Becoming Citizens : Representations of Citizenship in European Children's Literature

• Main Author: Saxen, Aura
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Teologiska institutionen 2018
• Subjects: children's literature; citizenship; Europe; nation state; critical content analysis; Cultural Studies; Kulturstudier
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-361205

This thesis examines the representations of citizenship in award-winning children's novels from Finland, France, Sweden and the UK to analyse how the effects of recent cultural and economic developments affecting European societies are described and explored in children's literature. In recent years, both the EU and the nation-state have seemed to be in a state of crisis. I hypothesise that increased cultural and ethnic diversity, new alternative arenas of citizenship and economic scarcity are currently driving the crises and changes in European states, and each of these developments influences our conceptions of citizenship. Reading the novels, I use a qualitative method based on critical content analysis to identify the issues relating to citizenship that the novels deal with and then analyse what they say about said issues. I argue that the novels show some awarness of increased cultural diversity, for example by having diverse casts of characters or by addressing cultural difference. The theme of scarcity is especially evident in characters experiencing precarity and a concern for the environment. Furthermore, they focus on how using one's voice, giving an account of one's life and being listened to, can lead to empowerment. In some of the novels, the protagonists are presented as models of active citizens bravely changing society, whereas the other novels contain more of the characters' internal musings of where they belong, in terms of which nation-state they belong to, but also their place within the state.