Open Collections

Luo, Yi

University of British Columbia

Along with unceasing refugee crises, the last few decades have seen a rapid growth of refugee experience depiction in children’s literature. Refugee stories for children, as “an emergent genre” (Hope, “One Day We Had to Run” 296), have attained increasing scholarly attention. Given the inclination to focus the portrayal of refugee experience mainly on “refugee flight” in many children’s picture books (Strekalova-Hughes 24), scholars have underscored the importance of more diverse and nuanced representations of the lives of refugee children that transcend the mere refugee flight to reflect their cultures, histories, agency and tenacity, as well as explain the reasons causing the flight (Tomsic and Deery; Strekalova-Hughes; Darragh and Kelley; Hope). This thesis examines the representations of refugee experiences depicted in three recently published Canadian picture books: The Doll (Tran-Davies and Puth), Salma the Syrian Chef (Ramadan and Bron) and The Paper Boat (Lam). Drawing on the RefugeeCrit framework (Strekalova-Hughes), I perform a close reading of the selected picture books, taking into consideration words and images, to examine the refugee experience representations, while situating it within the larger body of “children’s literature of atrocity” (Baer 382; Kidd, “‘A’ is for Auschwitz” 120). The goal of this study is to add to the relatively limited scholarship drawing on the RefugeeCrit framework in analyzing children’s picture books about refugees, especially in the context of Canadian children’s literature.

Text

2024-03-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87543

Children's Literature

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/