in crime fiction, beginning with his re-imagining of the solution to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and continuing with that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1998 and 2008, respectively). And yet, even as he has engaged with poststructuralist re-readings of these texts, he has put in place his own solutions, elevating them away from his own initial premise of writerly engagement towards a new metaphysics of “Meaning”, be it ironically or because he has fallen prey himself to the seduction of detectival truth. This reactionary turn, or sting-lessness in the tail, reaches new heights (of irony) in the essay in which he imagines the consequences of liberating novels from their traditional owners and coupling them with new authors (Bayard, Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur?). Throughout this essay Bayard systematically prefers the terms “work” and “author” to “text” and “reader”, liberating the text not only from the shackles of traditional notions of authorship but also from the terminological reshuffling of his and others’ critical theory, while at the same time clinging to the necessity for textual meaning to stem from authorship and repackaging what is, in all but terminology, Barthes et al.’s critical theory. Caught up in the bluff and double-bluff of Bayard’s authorial redeployments is a chapter on what is generally considered the greatest work of parody of twentieth-century French crime fiction—Boris Vian’s pseudo-translation of black American author Vernon Sullivan’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946, I Shall Spit on Your Graves). The novel was a best seller in France in 1946, outstripping by far the novels of the Série Noire, whose fame and marketability were predicated on their status as “Translations from the American” and of which it appeared a brazen parody. Bayard’s decision to give credibility to Sullivan as author is at once perverse, because it is clear that he did not exist, and reactionary, because it marks a return to Vian’s original conceit. And yet, it passes for innovative, not (or at least not only) because of Bayard’s brilliance but because of the literary qualities of the original text, which, Bayard argues, must have been written in “American” in order to produce such a powerful description of American society at the time. Bayard’s analysis overlooks (or highlights, if we couch his entire project in a hermeneutics of inversion, based on the deliberate, and ironic, re-reversal of the terms “work” and “text”) two key elements of post-war French crime fiction: the novels of the Série Noire that preceded J’irai cracher sur vos tombes in late 1945 and early 1946 were all written by authors posing as Americans (Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase were in fact English) and the translations were deliberately unfaithful both to the original text, which was drastically domesticated, and to any realistic depiction of America. While Anglo-Saxon French Studies has tended to overlook the latter aspect, Frank Lhomeau has highlighted the fact that the America that held sway in the French imaginary (from Liberation through to the 1960s and beyond) was a myth rather than a reality. To take this reasoning one logical, reflexive step further, or in fact less far, the object of Vian’s (highly reflexive) novel, which may better be considered a satire than a parody, can be considered not to be race relations in the United States but the French crime fiction scene in 1946, of which its pseudo-translation (which is to say, a novel not written by an American and not translated) is metonymic (see Vuaille-Barcan, Sitbon and Rolls). (For Isabelle Collombat, “pseudo-translation functions as a mise en abyme of a particular genre” [146, my translation]; this reinforces the idea of a conjunction of translation and crime fiction under the sign of reflexivity.) Re-imagined beneath this wave of colourful translations of would-be American crime novels is a new national allegory for a France emerging from the ruins of German occupation and Allied liberation. The re-imagining of France in the years immediately following the Second World War is therefore not mapped, or imagined again, by crime fiction; rather, the combination of translation and American crime fiction provide the perfect storm for re-creating a national sense of self through the filter of the Other. For what goes for the translator, goes equally for the reader. Conclusion As Johnson notes, “through the foreign language we renew our love-hate intimacy with our mother tongue”; and as such, “in the process of translation from one language to another, the scene of linguistic castration […] is played on center stage, evoking fear and pity and the illusion that all would perhaps have been well if we could simply have stayed at home” (144). This, of course, is just what had happened one hundred years earlier when Baudelaire created a new prose poetics for a new Paris. In order to re-present (both present and represent) Paris, he focused so close on it as to erase it from objective view. And in the same instance of supreme literary creativity, he masked the origins of his own translation praxis: his Paris was also Poe’s, which is to say, an American vision of Paris translated into French by an author who considered his American alter ego to have had his own thoughts in an act of what Bayard would consider anticipatory plagiarism. In this light, his decision to entitle one of the prose poems “Any where out of the world”—in English in the original—can be considered a Derridean reflection on the translation inherent in any original act of literary re-imagination. Paris, crime fiction and translation can thus all be considered privileged sites of re-imagination, which is to say, embodiments of self-différance and “original” acts of re-reading. References Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Barthes, Roland. Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Baudelaire, Charles. Le Spleen de Paris. Trans. Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions, 1970 [1869]. Bayard, Pierre. Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1998. ———. L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008. ———. Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968. 69–82. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. Collombat, Isabelle. “Pseudo-traduction: la mise en scène de l’altérité.” Le Langage et l’Homme 38.1 (2003): 145–56. Gorrara, Claire. French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. Johnson, Barbara. “Taking Fidelity Philosophically.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 142–48. ———. “The Critical Difference.” Critical Essays on Roland Barthes. Ed. Diana Knight. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 174–82. Lhomeau, Frank. “Le roman ‘noir’ à l’américaine.” Temps noir 4 (2000): 5–33. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3.3 (1977): 439–47. Nelson, Brian. “Preface: Translation Lost and Found.” Australian Journal of French Studies 47.1 (2010): 3–7. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage Books, [1841]1975. 141–68. Rolls, Alistair. “Editor’s Letter: The Undecidable Lightness of Writing Crime.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 3.1 (2014): 3–8. Rolls, Alistair, and Clara Sitbon. “‘Traduit de l’américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s Greatest Hoax?” Modern and Contemporary France 21.1 (2013): 37–53. Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure, Clara Sitbon, and Alistair Rolls. “Jeux textuels et paratextuels dans J’irai cracher sur vos tombes: au-delà du canular.” Romance Studies 32.1 (2014): 16–26. Wilson, Rita, and Leah Gerber, eds. Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2012.

