Setu 🌉 सेतु: Children's Literature 2020

Showing posts with label Children's Literature 2020. Show all posts

Poetry and Beyond

Hi,

While the world is facing another wave of Covid-19 cases bravely, and USA is eagerly waiting for official announcement of the new president, a few things are happening at Setu also.

In an attempt to make your 'stay safe at home' efforts easier, I am glad to present three new books under Setu logo. Amma's Gospel is a poetry collection by well known poet Rajender Krishan, the founder of Boloji.com. This title (ISBN: ) is being offered in paperback and ebook formats.

'Solitude and Other Poems' is also a collection of poems by Rajender Krishan that was earlier published in paperback. The same has been published as a Kindle ebook by Setu. It is available on Amazon now.

'English Pronunciation Dictionary for Hindi Speakers' is a pronunciation dictionary aimed at English Speakers from Indian subcontinent, especially from India and Nepal. Created by scholars from Australia, Bangladesh, India and Nepal, this compilation spans over four hundred pages and is available in paperback through Amazon.com. More information about these and earlier titles is available at Setu Publications Showcase page.

Anurag Sharma

October is the month of Mahatma Gandhi. His birthday is officially celebrated as the International Day of Non-Violence throughout the world. Setu's series of prestigious guest editors for this month is being hosted by Santosh Bakaya to feature 'Mahatma Gandhi: Legacy and Relevance'.

From Anika Shaheed in 'Young Voices' to Shaleen Singh in 'Author of the Month' this issue offers a wide variety of topics. Enjoy!

Best wishes!

Yours,
Anurag Sharma
Setu, Pittsburgh ✍️ October 2020

Setu, October 2020

Half a Century of Setu, the Bridge

Anurag Sharma

Hi,

Glad to present 50th issue of Setu.
Thanks a lot for your support and encouragement. Supported by over 3,500 literary articles by over 800 authors, and over 1.55 million unique hits, Setu is at your service bringing excellent pieces of literature and art from all around the world. I hope we will be there to see a true half century of Setu in 2046.

The month of Savan (or Shravan to be precise) is the season of Monsoon. I am proudly presenting 'Songs from a Monsoon Swing' the latest book from Setu which is a collection of poems by Lavanya Shah, a multilingual author from Cincinnati, who is already a well known name in Hindi literature. The book is available in paperback and ebook formats on Amazon.

Best wishes!

Yours,
Anurag Sharma
Setu, Pittsburgh ✍️ Setu, 50th issue Special

Setu, July 2020

Setu

Volume 5; Issue 2; July 2020

Setu PDF Archives

Editorial

Poetry

Author of the Month

Bashabi Fraser

Fiction / Flash

James Bates

Fiction/ Flash based on the prompt: The delayed tryst, on a moon-lit sea, in Avalon

Serial novel

Exclusive

Mosarrap Hossain Khan

Essay

Sinchan Chatterjee: Echoes of Narcissus: Selfhood, Subjectivity and Suicide in the Early Modern Period

Paintings by Dr. Jatinder Singh Bhogal

Special Edition: Children's Literature 2020

Guest Editor: Sutanuka Ghosh Roy

सेतु, जुलाई 2020

Setu Home - Past Issues

Guest Editor’s Note: Children’s Literature

(Setu Special, July 2020)

As we are trying to cope with the troubled times our feelings and emotions are bottled up. We all are engaging in various activities to keep ourselves busy. The children are the worst sufferers for they fail to understand the new sick world around them. They miss their school, their friends and the playground. This special issue of SETU on “Children’s Literature” will surely put back the lost smile on their lips. Reading the poems and stories will stimulate their imagination and add to their visual imagination too. They will be Alice in their own wonderland or be a Nancy Drew trying to solve a problem on their own.

Some of them will find a broomstick to fly like Harry Potter and enter into a magical world of potions. Nowadays childhood is stolen from the life of the children. Reading will help children weave their own dreamy yarn and experiment with different ways of seeing the world. We hope that the little angels will hover in their imaginary make-believe world and travel through time to touch the stars!

I am thankful to all the contributors who sold their rainbow dreams to make the children happy!

Happy reading!

Sutanuka Ghosh Roy
Kolkata July 2020.

