Andal Aireen Grace
Macquarie University, Australia.
J Early Child Lit. 2023 Mar;23(1):73-101. doi: 10.1177/14687984221118981. Epub 2022 Dec 19.
This article examines spatiality in selected children's books about COVID-19. Spatiality is an important lens because the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis related to distancing and mobility restrictions-spatial matters. Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities was adopted as a framework to how children's books present community belongingness within the spatial restrictions imposed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a content analysis of pandemic-related children's books published in early 2020 ( = 51), this paper explores the sense of community in three everyday spaces: 'inside' (home), 'outside' (outdoors), and 'in-betweens' (windows and digital space). Findings reveal a two-fold observation: (1) children's books show how the 'normal' in everyday space is disrupted; and (2) layers of imagined communities manifest within the everyday spaces depicted in the books examined. These findings offer insights that while children's literature and geography are different disciplines, there is much to be explored about spaces in children's lives from writers and illustrators of children's books. Likewise, a geographical lens can substantiate discussions in children's literature by unpacking relationships of characters based on the spaces they occupy. With these in mind, it is hoped that conversations about spatial discourses in children's books flourish from this initial exploration.
本文考察了关于新冠疫情的部分儿童书籍中的空间性。空间性是一个重要视角，因为新冠疫情是一场与社交距离和出行限制相关的危机——关乎空间的问题。本尼迪克特·安德森的想象共同体概念被用作一个框架，以探讨儿童书籍如何在新冠疫情第一波期间所实施的空间限制内呈现社区归属感。在对2020年初出版的与疫情相关的儿童书籍（=51本）进行内容分析时，本文探究了在三个日常空间中的社区感：“室内”（家）、“室外”（户外）和“中间地带”（窗户和数字空间）。研究结果呈现出两方面的观察：（1）儿童书籍展示了日常空间中的“常态”是如何被打破的；（2）在所考察书籍中描绘的日常空间内，想象共同体的层次得以显现。这些发现表明，虽然儿童文学和地理学是不同学科，但儿童书籍的作家和插画家对于儿童生活中的空间仍有许多可探索之处。同样，地理学视角可以通过剖析基于人物所占据空间的人物关系，充实儿童文学中的讨论。基于此，希望关于儿童书籍中空间话语的讨论能从这一初步探索中蓬勃开展。
