Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children's Literature: Ghost Images

by Anastasia Ulanowicz

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association Book Award

This book visits a range of textual forms including diary, novel, and picturebook to explore the relationship between second-generation memory and contemporary children’s literature. Ulanowicz argues that second-generation memory ― informed by intimate family relationships, textual mediation, and technology ― is characterized by vicarious, rather than direct, experience of the past. As such, children’s literature is particularly well-suited to the representation of second-generation memory, insofar as children’s fiction is particularly invested in the transmission and reproduction of cultural memory, and its form promotes the formation of various complex intergenerational relationships. Further, children’s books that depict second-generation memory have the potential to challenge conventional Western notions of selfhood and ethics. This study shows how novels such as Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself (1977) ― both of which feature protagonists who adapt their elders’ memories into their own mnemonic repertoires ― implicitly reject Cartesian notions of the unified subject in favor of a view of identity as always-already social, relational, and dynamic in character. This book not only questions how and why second-generation memory is represented in books for young people, but whether such representations of memory might be considered 'radical' or 'conservative'. Together, these analyses address a topic that has not been explored fully within the fields of children’s literature, trauma and memory studies, and Holocaust studies.

264 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2012

About the author

Anastasia Ulanowicz is an associate professor of children’s literature at the University of Florida (USA). She is the author of Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2013), which received the Children’s Literature Association Book Award in 2015. She is the co-editor, with Dr. Manisha Basu (Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) of The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (Palgrave, 2017) and Fieldwork in Ukrainian Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025), with Dr. Mateusz Świetlicki. Along with Dr. Basu and Dr. Brenda Glascott (Portland State University), Ulanowicz co-edited a special issue of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies (6.2, 2020) on the topic of “Reimagining Regimes of Reality” that featured her essay, co-written with Dr. Inna Sukhenko (University of Helsinki) on western representations of the Chornobyl nuclear crisis. Her current book project, Through Western Eyes: Representations of Eastern Europe in Western Comics, 1989-2022, examines the role of visual rhetoric in transnational representations of post-socialist Europe. She is the editor of ImageTexT, an international journal of comics studies, and her recent essays have appeared in such journals as Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Filoteknos, and Miscellanea Posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia. She was a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Wrocław in Fall 2021 and returned to the university in 2025 as a Fulbright Scholar.

Reviews

[Darya]

Цікаве дослідження про те, як у дитячій/підлітковій літературі змальовують "пам'ять другого покоління" - такий стосунок до "спогадів" про події, які відбувалися з нашими предками, який суттєво визначає наше розуміння себе.
По-перше, мені було дуже цікаво прочитати передмову, де підсумовується все теоретичне підґрунтя, яке дозволяє вести подальшу розмову, - оскільки я зараз намагаюся приєднатися до досліджень саме на цьому перетині memory studies/дитяча література.
По-друге, це теоретичне підґрунтя стає приводом просто для цікавого обговорення п'яти книжок у п'яти подальших розділах. Книжки підібрані дуже різні - не побачила, що ще між ними спільного, окрім того, що вони вийшли між ~1970-ими і часом написання розвідки, для умовно дитячого/підліткового читача, англійською мовою (включно з виданим одразу англійською, але для того перекладеним з боснійського оригіналу нехудожнім щоденником підлітки з обложеного Сараєва). Не можу сказати, що вибір прикладів для аналізу мене цілком переконав, але їх розмаїття точно дозволяє творчо перевірити межі методу.