Sutanuka Ghosh Roy

Bio: Dr Sutanuka Ghosh Roy is Assistant Professor and Head Department of English in Tarakeswar Degree College, The University of Burdwan. She did her doctoral dissertation on Two Eighteen Century British Women Poets: Hannah More and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She has been teaching at the undergraduate and postgraduate level for twelve years. She is currently engaged in active research and her areas of interest include Eighteenth Century literature, Indian English literature, Canadian Studies, Post-colonial Literature, Australian Studies, Dalit Literature, Gender Studies etc. She has published widely and presented papers at National and International Seminars. She is a regular contributor of research articles and papers to anthologies, national and international journals of repute like The Statesman, Muse India, Lapis lazuli, Setu etc. She is also a reviewer, a poet, a critic and an avid painter.

Children’s Literature: Authors

* POETRY *

1. AMIT SHANKAR SAHA
2. ANEEK CHATTERJEE
3. ANITA NAHAL
4. ARPAN DASGUPTA
5. DANNY BEST
6. GOPAL LAHIRI
7. IPSITA GANGULY
8. MADHU SRIVASTAVA
9. MANDAKINI BHATTACHERYA
10. NABANITA SENGUPTA
11. NISHI PULUGURTHA
12. PARAMITA MUKHERJEE MULLICK
13. PRANAB GHOSH
14. PRETTY BORA
15. RAJA CHAKRABORTY
16. RAJORSHI PATRANABISH

17. SANTASHREE CHAUDHURI
18. SHALEEN SINGH
19. UMA RAY SRINIVASAN

* SHORT STORIES *

1. AJANTA PAUL
2. AMITA ROY
3. KETAKI DATTA
4. MITALI CHAKRAVARTY
5. NANDINI SAHU
6. SANTOSH BAKAYA

* ARTICLES *

1. BREEZ MOHAN HAZARIKA
2. INDRAJIT BOSE
3. JAGARI MUKHERJEE

Setu, July 2019

Fiction: The Filthy Foursome and Alice

Santosh Bakaya

It was a dark, dismal night, and a tempestuous wind was blowing through the jungle. The trees were moaning and writhing, as though in great pain. A twelve year old girl was walking through the jungle, lost in thought. She was missing her mother, who had time and again reprimanded her for her slothful ways, especially her habit of not washing hands.

Stuck to a tree was a wooden board, which said, To Malevolent Land. Malevolent Land! The name sent shivers up her spine and she slumped on a fallen tree trunk to recover her breath. The moment she sat on the trunk, some voices fell into her ears.

“Twirl the hula hoop. Twirl the hula hoop

Are you hard of hearing, you nincompoop?

What will you folks have, stew or soup?

Wash your hands, scrub away, nincompoop!

Twirl the hula hoop. Twirl the hula hoop

Stew or soup, stew or soup? Twirl the hoop

Twirl the hula hoop. Twirl the hula hoop.

Wash your hands, scrub away, nincompoop!

“Let me twirl the hula hoop, please let me. Who …. are ….you four?” She stuttered, as her eyes fell on four cloaked and masked men sitting on a tree stump, every now and then dipping their hands in a bucket of water and scrubbing their hands.

Frantically. Vigorously. Frenziedly.

Four scrawny necks whirled in the direction of the voice, and their eyes fell on the most innocent face they had ever seen.

“This is our territory, and we are the four wizards of Malevolent Land, h ah ah a. We don’t tolerate any intruders.” The Filthy Foursome guffawed in malevolent glee, pointing towards the board which said, Malevolent Land. The girl shuddered. The four waved their gnarled and grotesque looking hands, soon there were cookies, doughnuts and scones dancing in the air.

“Every globule of our blood will rise in revolt if you don’t eat! Eat! Eat! Eat!

Now eat! Eat! Eat! Eat!” Said the wizards.

“But first wash your hands, nincompoop!

Don’t you carry a sanitizer with you stup….

id girl?” Bellowed one.

“Oh, my mom is always after me to wash my hands, but I am too lazy to do it”. She confessed almost on the verge of tears.

“What is your name?”

“Alice”.

“Oh, that crazy, confused, forever hallucinating girl? Sometimes you wander in Wonderland, oft, you are caught peeping through the looking glass”, One of the four said with a smirk, trying to smack of sanity.

“But, we are wizards, we know you are lying, they call you Malice.” Said one, looking absolutely gray.

“No! No! When I was small, I could not pronounce my name properly, instead of Alice, I called myself Malice, so the name stuck.

“Stuck! Stuck! Stuck”, they chanted.

“I am Alice of the present century; that confused Alice lived in the middle of the Victorian era, and she was merely seven years old. You claim to be wizards and you don’t even know this!” She rejoined impishly, but they went on chanting, unfazed.

