{"id":7316,"date":"2011-01-07T10:36:26","date_gmt":"2011-01-07T15:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=7316"},"modified":"2011-01-07T10:36:26","modified_gmt":"2011-01-07T15:36:26","slug":"childrens-literature-pre-first-world-war-encouraged-war-involvement-professor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2011\/01\/childrens-literature-pre-first-world-war-encouraged-war-involvement-professor\/","title":{"rendered":"Children’s literature pre-First World War encouraged war involvement: professor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lissa

Lissa Paul is studying children's literature leading up to the First World War and how it encouraged children to grow up and go to war.<\/p><\/div>\n

Viewed in 2010, some of the early 20th century children\u2019s books Lissa Paul is studying look a little surreal.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s An ABC for Baby Patriots<\/em>, where B stands for battles and C stands for colonies. There\u2019s an ad that encourages kids to dress up a male paper doll, pictured on a missile-firing battle ship, in Navy regalia.<\/p>\n

In the years just before the First World War, the professor of Education<\/a> says, children\u2019s books and popular culture promoted proud support of the British Empire. So when war was declared in 1914, young boys were already primed to fight for their countries.<\/p>\n

As the 100th anniversary of the First World War approaches, the UK\u2019s Leverhulme Trust<\/a> is funding three international conferences to study children\u2019s literature and culture in the years approaching the First World War. Paul is organizing the Canadian conference.<\/p>\n

From the Boy Scouts, formed in part to train boys for future military life, to books promoting the virtue of supporting king and country, children\u2019s literature presented the glory of war strongly enough to suppress all instinctive, religious and cultural imperatives against killing, Paul said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re going to get young people to overcome those instincts, you have to work pretty hard to create a culture that makes it not only acceptable, but desirable,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

By studying children\u2019s literature and culture in the pre-war years, \u201cwe\u2019ll gain insights into how children were enculturated,\u201d she said. \u201cIf we\u2019re ever going to stop war, we have to understand what encourages people to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conferences, part of the international research project Approaching War, will take place in Australia, Canada and England in 2011, 2012 and 2013. The Australian conference, located at the University of Technology Sydney, will be in November or early December of this year. A three-day conference is being tentatively constructed for May 9 to 12, 2012, in Canada, starting at Brock and moving to McCrae House in Guelph, birthplace of In Flanders Fields<\/em> author John McCrae. The third conference will be in Newcastle, UK. Newcastle University, the University of Technology Sydney and the Toronto Public Library (through its Osborne collection) are part of the research project.<\/p>\n

Paul<\/a>, who has been at Brock since 2005, has a long-time interest in children\u2019s literature. Her new book, The Children\u2019s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century<\/em>, was published Dec. 14 by Routledge. She is an associate general editor of The Norton Anthology of Children\u2019s Literature<\/em> (Norton 2005),authored Reading Otherways<\/em> (Thimble 1998) and was the content editor of Growing with Books: Children\u2019s Literature in the Formative Years and Beyond<\/em> (Ontario Ministry of Education 1988).<\/p>\n

When it comes to relationships between children\u2019s culture and war, the First World War is particularly interesting, she said. Its iconography, from Snoopy\u2019s Red Baron to imagery in war games, endures even now.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough the First World War, boys especially were encouraged to believe that war was an exciting adventure, a noble thing in which people should engage,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat were the conditions that allowed that war to take place? What were boys seeing that made them say \u2018This is what I\u2019m going to do: kill or be killed?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lissa Paul will host a Canadian conference on children’s literature and culture in the years leading up to the First World War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,1,5],"tags":[32,3325],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7316"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7320,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7316\/revisions\/7320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}