While there is a plethora of critical readings on the intertextuality of fairytales, there is significantly less attention drawn to the metaleptic and metafictional attributes embedded in the rest of the children’s literature canon. Picturebooks, to give but one specific example, utilize metaleptic devices profusely, either as a means to highlight the potentiality of language games (for example to teach the alphabet, rules of punctuation, etc) or as a writerly activity that anticipates an active reader. Mike Cadden’s edited collection of essays Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature as well as Sylvia Joyce Pantaleo and Lawrence R. Sipe’s edited volume Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality mark the beginning of an intriguing connection between the breaking of illusion and children’s literature.
This panel solicits presentations that could expand on the limited discourse on the uses, intentions, and implications of metaleptic and metafictional devices in children’s literature. Readings of children’s literature that foreground their fictionality to the young reader and/or flaunt fiction’s fictional make-up are particularly welcomed. Papers may address but are not limited to the following topics:
- Picturebooks and frame-breaking
- Novel-within-the-novel in children’s fiction
- Paratexts, Intertexts, and metatexts in children’s literature
- Intermediality in children’s literature: the superimposing of mediums
- Online children’s books: the meta-reader of online children’s fiction
- Metalepsis or metafiction in animated children’s films and TV shows
- Kaleidoscope and hypertext novels/picturebooks
- Meta-poetry in children’s literature
- Wordless picture books
- Metalepsis and illustrations
- Young-reader as author
- Case studies/children’s accounts on metafictional children’s literature
Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
New York Institute of Technology
16 West 61st Street, Room #608
New York, NY 10023