Stuck! Stuck! Stuck

Now, you are stuck here

Alice is full of malice

Malice is full of Alice

you have always been ‘wildly curious’

Wash your hands, or we’ll get furious

Alice is full of malice

Malice is full of Alice

Stuck! Stuck! Stuck

She dipped her hands in the water bucket owned by the wizards, washed her hands while the Filthy Foursome looked on impatiently. Then she gobbled up the cookies, scones and doughnuts and while the four were busy washing their hands, she slunk away. Behind her she heard the sound of running feet, and highly agitated yells of “Off with her head!”

She stopped and threw a counter yell in their direction, “you weird wizards, if you can do nothing else, at least be original! The Queen of Hearts will start turning in her grave, and Lewis Carroll will not like it. [Actually I am confused whether it was the Red queen who said it, or the Queen of hearts, but anyway, she mumbled] The moment she said this, the sounds behind her stopped and her eyes fell on something dark huddled under a tree.

“Hey, what is that? The Cheshire cat? Ah, purrfect!” She said in a flurry of excitement, heading towards it, when suddenly the cat started caterwauling. A strident and piercing scream rent the air.

“How dare!” The cat growled, suffixing the growl with an indignant Meow. A meow which seemed to trigger an earthquake more than 7 on the Richter scale.

“How dare, what?”

“Mistake me for the Cheshire cat? MEOOOOOOOOOW!”

“Oh!”

“I have my own identity! And I hardly ever grin. ME….NO CHESHIRE CAT. I only frown, and tell me, can anyone do anything but frown in these circumstances? But, did you wash your hands, girl? ” It strode toward her at a menacing pace, glowering.

No specialist in feline psychology, but, Alice realized that the cat was more bark than bite, nay, more meow than munch, and grinning in relief, recalled her dad reading from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats* just a few hours back.

“Are you Bombaulrina then? Or, maybe, Macavity?”

The cat grinned a grin which was dangerously near a smirk and said,

“The name that no human research can discover –

BUT THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.”

Never confess – never confess ……the words resounded with a new vigour and slowly many cats came out from the shadows and started singing some incomprehensible cat song – a slow, eerie chant at varying feline pitches and inflections.

As the chant reached a crescendo, she furtively left the place, frantically wondering what the name of the cat was ……..

Rumour has it, that the Filthy Foursome are still there in Malevolent Land, washing hands and spewing doggerel, and Malice, oops Alice is cured of her hallucinations, but can be seen washing hands at all odd hours of the day and night .

Frenziedly. Feverishly. Vigorously.

* It is a collection of whimsical poems [Faber and Faber, 1939] penned by Nobel laureate, T. S Eliot about feline psychology.

Bio: Dr. Santosh Bakaya, recipient of the International Reuel Award for writing and literature [2014] for her long narrative poem, Oh Hark!,

Setu Award [2018], Bharat Nirman Award for literary excellence [2017] Keshav Malik Award [2019], is an academic- poet- novelist- biographer - essayist -Ted Speaker- creative writing mentor, whose Ted talk on the Myth of Writers' Block is very popular in creative writing circles.

She runs a much appreciated column, Morning Meanderings, in Learning and Creativity. Com which is a kindle version.

Her poetic biography of Mahatma Gandhi [Ballad of Bapu], has been internationally acclaimed.

Under the Apple Boughs [Poetry], Where are the lilacs? [Poetry], Songs of Belligerence [Poetry], Flights from my Terrace [Personal essays], Bring out the tall Tales, [short stories with Avijit Sarkar], A Skyful of Balloons [novella] are some of her books which have received laurels. Her latest book is a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. [Only in Darkness can you see the Stars]

Children's Literature 2020 :: Setu, July 2020

The Warning: Arpan Dasgupta

When home is no more
And all creatures are helpless,
Beware, people of Earth
Danger has stepped on your door!
Save mother earth
Or perish in the raging fires
You once preserved
Which will lead to utter destruction
Of the human race.

The worst is yet to happen,
And all of us know it
In the deepest corner of our hearts,
Beware, humans, beware:
You have been warned,
And this is the last chance
You have got.

Bio: Arpan Dasgupta studies in standard VI, Delhi Public School, Ruby Park, Kolkata. He is an avid reader and enjoys writing poems. His other interests are music and baking.

