W splocie z przeszłością. Historiografia w literaturze dla dzieci i młodzieży w XXI wieku w perspektywie nowej humanistyki

Abstract

Literature for children and youth is reinterpreted under the influence of the new humanities. For example, prose from the 20th century is subjected to postcolonial read-outs (In Desert and Wilderness [W pustyni i w puszczy] by Henryk Sienkiewicz, the novel cycle by Alfred Szklarski), an eco-critical reading of the works of Tove Jansson, Hugh Lofting and the Polish writers Ludwik Jerzy Kern and Dorota Terakowska is proposed. On the other hand, works based on historical issues create a thematically focused series of publications, genealogical and geanological cycles, which are also fictionalized biographies, separate works referring to the lineage of the Polish state and dynastic linagees, post-memory narratives of a so-called “second generation” about the experience of the Second World War, and works on migration issues. The examples of literary historiography for adolescents mentioned and described in the article, captured in several areas of the formal issues, can be read through the prism of many analytical and interpretative practices, overlapping and incompletemethodologies. Retentional direction of reading, with the horizon of the past inscribed in it, does not exclude a protentional-oriented towards the future and environmental change, motivated by postcolonial revisions of old works, important issues of the 21st century (migration, post-memory), and a non-anthropocentric perception of reality. Their analysis should take into account the “poetics of history”, tropology of the narrative and narrative strategies (which Hayden White wrote about). Moreover, entangling the past with the present of the child-reader (and in fact with their future), seems to be a necessary condition for its interiorization, for recognizing it as one’s own, for admitting it. It always has a multitemporal, multigenerational and multicultural character.