An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook
An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook takes a new approach to interpreting 1920s and 1930s picturebooks by prominent Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals by examining them within the ecological environment that, first, made them possible and, then, led to their demise. It argues that naturalistic models of the complex interactions of dynamic systems offer effective tools for understanding the fraught interrelations of art and censorship in the early Soviet period. Through illustrative case studies, it mounts a close analysis of word and image and their synergistic interplay in avant-garde picturebooks, while also recontextualizing them within the ecology of their original environment where extraordinary countervailing forces played out a drama of which these books survive as telling artifacts. Ultimately, it argues that the Russian avant-garde picturebook offers a uniquely illustrative example of literary ecology that sheds light on issues of creativity and censorship, politics and art, more broadly as well.
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition, 9] 2018. xiv, 236 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Table of figures | pp. vii–xii
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Acknowledgements | pp. xiii–xiv
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Introduction: A natural history of the Russian avant-garde picturebook | pp. 1–28
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Part I. Ex nihilo nihil fit: The evolution of the Russian avant-garde picturebook
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Chapter 1. Precursors of the avant-garde picturebook | pp. 31–48
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Chapter 2. Origins of the revolutionary picturebook | pp. 49–60
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Chapter 3. Aesthetic renewal from the primitivist periphery | pp. 61–76
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Part II. Unnatural selection: Censorship and ideology
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Chapter 4. Dual audience and double vision: Aesopian depths and hidden subtexts | pp. 79–92
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Chapter 5. The unspoken and the unspeakable: Political allegory in children’s books | pp. 93–114
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Chapter 6. Revolutionary rhetoric and the semiotics of size | pp. 115–130
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Part III. Adaptations: Re-orienting the picturebook
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Chapter 7. Early Soviet images of America in picturebooks | pp. 133–148
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Chapter 8. The infantilization of thought and theory in books for children | pp. 149–162
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Chapter 9. Authorial appearances in picturebooks | pp. 163–180
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Part IV. A question of survival: Facing limitations
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Chapter 10. Metatextual exploits in writings for children | pp. 183–194
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Chapter 11. The obliteration of the avant-garde aesthetic: The beginning of the end | pp. 195–210
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Chapter 12. The extinction of the Russian avant-garde picturebook | pp. 211–218
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Bibliography | pp. 219–232
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Subject index
“Weld’s study reaffirms the uniqueness of its characteristics in the history of children’s literature and highlights the historical and cultural complexities of the literary evolution in post-revolutionary Russia.”
Larissa Rudova, Pomona College, in The Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 43, No. 1, January 2019
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Boškovic, Aleksandar & Ainsley Morse
2023. Chapter 4. Soviet socialist su(pe)rrealism for children. In Photography in Children's Literature [Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition, 17], ► pp. 94 ff. 
Krapfl, James, Sara Pankenier Weld, Anastasia Kostetskaya, Olga Voronina & Megan Swift
2022. A roundtable on Megan Swift’sPicturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin. Canadian Slavonic Papers 64:4 ► pp. 490 ff.
Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina
2022. Geschichte des Bilderbuchs und seiner Gattungen. In Das Bilderbuch, ► pp. 29 ff.
Järvinen, Hanna
2020. Ballets Russes and Blackface. Dance Research Journal 52:3 ► pp. 76 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Art & Art History
Literature & Literary Studies
Main BIC Subject
DSB: Literary studies: general
Main BISAC Subject
LIT009000: LITERARY CRITICISM / Children's & Young Adult Literature