Children's Literature 2020 :: Setu, July 2020

Images: Anita Nahal

Anita Nahal

Anita Nahal, Ph.D., CDP currently teaches at the University of the District of Columbia. She’s a poet, professor, short story writer, flash fictionist, children’s books author, and D&I consultant. She’s held numerous professional positions such as, Assistant Provost for International Program, Howard University, Mellon Fellowship Program Administrator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Associate Professor at Sri Venkateswara College, New Delhi among others. She has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Residence at SUNY, Binghamton, an NEH Summer Faculty award winner, and a gender scholar at Berkeley, CA. Nahal has two volumes of poetry, Hey...Spilt milk is spilt, nothing else (Authorspress, 2018) and Initiations (Pitamber-1988), a collection of flash fictions, Life on the go-Flash fictions from New Delhi to America (Authorspress, 2018), and three children’s books (Madhuban-Vikas, 1993-1995,) besides academic writings. Her recent poems and flash fictions can be found in Aberration Labyrinth, Confluence, Better Than Starbucks, Aaduna, River Poets Journal, Colere, Lapis Lazuli and in a number of Medium publications. Nahal is also the co-editor of the anthology, In All The Spaces-Diverse Voices In Global Women's Poetry, (Authorpress, 2020). Nahal is the daughter of Sahitya Akademi award-winning Indian novelist and professor, Late Dr. Chaman Nahal, and her mother, Late Dr. Sudarshna Nahal was also an educationist, author and principal of a K-12 school. Originally from New Delhi, India, Anita Nahal resides in the US with her son, Vikrant, and daughter-in-law, Sumona. In her free time, she loves dancing, and practicing and teaching Yoga. For more on Anita: https://anitanahal.wixsite.com/anitanahal

Children's Literature 2020 :: Setu, July 2020

Poetry: Aneek Chatterjee

Aneek Chatterjee

Mother

Mother you love me.

You’ve structured my

daily routine with much care.

Seven to nine

in the morning: language;

nine to 11: maths;

11 to 1: biology

Lunch, rest etc

thereafter.

From the afternoon to

late evening: tuition from

reputed teachers

Mother, do you know

a football ground

laughs in my language book;

grasshoppers jump from

biology lessons;

& an ominous planet threatens

me from my physics lexicon ?

Sometimes I want to be

your father

& wish to take you back

to days of yore

when you played hide &

seek, kho – kho;

when you dreamed to be a

leg spinner;

& tell you

stop spinning around

your son

______________________________

Elders!

Look at the lovely sky

Where I wish to fly

The aroma of flower

Signals nature’s power

The naughty river flows

Through jungle, meadows

I’ve visited in my dream.

But I like to scream

When a dog crashes under the car

A bird is caged by the neighbor;

& there is a fence around my mind

Oh elders, be patient, be kind

________________________________________

Bio: Aneek Chatterjee is a poet and academic from Kolkata, India. He has been published in reputed literary magazines and poetry anthologies across the globe. His recent credits are: Chiron Review, Better Than Starbucks, Poetry Potion, Shot Glass Journal, The Stray Branch, Dissident Voice, Café Dissensus, Literary Yard, Ann Arbor Review, Chicago Record, Setu, Ethos Literary Journal, GloMag, New Asian Writing, Montreal Writes, Scarlet Leaf Review, Pangolin Review, Mark Literary Review, Merak Magazine, Taj Mahal Review etc. He authored 13 books including two poetry collections titled “Seaside Myopia” & "Unborn Poems and Yellow Prison" (Cyberwit.net), and a novel named “The Funeral Procession”. Chatterjee has a Ph.D. in International Relations; and has been teaching in leading Indian and foreign universities. His poetry has been archived at Yale University.

Children's Literature 2020 :: Setu, July 2020

Poetry: Amit Shankar Saha

Amit Shankar Saha

1. Freedom

Dear child,
Yesterday you kept
your head on your father's lap
and perhaps you slept,
lost yourself in musical strains,
found yourself in a different world,
whereas in this world
of bending roofs and cringing walls,
where to breathe is to disgrace
and the mind's a cellular space,
where thoughts of pain
no music can overcome,
we celebrate independence,
you celebrate freedom.
***

2. Freedom Reloaded

Dear child,
A year ago on Independence Day
I wrote a poem for you.
Do I write one this year too?
But who will share?
If I stare
long at the phone
will it ring?
No. One day you will know
why freedom is also forgetting.
***

3. Revisiting Freedom

Dear child,
You still smile in freedom,
not the momentary smile
of photo consciousness,
but something primordial,
as if we are still being born
and nothing has happened yet,
as if we can still look back
at the gloaming hour of our
independence and rescue
from the cornice of hope
the frightened existence
of our innocent freedom.

