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68 in the sophisticated trilogy allow the author to explore human psychology through characters that have very human thoughts and emotions. His Dark Materials has led a move toward more realistic fantasy or fantasy realism, in which other worlds help us to better understand our own. The Australian author Garth Nix has been hailed by some as the successor to Pullman. His first novel, Sabriel, published in 1995, won the first Aurealis Award in both the adult and young adult categories, as did the sequels in The Old Kingdom series. Like Pullman, Nix thinks that «all the best fantasy is very firmly grounded in reality», as he put it in an interview on the Harper Teen website. Herr der Diebe (The Thief Lord), published in Germany in 2000, marked the brilliant international début of Cornelia Funke, who has been called «the German J.K. Rowling». The intricate narrative blends magical fantasy and real-life adventures to tell the story of a gang of misfits living in a deserted cinema in contemporary Venice. The British author and screenwriter William Nicholson writes epic fantasy that deals with real threats and very human issues. At the same time, his The Wind on Fire trilogy has a strong spiritual element. The author believes that fantasy literature is currently filling a spiritual need in both adult and child readers. 10 The British author David Almond blurs the boundaries of fantasy and realism so completely that his works have been classified as both. His first novel, Skellig (1998), which won the 1998 Whitbread Children’s Award (beating out the second Harry Potter) and could have competed in the adult category according to the jury’s president, is the haunting story of a strange creature that a boy discovers in the garage of their rundown new house. Almond is attributed with creating a genre all his own, a unique blend of spirituality and gritty, urban realism that is sometimes referred to as mystical realism. Another new facet of the fantasy genre shares much in common with historical fiction. While The Tales of the Otori trilogy has a strong mythic and epic adventure dimension, Lian Hearn immersed herself in Japanese history, culture, and language to convincingly create a world set in a mythical feudal Japan. Kevin Crossley-Holland’s award-winning Arthur trilogy, which begins with The Seeing Stone (2000), is a retelling of Arthurian legend blended with a realistic view of rural medieval life at the time of the Crusades. An acclaimed poet and translator of Beowulf, Crossley-Holland did not set out to write specifically for children, but rather to transmit the ancient Arthurian legends, a goal which he achieves in meticulously researched books full of period detail and marked by his knowledge of Old English. Liliana Bodoc’s La Saga de los Confines trilogy is at once a magical epic story in the tradition of Tolkien but inspired by the native legends of Latin America, and the story of the conquest of the Americas. Reviewers urged adults, as well as children, to read these stimulating books that address important moral issues of our time. Even extremely popular comic crossover fantasies often take on other dimensions. Terry Pratchett’s hugely successful comic/fantasy Discworld series began as a spoof of the conventions of the fantasy genre, but evolved into an increasingly satirical commentary on almost every aspect of today’s world. His unique brand of fantasy has attracted a huge cult following among young readers as well as adults, although only four novels in the series have been marketed for a young audience. In a fantastic, surreal setting, Pratchett humorously examines real-world questions and practices what has been called «stealth philosophy». Like Pratchett, the German author Walter Moers offers a witty and satiric reflection on contemporary society in comic fantasy novels that appeal to a similarly enthusiastic crossover audience. Using an action-film formula, Eoin Colfer blends folklore, fantasy, crime, and technology in his fantasy series Artemis Fowl. Like the Harry Potter saga, the Artemis Fowl series has special appeal for reluctant readers, especially teenage boys. Although Colfer’s books may not be of high literary value, the numerous allusions to literature, television, cinema, video games, and the internet give them a hip quality that appeals to many teenagers and adults. The extensive contemporary child-to-adult crossover is largely due to the fact that today’s children’s and young adult books are complex and multilayered texts that invite readings on many levels. Characters do not adhere to clearly defined categories of good and bad or black and white; rather, they are complex and ambiguous. The characters in Pullman’s trilogy illustrate this particularly well, but even Harry Potter has a disturbing, dark side. The clearly delineated plots of conventional children’s literature have been replaced by complex