Historical fiction is a powerful way of transmitting national history to later generations. It emerged in the nineteenth century as a means of building identity and fostering solidarity. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, former representations of history were deconstructed. Instead of glorifying the nation, social evils were exposed. As a…

This article focuses on the series of 11 books about a young female pilot, "Worrals of the WAAF," by W.E. Johns, creator of Biggles. The Worrals books were published from 1941 when recruitment for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force was falling. Johns chose to ignore that the WAAF supported pilots through their work on the ground and did not…

One of the most popular Dutch educational enlightenment authors was Hieronymus van Alphen. His three volumes of "Little Poems for Children" published in 1778 and 1782 were extremely successful, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Inspired by the German poets Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann, Van Alphen brought about an…

This paper examines militarisation in child culture in Israel's transition from a pre-state society engaged in the nation-building process to statehood. The paper studies children's culture and the literary corpus for children created in the 1940s and 1950s in Jewish Palestine, before and after Israel's establishment. It investigates the main…

This article examines the reciprocity between children's literature and educational ideals in Dutch rewritings of international literary classics published for children between 1850 and 1950. It analyses the assumed pedagogical power of rewritings of international literary classics for children from the perspective of three theoretical concepts:…

This article examines one of the first children's libraries in continental Europe, founded by Belgian feminists in Ghent around 1910. The transnational cultural transfer and transformation of the American children's-library paradigm is studied from the perspective of "entangled history". The authors reveal a history entangled in…