Bio:
Amit Shankar Saha is a widely-published award-winning poet and short story writer. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the author of two collections of poems, "Balconies of Time" and "Fugitive Words" and the e-Chapbook "Illicit Poems". He teaches in the English Department of Seacom Skills University.

Children's Literature 2020 :: Setu, July 2020

New-Age (Non) Human: A Posthuman Investigation of Suzanne Walker's 'Mooncakes'

Jagari Mukherjee

Graphic novels constitute a popular genre in the twenty-first century, continuing from the tradition of the “Superhero” comics of the previous century. These graphic novels usually are labelled as “YA” novels, as their target readership consists of young adults (teenagers). One of the latest graphic novels to be published in 2019 is Mooncakes, penned by Suzanne Walker and illustrated by Wendy Xu. This article proposes to look at Mooncakes from a posthumanist angle.

The conclusion of Francesca Ferrando’s seminal essay on Posthumanism, entitled “Towards A Posthuman Methodology: A Statement”, Ferrando asserts that “Posthumanism has to acknowledge the whole abstract experience in order to be receptive to the non-human and be open to unknown possibilities.” Ferrando defines Posthumanism in terms of its function, mentioning that it “criticizes anthropocentric humanism and opens its inquiry to non-human life, from aliens to other forms of hypothetical entities related to the physics notion of a multiverse. In so doing, it articulates the conditions for a posthuman epistemology concerned with non-human experience as the site of knowledge.”

The aim of this article is to examine Mooncakes in the light of Ferrando’s words. The main characters of Mooncakes are decidedly non-human. The heroine, Nova, is a witch who works in a bookstore owned by her two grandmothers, Qiu and Nechama. Nova’s parents are dead but their ghosts visit Nova and her grandmothers for Thanksgiving and express their disappointment because at Nova’s decision of not going in for apprenticeship to learn witchcraft and to stay at home instead. Moreover, it would be difficult to answer the question as to whether the novel has a “hero” in the traditional sense of the term: the other protagonist, Tam Lang, is a werewolf who prefers to use the gender-neutral pronoun “they” (Tam corrects Grandma Qiu once towards the beginning of the novel when Qiu addresses Tam as “she”). Thus, Mooncakes normalizes the non-human and is inclusive of the LGBTQ spectrum. Nechamma and Qiu discuss Nova’s previous romances with boys in the light of her present budding relationship with Tam, voicing their approval for the latter. Mooncakes’ target audience are ‘young adults”, judging from its tone, and thus belongs to what is known as the YA category.

The historical depiction of witches in medieval literature has been biased at its worst, and marginalized at its best. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the three witches dancing round the cauldron darkness of the forest lend a sinister atmosphere to the play. They are known as the “weird sisters”, a term that the late British novelist Terry Prachett parodies in his novel Wyrd Sisters, which is a part of his Discworld series belonging to the genre of fantasy. In Prachett’s tale the witches are largely benevolent, have names and personalities, and coexist with humans in a magical milieu (the first novel in the Discworld series is named The Color of Magic and features a wizard as its protagonist). Witches had a place in literature before Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997 and became the third highest grossing novel of the twentieth century with an estimated 120 million sales. However, one may remember that the protagonists of the Harry Potter series are wizards and witches in an essentially human world; they still belong to the minority community. However, in the multiverse of Mooncakes, humans are decidedly a minority, here represented by Nova’s friend, the sceptic scientist Tatyana, who believes that her friend is a witch but seeks scientific explanations behind witchcraft.