plots with multiple, interwoven story lines. The complicated plot of His Dark Materials became increasingly so with each novel. Readers’ diverse responses to these multilayered texts are not necessarily the result of age, but rather of individual sensibilities. Children, adolescents, and adults read crossover texts differently from diverse perspectives, but they can all take equal pleasure from the reading experience. Many crossover books are of extremely high literary quality and have a very sophisticated style. Reviewers feel that some children’s books have been so slanted to an adult audience that they require adult competencies and make inappropriate intellectual and emotional demands. The majority of children’s authors disagree, however. In the 1990s, the Danish author Kim Fupz Aakeson stated: «It’s all right to provoke children with something they don’t understand or get a bit wrong. Neither does it matter if a children’s book contains something that is perhaps only for the adult reader.» 11 Already in the 1970s and 1980s, Jan Mark, a rare two-time winner of the prestigious Carnegie Medal, was writing very difficult and sophisticated works said to «stretch the range of children’s 69
70 books». A reviewer of Handles (1983) claimed that Mark «provides for young people the combination of fine prose and strong realism generally reserved for adults». 12 Early in his writing career, the Flemish author Bart Moeyaert consciously chose what one critic terms «adult writing for children and youth». While books by authors like Moeyaert may sometimes be less accessible for young readers, they «tap uncharted depths in children». 13 The same can be said of the Norwegian author Tormod Haugen and the Danish author Louis Jensen, whose novels are characterized by their literary quality and complex narrative techniques. Aidan Chambers’s Carnegie Medal-winning novel Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999), which was recommended for sophisticated teenage readers and adults, indicates the extent to which the «literary novel» had gained a foothold in young adult fiction by the end of the 1990s. Like many other young adult novels, Postcards from No Man’s Land could have been published for the adult market. It is unlikely that novels such as Chamber’s This Is All: The pillow book of Cordelia Kenn and M.T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, which were both published in 2006, would have appeared as young adult novels only a few years earlier. Jonathan Hunt argues that «young adult literature has matured into something virtually indistinguishable from the best adult literary fiction». 14 An increasing number of books being published as young adult titles could just as easily be published for adults, and vice-versa. 15 While young readers do not have to understand everything in a text (adult readers don’t necessarily either), many critics feel that today’s young readers generally have more literary competence than their predecessors. Children of the twenty-first century are savvy consumers exposed to the same cultural and marketing influences as adults. Children’s authors realize that they have a demanding and discerning audience. Convinced that preteen readers are the most difficult audience of all, Carl Hiaasen asked for an escape clause in his two-book contract with Knopf so he could bail if Hoot (2002), his début novel for young readers, was a failure. Many crossover novels contain thought-provoking concepts that engage the reader – adult or child – on an intellectual as well as an emotional level, often raising questions that remain unanswered. Jane Nissen, a former children’s editor at Penguin, contends that «Philip Pullman’s trilogy heralded the rise of quality fiction and led the way for Harry Potter.» 16 Many critics feel that His Dark Materials can better lay claim to the crossover label than Harry Potter due to the complexity of a work that the author describes as «Paradise Lost for teenagers». A number of American critics feel that Pullman writes more for adults because his challenging books require some knowledge of religion, metaphysics, physics, psychology, politics, and previous literary works. However, other critics rightly point out that «adults read J.K. Rowling because she is not complicated; children read Philip Pullman because he is». 