In this chapter, the authors work with Ursula Le Guin’s (1986) Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to offer a reconfiguration of “the book” in childhood contexts. Attending to the relational agencies generated from messy entanglements of (hence hyphenated) reader-book-child-chair-cat-lice-mites, they feel their way around to arrive at other ideas about what books are, what books do, and what else they might potentiate in contemporary imaginations of “the child”. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural “carrier bag” rather than a weapon of domination. The authors offer a scrabbling methodology of “research-creation”: a method of scrabbling “down the back of the chair” (both literally and metaphorically). This feminist methodology attunes to assemblages of odds and ends, hair and dust mites, children’s literature and child readers and facilitates an exploration of the intersectional, relational meanings that might tell us something else about childhood in the Anthropocene.

After World War II, science-fiction authors found lucrative side gigs in writing fiction for young people. Before “young adult” books were a fixed category, authors like Robert Heinlein wrote stories about space for middle-grade readers, most of whom were male. This chapter looks at Heinlein’s juvenile fiction published by Scribner’s, and shows how his work reinforced a vision of scientific masculinity.

This chapter examines an under-explored archive of readers’ letters to the editors of a popular 1950s pulp fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. Using this empirical method, it is able to demonstrate that not only were such magazines once a centrepiece of American popular culture, but that they paid close attention to what their readers wanted, changing covers, illustrations, and even storylines in response to surprisingly numerous and highly proactive reader responses. In so doing, these magazines became key players in debates about censorship and juvenile delinquency during the moral panics of the early Cold War.

This chapter discusses the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century, readers had little more than short continental prose fictions, or romances; by the end they had thousands of pages of invented lives and stories that were consumed in books, anthologies, part books, abridgements, and magazine instalments. The development of a tradition of extended prose fiction had a transformative impact on the landscape of literary culture at this time. Critics viewed the rise of narrative fiction as the reason for, amongst other things, a crisis in poetic identity, the rise of the solitary reader, and the development of a complex sense of self. The development of the novel also generated what now seems like bizarre mass hysteria over the uses of this new form—reading novels was thought by many to be seductive, dangerous, and enervating for those who consumed too much, too fast.