As far as its plot is concerned, Mooncakes uses the ancient trope of the victory of good over evil. The novel opens with Tam revisiting his old neighborhood after many years, the neighborhood where Nova lives, in order to escape his demons: there are dark forces which want to harness Tam’s “wolf magic” and turn him into an evil demon in order to access forbidden power. This Satanic-Faustian ambition is thwarted by the joint efforts of Nova and her close ones. In the very first chapter, Nova rescues Tam from a horse demon let loose by the dark forces. This sets the tone for the rest of the story where the female protagonist rescues her beloved from the bad guys, thereby shattering stereotypical depictions off helpless damsels rescued by princes and knights in shining armors. Nova is as strong as Tam is soft and vulnerable: she refuses to give up in the face of difficulties, and ropes in her grandmothers to come up with a new kind of magic that would be powerful enough to ward off the evil forces. Nova is not perfect: she uses hearing aids and is full of stubbornness in her refusal to go in for an apprenticeship: it is only at the end, when all of the combined magic of Nova, her grandmothers, and Tatyana have managed to banish the evil forces that she realizes that she needs formal training in witchcraft, and finally decides to leave home. Tam decides to go with her, and the novel ends with the young couple kissing, locked in an embrace. In spite of the danger lurking throughout the book just around the corner as a threat to Tam, there is decidedly a feel-good factor about the story. This is no less reinforced by the physical representation of Mooncakes: the pages are of high-quality glossy paper and Wendy Xu’s artwork is colorful and easy on the eyes. The characters are black-and-white in their depiction: the good and good and the bad are bad with no grey shades in between; there is no Batman-type “Dark Knight” complexity and dilemma. The forest in the novel is crowded with a host of magical creatures, loyal to Tam and Nova, but threatened, as per the plot, by the cult who belong to the dark side.

Nova’s home, adjacent to her grandmas’ bookstore, gives an insight into the abode of a young modern witch. The bookstore is named as Black Cat Bookseller Café and the family keeps a number of black cats as pets. Nova’s room exemplifies the room of a teenage witch. A flying broom is kept at the foot of the bed, a wooden treasure-box is placed on her bedside table in which she keeps her magic wand and gemstones, old books lean against the wall, pile on top of one another, a wooden bookcase stands on the other side, full of books presumably on witchcraft, and a jack o’lantern with silvery light hangs overhead. Even Nova’s bright blue earphones are magical: she uses a trick with them to stun the evil witch, Mrs Crawford. The ceiling has constellations mapped out with toy stars and planets, which Tam and Nova had set up as children. As a witch, Nova has all the constellations imprinted in her memory, as Tam recalls. Qiu and Nechamma’s kitchen is full of herbs and potions. When Tam is imprisoned by Mrs Crawford, the two old witches locate him with the help of a potion brewed in the cauldron, as the smoke arising from the potion falls on a map pointing to his exact location, to which they fly using brooms. Although most of the story is set in Nova’s home, the climax of the novel occurs in the forest where good and evil forces converge together.

In Mooncakes, the world of magic and enchantment is normalized. Like the poet Coleridge, Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xiu familiarizes the strange and the unfamiliar. They represent a posthuman milieu which is more tolerant of differences than is prevalent in the real world.

Text

Walker, Suzanne and Wendy Xiu.Mooncakes. Lion Forge LLC, 2019.

Reference

Ferrando, Francesca. “Towards a Posthumanist Methodology: A Statement”. Frame: Journal For Literary Studies, vol. 25, issue 1, pp 9-18.

Bio: Jagari Mukherjee is a gold medalist in English Literature, a Best of the Net 2018 nominee, DAAD scholar from Technical University, Dresden, Germany, a Bear River alumna. Her poems and other creative pieces have been published in different venues both in India and abroad. Her latest book, The Elegant Nobody, was published by Hawakal Publishers in January 2020. She is the winner of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 for Book Review, Poeisis Award for Excellence in Poetry 2019, and also the recipient of Reuel International Prize For Poetry 2019, among other awards. Jagari is a part of the Reviews team at The Blue Nib.

Children's Literature 2020 :: Setu, July 2020

“Sunlight on the Water:” Arthur Ransome’s Book Illustrations

Indrajit Bose

Abstract: Arthur Ransome, appearing towards the closing phase of the ‘golden age’ of children’s illustrated books, gave us, in his Swallows and Amazons series for children, a complete and artistically rendered world through his illustrations. Ransome illustrated his own stories, drawing both full-page illustrations of people and places, and miniature sketches of the natural world and objects as chapter terminations. Though not a professional illustrator, Ransome was able to give his readers a full picture of the English natural world which has proved to have had an enduring legacy in children’s fiction.

It would be perhaps a truism to say that illustrations are an integral part of our reading experience of children’s literature. Well illustrated books kindle that imaginative spark in children that the authors are trying to foster through their writing. From Beatrix Potter’s pictures of a rural English Eden with animals leading a cozy country life, to the riverside pictures of Ratty and Mole in The Wind in the Willows, to the sketches of Pooh and Piglet bivouacking in the Hundred Acre Wood, generations of child readers have grown up adoring and fantasizing over these pastoral idylls of matchless beauty. And the images have endured over time; many adults remember with affection the beautiful illustrations of E. H. Shephard in Pooh or Potter herself. The turn of the century was not only rich in the literature for children it produced, but it was also the veritable golden age of illustrated children’s books. It was the conjoint efforts of the authors and illustrators that together recreated a potent paradigm of the visible world in a fictional fantasy universe.

