Session 1: Youngest Fears
Chair: Rob Fisher

Putting the 'I' Back Into Being: Sendak's Exploration of Childhood Fear And Terror
Phill Fitzsimmons
Fiji Practicum and Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

Recogised as arguably one of the most engaging and internationally the best selling, Maurice Sendak's picture book trilogy of 'Where the Wild Thing Are', 'In the Night Kitchen' and 'Outside Over There' is also recognised as being the most darkest in children's literature. Unintentionally intertextual, Sendak readily acknowledged that his work in general and this trilogy in particular was "colored with memories of village life in Poland, never actually experienced but passed on to me as a persuasive reality by my immigrant parents". While acknowledged but not explored by researchers, these texts also represent a visual representation of the psychological phenomenology of how children understand the concepts of fear, horror and terror. The latter point was a personal realization years after these texts had been published when it was pointed out to Sendak how similar his texts were to elements of his own childhood. While using all three texts in the previously mentioned trilogy, this paper focuses on the last in the series,'Outside Over There, reputedly the darkest, most esoteric and the most symbolic. Using a transtextual approach in tandem with the 'Red Thread' reader response framework this paper unpacks possible meanings of Sendak's pictorial subtext and how they form a transcultural underpinning of how children understand, relate to and deal with fear, horror and terror.

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It Scares Me, But I Like It: Considering Why Children Enjoy Terror Through Ancient Mexican Legends and Current Children's Literature
Rita Dromundo Amores
Universidad Pedagógica Nacional and UNAM, Mexico

Some parents and teachers pretend to keep their children far from evil, in a world of fantasy, but our kids have to deal with many adversities every day. If so, why children demand scary tales? Isn’t reality sufficient? The fact is that young people have always loved stories that take them to the limits. Mexican children still ask for ancient stories from indigenous cultures such as the Aztec and Maya, where there are mean characters like a magic woman that enchant men, little devils, sorcerers that take animal forms. Kids love to listen to this kind of narration although they know that they will become scared.
In recent literature there have been many terror stories among the best sellers, in Mexico and worldwide We also consider that although the biggest fears are related to death, the day of the dead in Mexico is scary only for foreigners, because for Mexicans it’s a day of feast, when alive and dead people share meals. We suppose that children love to feel fear, as long as it’s only fiction, and there is a happy end, also dealing with fictional terror will help them to understand reality and consider it in a positive way.

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Domains of Fear: A Study of The Arabian Nights
Özlem Görümlü

No abstract is presently available