Petros Panaou undertakes a bold, perhaps daunting task: exploring the idea of nationhood from outside the nation in question. Even more boldly, he uses literature for children as the medium for that exploration. Panaou offers two Irish picturebooks that exist in tension with one another: War and Peas from Northern Ireland and Naomh Padraig agus Crom Dubh (St Patrick and Crom Dubh) from The Republic of Ireland. After (briefly) contextualizing the worlds in which each book appears, Panaou explores the ideological approaches, in varying degrees of overt- and covert-ness, to the Irish famine and to Gaelic identity, respectively.We hope that this piece offers readers the impetus to explore national identity--your own, or another's--through the lens of the books that nation offers to its children.
Journal
The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's LiteratureISSN
1551-5680Volume
13Issue
2Publisher
La Trobe UniversitySection Title
Alice's AcademyAuthor Biography
Petros Panaou is a lecturer at the University of Nicosia, where he teaches children's literature and language arts courses. Much of his work has focused on picture book analysis and comparative children's literature, and is interdisciplinary in nature.Date Created
2009-06-26Rights Statement
Essays and articles published in The Looking Glass may be reproduced for non-profit use by any educational or public institution; letters to the editor and on-site comments made by our readers may not be used without the expressed permission of that individual. Any commercial use of this journal, in whole or in part, by any means, is prohibited. Authors of accepted articles assign to The Looking Glass the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently available electronically. They retain the copyright and, 90 days after initial publication, may republish it in any form they wish as long as The Looking Glass is acknowledged as the original source.Data source
OJS data migration 2025: https://ojs.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/139