17 As we have seen, Pullman was not the first author to write children’s fiction of high literary quality that appealed to adults. A few years before Pullman, Jostein Gaarder also accomplished the rare achievement of gaining both commercial success and the approbation of the literary establishment with a children’s book, namely Sophie’s World, published in 1991. Gaarder’s books for children and young adults are sophisticated, ingeniously contrived, and multilayered. All of his novels, whether published for an adult or a juvenile audience, deal with profound metaphysical questions which are of interest to young and old alike. The darkness in children’s books, which took many adults by surprise when the crossover vogue brought them under closer scrutiny, is certainly not a new phenomenon. Violence and death figure prominently in many children’s classics, including the fairy tales of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Dark themes were largely discouraged in children’s literature throughout much of the twentieth century, however. Robert Cormier’s first young adult novel was rejected by numerous publishers for its pessimistic ending, although his subsequent works continued to describe the dark underside of adolescence. Since his first novel, Janne, Min Vän (Johnny My Friend), published in 1985, the Swedish author Peter Pohl has consistently dealt with difficult themes in works that rarely have a happy ending. Today children’s authors often present a much more pessimistic view of the world. In writing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon claims that he wanted to get rid of the «little invisible ring of safety» that characterizes children’s fiction and to say to the reader: «This is the real world, bad things might happen.» 18 Since the outset of his career, Tormod Haugen has never hesitated to use discomforting themes, because he wants to depict life as it really is, rather than the way adults want children to believe it is. According to Bart Moeyaert, many adults object to novels of this kind and feel that «you can’t give children a dark corridor with no bright end in sight». 19 Jan Mark often portrayed a dark, bleak view of the world, especially in her science fiction novels for older readers, for example, The Eclipse of the Century (1999), Useful Idiots (2004), and Riding Tycho (2005). In Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the innocent, young Baudelaire orphans unjustly undergo an inordinate amount of sorrow, despair, pain, and suffering, far exceeding that of any Dickens orphan. The author believes that «most children’s books aren’t nearly dark enough, given the randomness and chaos of the real world». 20 Many writers are of the opinion that it is essential to present children with the truth even when it is dark and painful, and many people would argue that today’s darker children’s fiction merely reflects the darker world in which young people now live. 21 71
Page 1 and 2: Formar Leitores para Ler o Mundo
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Page 7 and 8: 14 dispor dos utilizadores, de modo
Page 9 and 10: 18 The Decline and Decline of Liter
Page 11 and 12: 22 And she quotes both a UNESCO web
Page 13 and 14: 26 But the point here is that the o
Page 15 and 16: 30 The best of a book is not the th
Page 17 and 18: 34 were both sophisticated and vari
Page 19 and 20: 38 answer «why», «how», «where
Page 21 and 22: 42 book itself rather than their ow
Page 23 and 24: 46 long as the children actively co
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Page 27 and 28: 54 and authentic ways. The study th
Page 29 and 30: 58 Roland Barthes suggests that rea
Page 31 and 32: 62 bilities as compared to novels.
Page 33: 66 singly dragged down to the lowes
Page 37 and 38: 74 The literary quality of children
Page 39 and 40: 78 dos álbuns de Beatrix Potter, n
Page 41 and 42: 82 Planificar la Lectura en la Escu
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Page 45 and 46: 90 Probablemente una de las razones
Page 47 and 48: 94 Sociedad y Lectura. La Importanc
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Page 55 and 56: 110 Contrôler et gérer sa propre
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Page 59 and 60: 118 1. CONECTAR CON LOS PROPIOS REC
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Page 69 and 70: 138 Sucessivamente reeditada durant
Page 71 and 72: 142 4. Da diferenciação na homoge
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Page 77 and 78: 154 Em primeiro lugar, este espaço
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Page 83 and 84: 166 PERFIL DE LOS ASISTENTES Viven
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170 único livro nos meses anterior
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174 da leitura no Brasil. Espera-se
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178 seus empreendimentos à questã
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182 Embora o objetivo central fosse
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186 Abertura ANTÓNIO JOSÉ TEIXEIR
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190 fruição. Todo o problema da l
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194 Proust, Shakespeare ou a Corres
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206 ANTÓNIO JOSÉ TEIXEIRA Estamos
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210 ISABEL ALÇADA* 211 Agradeço m
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Reservados todos os direitos de aco
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