Especially potent and enduring were the pictures of an English countryside and country life which continued to be the defining image of Englishness in children’s imagination all over the world. These pictures really represent an idealization of rural England that was to persist particularly in the genre of the adventure story long after much of England had changed indescribably after the Second World War. In the long series of Swallows and Amazons books (1930—47) by Arthur Ransome, of course, this image of England and Englishness is especially predominant. What is even more to Ransome’s credit is that the books are drawn and illustrated by Ransome himself—no mean feat if we consider the fact that the series covers twelve books. Ransome not only gave us gripping tales of juvenile adventure figuring children with whom we can identify, but also immortalized the landscape of the Lake District and the Norfolk broads through the descriptions and sketches in his stories. It is to these drawings and sketches that we must turn to appraise his contribution to the genre of the illustrated children’s adventure story.

Speaking historically, of course, Ransome and his illustrations antedate what is referred to as the ‘golden age of children’s book illustrations’, including the work of illustrators like John Tenniel and Kate Greenway, Ernest Shephard, Arthur Rackham, Jessie Wilcox-Smith, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Robinson and others. This period, extending roughly from the 1880s to the 1930s, saw the unprecedented growth and development of illustrations in children’s books. There were beautiful illustrations, both colour and black-and-white sketches, executed with artistic finesse, of people, objects, places and settings. There were woodcuts, engravings and chromolithographs. This period also coincided with a simultaneous development in printing technology. Though the human figures were beautifully executed, they often had esoteric qualities, as the illustrators often drew for books of fairy tales and legends, like the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, as well as for more realistic subjects like the novels of the Bronte sisters. There were also elements of the fin de siècle, with wavy, billowing hair, fantastical cloudscapes and colourful arabesques. Often, there were animals with humanized traits, or allegorical personages. The tradition of the adventure story—often describing the exploits of a group of children—was, by contrast, far more realistic. It is to this tradition that Arthur Ransome belongs.

Ransome was not a professional artist and illustrator, he was a journalist, and correspondent of the Daily News during the Revolution in Russia, and later foreign correspondent of the Guardian. His drawings are realistic, and recreate the scenes and locales of the Walker children’s holiday adventures in the Swallows and Amazons series. He draws mainly for his locales on the beautiful natural landscape of the Lake District and the marshes and river of the Norfolk Broads. Both during his stint as war correspondent in Europe, when he successfully built and sailed a cruising yacht, Racundra, in the Baltic Sea, and during his later life as an author and journalist in England, when he owned a succession of sailing yachts, Ransome was keenly absorbed in the out-of-doors life on the water, an avid sailor and sporting enthusiast like no other. This love for boats and sailing is reflected in the holiday adventures of the children in the Swallows and Amazons series. Whether it is John, Susan, Titty and Roger in Swallows and Amazons, Dick and Dorothea in Winter Holiday or Joe, Bill and Pete in The Big Six, all the children are caught up in the excitements, delights and also responsibilities of sailing.

The books are all, of course, illustrated by Ransome himself, and the insertions of key full-page illustrations were obviously designedly done. Many of these concern the actions of the children in the books, their sailing down or up the river, fishing or other nautical activities. In fact, he lovingly draws the sailing boats (see Figures 1and 2: The Big Six:132, 145)and the rivers, with deft shading showing the undulating waves, the skies with birds circling in the far distance, or even the nighttime skies with stars twinkling and the boat sailing in the moonlight (Figure 3, Winter Holiday: 295). The illustrations clearly recreate a long English summer spent in delightful pursuits. There are descriptions of fishing on the river, sailing out to islands on the lake with all the expectancy of a travel expedition, picnicking in the woods and cooking on camp fires.

But what is interesting is in these full-page illustrations, Ransome, when delineating the English landscape, the leafy foliage of trees on the riverbank, or bushes or reeds by the river, takes recourse to an impressionistic vagueness. The precision we are accustomed to find in such matters, for instance, in the work of Arthur Robinson in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, is entirely absent here. Also interestingly, the human figures are glimpsed mostly in profile or in silhouettes. Ransome resorts to vagueness when it comes to delineating facial features—there are only suggestive outlines, a chin, a nose or rounded cheeks—no filling in with precisely drawn or shaded characteristics. This vagueness is probably deliberate, and not a sign of any deficiency in artistic skill, and Ransome perhaps wishes his young readers to imagine what his child protagonists are like for themselves, to guide and not to dominate their imagination with overmastering images.

