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Nous diffusons cet appel à contributions rédigé en anglais mais qui accepte des propositions en français (voir en fin d'appel). Il nous a été transmis par Virginie IchéCallfor Papers“Dear Child”: Talking to Children in Victorian and Edwardian Children’s BooksTobe published in Cahiers victoriens etédouardiens 92 (autumn 2020)https://journals.openedition.org/cve/The 92nd issue ofthe French peer-reviewed journal Cahiersvictoriens et édouardiens (CVE)will address the question of communicating with children in Victorian andEdwardian children’s books.Like the many (adult) novelsanalyzed by Stewart in Dear Reader: TheConscripted Audience of Nineteenth-Century Fiction, nineteenth-centurychildren’s books are particularly aware of their audience. Yet if Stewart scrutinizesthe prototypical address “Dear reader” that, he feels, is the symbol of “therelentless micromanagement of response in nineteenth-century narrative” (21), hedoes not see that address and its variations as instrumental in constructing aconversational tone. Children’s books, on the other hand, with their prototypicaladdress, “Dear child” (rather than “Dear reader”), seem to rely on, and createconversations between the implied author and/or narrator and the implied readerand/or narratee, in keeping with the tone that Chambers (1978) says is usual forchildren’s books, “the tone of a friendly adult storyteller” (5).Children’s books entertain aspecific relationship with their audience. They are often said to be theproduct of conversations: as Grenby (2009) reminds us, children’s authors ofall time have indeed frequently insisted that the books that they published grewfrom private conversations with children they knew. This is famously the caseof 19th-century authors such as Lewis Carroll (who improvised someepisodes of Alice’s Adventures underGround, which then served as a basis for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, while rowing a boat with Lorina,Alice and Edith Liddell), J. M. Barrie (who entertained the Llewelyn Daviesboys with tales of a boy who would not grow up and later published Peter Pan) and Kenneth Grahame (who toldhis son Alastair stories he subsequently developed for The Wind in the Willows). Many other children’s authors specify inthe prefaces or dedications to their books that the stories they tell originatedfrom conversations with children (for instance, Catherine Sinclair in Holiday House, Mary Molesworth in Four Winds Farm, or Rudyard Kipling in Just So Stories). As Grenby puts it(2006: 17), such assertions about the conversational geneses of children’sbooks endow child readers “with a flattering agency in the creation andconservation of stories,” and consequently may aim to incite child readers toactively respond to stories, and not merely receive them passively, becoming, ineffect, participants in the conversation. Various strategies may be used to triggerresponses: the narrator may address the child reader, or ask direct questionsto him/her; the author may also leave what Iser (1972) and Chambers (1978)after him call “gaps” in order to “challenge the child reader to participate inmaking meaning of the book” (Chambers 10).Conversing with childrenwhile elaborating stories may also alter the way children are depicted inchildren’s books, as well as the place and role of conversations with childrenin children’s books. For instance, as Gubar (2009) and Iché (2015) have shown, Aliceis frequently talked to in the Alicebooks and is recurrently portrayed as an active collaborator in themeaning-making or even storytelling process. Though not explicitly endorsingthe myth of the domestic origins of their books, some children’s authors, namelyDinah Craik, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Mary Louisa Molesworth and Edith Nesbit,who probably “had the chance to observe children’s development at close[…]range,” also decided to “help the young find their own voices” (Gubar 2009,127). One way of giving pride of place to children is to show the role ofchildren in shaping stories (see Rosing’s analysis of Ida’s role in JulianaHoratia Ewing’s Mrs. Overtheway’sRemembrances) or to employ child narrators (as in Ewing’s Six to Sixteen or inNesbit’s The Story of theTreasure Seekers). Are the voices of these child narrators and childcharacters markedly dissimilar from the voices of adult narrators and childcharacters as portrayed by adult narrators? How thematically and stylistically differentare the conversations led by these child figures?Rose (1984), Nodelman (1992)and many other scholars have highlighted though the power imbalance betweenadult authors and child readers, with adult authors constructing children asother in order to constrain them and their reactions. Gubar, thoughdeconstructing this vision of children as disabled and non-agential (2013),argues in Artful Dodgers that this is,in effect, one of the lessons of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, in which a manipulative storyteller circumscribesJim’s actions under the guise of celebrating his power. Iché (2015) similarlyargues that the Alice books (and inparticular The Nursery Alice) givethe impression of eliciting the implied child reader’s participation in the conversationalconstruction of the story, while actually controlling his or her every reaction.Child narrators, who are but the product of (more or less) hidden adults (seeNodelman’s The Hidden Adult 2008), mayalso prove to be cunning manipulators, who engage in mock-two-way-conversationswith the narratee in order to shape his or her mind—in keeping with the didacticorigins of children’s literature.This issue will thus examinethe question of how children are talked to, and consequently ascribed aspecific place and role in the conversation. Attention can be paid tocharacters, whether they are children or child stand-ins, narratees, impliedand real-life readers. Possible avenues of investigation for this issue include(but are not limited to): • the conversational genesesof 19th-century children’s books and their impact on the narrativestructures and/or the role of the child reader• the role and place ofconversations with children in 19th-century children’s books • the conversationalrelationship between child or adult narrators and child narratees• the narrative and stylisticstrategies to enhance / restrain child agency • adult-led conversationsand children’s responses• the issue of childnarratorsPleasesend abstracts (no longer than 400 words) with a short bio-bibliographicalnotice (no longer than 50 words) by January 10, 2019, to Virginie Iché (UniversitéPaul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France): virginie.iche@univ-montp3.frNotifications of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2019. Full articles will be due by June 20, 2019. Proposals in English or French will be considered.SelectiveBibliographyBeauvais, Clémentine.“What’s in “the Gap”? A Glance Down the Central Concept of Picturebook Theory.”Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics6 (2015): 1-8.Chambers, Aidan. “The Readerin the Book: Notes from Work in Progress.” Children’sLiterature Association Quarterly 1978: 1-19.Grenby, M. O. “The Originsof Children’s Literature.” The CambridgeCompanion to Children’s Literature. M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (eds.). Cambridge:CUP, 2009: 3-18.Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers – Reconceiving the Golden Ageof Children’s Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2009.---. “Risky Business:Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38.4(Winter 2013): 450-457.Iché, Virginie. L’esthétiquedu jeu dans les Alice de Lewis Carroll. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015.Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: JohnHopkins UP, 1974 [1972].---. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Routledge &#38;Kegan Paul, 1978.Knowles, Murray and KirstenMalmjær. Language and Control inChildren’s Literature. London: Routledge, 1996.Nodelman, Perry. “The Other:Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17 (1992): 29–35.---. The Hidden Adult – Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore: TheJohn Hopkins UP, 2008.Prince, Gerald.“Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.” Reader-Response Criticism. Jane P. Tompkins (ed.). Baltimore: JohnsHopkins UP, 1980: 7-25.Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibilityof Children’s Fiction. Houndmills and London: Macmillan Press, 1994 [1984].Rosing, Meghan. “‘Stories byBits’: The Serial Family in Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Mrs. Overtheway’s Remembrances.” Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Victorian Studies39.2 (2013): 147-162.Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience inNineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1996.Wall, Barbara. TheNarrator’s Voice – The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 1991.Watson, Victor. “The Possibilities of Children’sFiction.” After Alice – ExploringChildren’s Literature. Morag Styles, Eve Bearne and Victor Watson (eds.). London:Cassell, 1992.