The fifth chapter switches to a different, structural issue: that of sequels, which have always appealed to authors of detective fiction. What does returning to an inaugural character require to revive interest in fresh adventures? In turn, how might a single sequel become a larger series, transforming the second novel into a succession of more or less ordered books that avoid simply starting over again, each as if anew? What instead does it take to weave together an enriched, intertwined history for a central detective, even one initially imagined as relatively two-dimensional? Exploring how subsequent novels cement reader loyalty by either addressing or sidestepping earlier episodes, this chapter looks at the stylistic stitching needed to integrate back-stories with more recent episodes. And it takes up the idiosyncratic strategies authors select to fuse memories and flashbacks together with psychological patterns, shaping the sum of individual parts into a more unified portrait.

Abstract This chapter argues that children’s and young adult (YA) fiction since 1940 has been a site for experimentations with form, genre, and narrative that amplify, and in some cases anticipate, what is happening in “adult fiction.” Children’s literature brings to the fore the importance of thinking about audience in the construction of literary history. The genre is both universal and sharply delineated: every adult reader was once part of its target audience, but eventually is thought to outgrow children’s literature. From picture books through YA novels, children’s literature shapes its readers’ early understanding of the world, and adult readers who return to children’s literature encounter past selves for whom reading happened with a fierce and uncritical passion. The chapter argues that US children’s literature not only performs crucial cultural work, but also challenges traditional conceptions of how and when cultural work is performed.

In Brief Interviews, Wallace’s most mathematically driven work of fiction, the central lesson is how to value the other in such a way that she is not killed off – not mown down by being remade as a number in the punning meaning behind the Wallace story that gives this chapter its title, “Other Math.” I place this crucial dynamic of combining selves in the context of the many systems of human and economic valuation – from coins, gifts, and contracts to viewing a spouse as “my other half” – that knit together a collection too often read as a disparate assortment of stories. In Brief Interviews Wallace makes his fullest use of paratextual features of story-numbering, series, and page numbers to arrange for the reader an encounter with the stochastic mathematics that drives “Adult World,” which I regard as a take-down of Plato, a watershed in Wallace’s history of unbridled markets and neoliberalism, and the collection’s centerpiece (over the many who have focused on “Octet”). As in chapter 2, a crisis in the value of currency fires Wallace’s imagination, here in a response to the so-called Asian Flu of the late 1990s. Interweaving a genealogy of Wallace’s probability-driven formal experimentation with a history of stochastic math’s importance to modern finance, I describe the dialectic of computerized complexity and balance-scale simplicity that underlies this book’s moral vision.

This chapter examines a set of texts—Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (2005–9), Vaughan Edwards and Barry Creyton’s The Dogs of Pompeii (2011), Paul Shipton’s Gryllus the Pig duology (2004–6), Gary Northfield’s Julius Zebra series (2015–18), and Robin Price’s Spartapuss series (2004–15)—that undermine the reader’s presumption of distance from the classical world through an emphasis upon grotesquerie and play. While the protagonists of the first two sets of texts examined are children, the other books deploy animals or humans in animal bodies to emphasize that the classics are accessible to the child reader and that consuming narratives about the past is both serious business and play. In these narratives, the past is itself an object to be consumed as popular culture is consumed; the protagonist of these narratives is likewise obliged to offer himself as an object of consumption through acts of heroic (or mock-heroic) self-sacrifice. Rather than proposing the past as a hard-to-access site of superior culture, these narratives propose it as a place of triumphant popular culture familiar to child readers from their own experience.

Engages with the juvenile fiction of the Brontës, whose writing careers originated in perhaps the most famous of Victorian literary toy stories. A gift of twelve toy soldiers prompted the Brontë siblings to commence what they referred to as a series of “plays,” set in the imaginary worlds of Glasstown, Angria, and Gondal, which were eventually transcribed in tiny print into tiny books. Whereas the miniature books have been traditionally interpreted as objects of mourning, this chapter asks that we return to their foundation in games with toy objects and to reconceive the juvenilia as play therapy. It then considers Charlotte Brontë’s eventual repudiation of phantasy writing in favor of the “homely materials” of novelistic realism across a series of valedictory pieces. These texts pre-enact the conflict between Klein and Anna Freud over the relative merits of play versus domesticity and the pedagogic in maturation. Turning briefly to Charlotte’s perplexingly unlikeable first novel The Professor (1857), it offers a reading of the protagonist Crimsworth as sadistic avatar, which seeks to reconcile Kleinian toy-therapy with ideas set out in Anna Freud’s “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams.”