This contention would also tend to be supported by the fact that when Ransome is sketching objects or river birds or sailing craft in the small illustrations that close chapters in the books he is quite specific about details. In fact, there are many illustrations which tend to reinforce the impression of a real world, maps and charts, objects like lanterns, bunk beds, compasses and cooking on camp fires (see Figures 4 and 5 Swallows and Amazons 333, Winter Holiday 279). He seems to be providing notes on the real world of exploration, action and adventure where his youthful protagonists all seem to be ambitious to venture forth. These illustrations are admittedly minor ones; Ransome himself does not include them in the list of illustrations with which he begins the narrative of each of these novels. Possibly he takes them as only providing supplementary background or some light relief. But they are very much part of our integral experience of reading these books. They not only remind us of the background of the stories but thrill us with their simplicity and beauty.

The sketches of various water fowls, ducks, moorhens, bearded tits, are all beautifully done with loving attention to detail. Also the river fish, like pike, carp and sturgeon, are vividly drawn. (Figures 6, 7 & 8 Swallows: 24, The Big Six 279). The natural world of the riverbank comes alive to us through these sketches. It is a vividly and vigorously drawn natural world, strong in its tones of earthy realism, alive with all the tints of a languorous summer’s day, but at the same, replete with people busy with their working lives. It may be a holiday world for the children, but their world borders on the workaday world. Also, this world is as quintessentially English as the natural world of The Wind in the Willows. But it is not a world where the characters lead a life of leisured ease. Of course, Ransome was writing stories of action and adventure, not attempting a quasi-mythological fable and telling commentary on his times like Grahame. But, due to his realistic overtones, no less reinforced by his illustrations, Ransome’s fictional world remains firmly anchored in its present reality.

The children’s activities of sailing on the river and lakes, camping, fishing and bird-watching epitomize the holiday activities, pluckiness and hardihood of British children of that age and generation. Ransome was also probably trying to convey lessons in resourcefulness and practical action in the face of natural and man-made disasters. These tales of action and adventure were to prove to have an enduring legacy in English children’s fiction, and we can find traces of this world even in the adventure stories of Enid Blyton.

The greatest tribute that can be paid to Ransome as illustrator is that he had the courage and inventiveness to illustrate his own stories. He drew well, though lacking the finesse and professional finish of the illustrators commissioned to illustrate children’s books, but left much to the imaginations of his young readers. His illustrations still delight us and will continue to encourage and inspire more generations to read Ransome’s books.

Works Cited:

Ransome, Arthur. Swallows and Amazons. 1930. London: Random House, 2001.

---.Winter Holiday. 1933. London: Random House, 2012.

---. The Big Six. 1940. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

“Arthur Ransome”. https://www.fanasticfiction.com. Web. 20.05.2020

https://arthur-ransome-trust.org.uk/

Archive of Children’s Book Illustrations of the Golden Age. https://www.pookpress.co.uk/illustrators-archive/

Bio: Dr Indrajit Bose is Assistant Professor and Section-in-Charge of English, Guru Nanak Institute of Technology, Kolkata. He completed his graduation from St Xavier’s College, Kolkata and M.A and Ph D from Jadavpur University. His area of specialization is in Conrad studies. He has also completed the eTBE certificate from the University of South Carolina, U.S.A and has been trained in ELT by the British Council. He has taught for more than 18 years, presented papers at national and international conferences and published in journals. He has also completed a UGC MRP on “Speaking Proficiency Development of EFL and ESL Learners in India” (2014-16). He also holds a diploma in French.

Children's Literature 2020 :: Setu, July 2020

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Setu

Volume 5; Issue 2; July 2020

Editorial

Poetry

Author of the Month

Fiction / Flash

Fiction/ Flash based on the prompt: The delayed tryst, on a moon-lit sea, in Avalon

Serial novel

Exclusive

Essay

Paintings by Dr. Jatinder Singh Bhogal

Book Review

Multilingual Poetry

New Poetry Form: The "Trilogy" Poetry

Translation

Video Poetry

Guest Editor: Sutanuka Ghosh Roy

Mother

1. Freedom

Jagari Mukherjee

Indrajit Bose