Hong Kong children’s literature: City and visual-textual narratives = 香港兒童文學: 城市與圖文敍述
Project title
Hong Kong children’s literature: City and visual-textual narratives = 香港兒童文學: 城市與圖文敍述
Principal Investigator
Grant Awarding Body
Research Grants Council
Grant Type
Faculty Development Scheme
Project Code
UGC/FDS15/H19/23
Amount awarded
HK$317,169
Funding Year
2024-2025
Duration of the Project
18 months
Status
On-going
Abstract
Hong Kong children’s literature has been considerably sidelined in academic scholarship. When it is mentioned, it is mostly a brief entry in historical overviews up to the 1990s. It may seem that the academia value the genre when there are two anthologies in the series of Hong Kong Literature dedicated to children’s literature, published in 2014 and 2021, respectively. Still, the anthologies have only listed the works of a number of writers without in-depth discussion. Most academic analyses (Dong 1995; Zheng 1996; Zhou 1996; Liu 1997) see the genre as having petered out in the early 1990s. There is clearly a void of scholarship on the subject of the writers, publishers, intents and types of published materials published in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the rise of children’s picture books in the last decade (Wu 2019) has revived the genre significantly. Not only are the chain bookstores willing to separate an area for international and local children’s books now, but there is an increasing number of independent bookstores and publishers dedicating their business to picture books.
The proposed research aims to compensate for the dearth of academic studies of Hong Kong children's literature by addressing the following issues: 1) the use of visual-textual narrative in Hong Kong children's literature; 2) the rise of picture books; and 3) the manifestation of Hong Kong as a city in the selected works. The focus of this project will be on the inter-connectedness between the city culture of Hong Kong and the local visual-textual narrative. It has been raised by a number of critics (Lo 2009; Yesi 2012; Wong 2020) that Hong Kong literature is always related to its city culture. Hong Kong literature embraces its colonial history and politics, geopolitical role as an international city in Asia, and indispensable city culture. This raises the issue of how children’s literature will align with these characteristics of Hong Kong literary texts. Additionally, in the study of Hong Kong literature, the graphic narrative does not enjoy equal status with textual narrative. Even if the graphic narrative has been examined as a communication mode of picture books (Nodelman 1988; Nikolajeva and Scott 2004) and comic books (McCloud 1993; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996; Groensteen and Miller 2013), it is being underestimated by the local academia (Dong 1995; Liu 1997; A Nung 1997; Ho 1997) who do not see the contribution of visual narrative to Hong Kong literature. In order to provide a more comprehensive and expand the scope of reading literary texts, this project will include the study of the visual narration and its collaboration with textual narrative.
Contextualized in light of the contemporary urban context, this proposed project will examine the varying ways in which children’s literature is engaged with the landscape of Hong Kong as a city space, both in terms of realism and as an idea, such as the fantasy of the city as a space of interconnectedness and transverses, evolving dynamics, and culturally interlocking network. It will examine the visual-textual representation of Hong Kong in Children’s Paradise Magazine (1953-1995), an important children’s magazine series that manifests the evolution of visual-textual collaboration, and how the current trend of picture books has opened a new platform for Hong Kong children’s literature and, thence, shed new light on the understanding of the city in a brand new visual-textual narrative. The proposed study will investigate the aforementioned issues with qualitative content analyses of selected primary texts and a quantitative examination through a corpus machine, Google Vision API, so as to take an overview of the image of city in both textual and visual narrative. The investigation will be supplemented by the interviews of publishers, writers, and illustrators so to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the current trend.
The proposed research aims to compensate for the dearth of academic studies of Hong Kong children's literature by addressing the following issues: 1) the use of visual-textual narrative in Hong Kong children's literature; 2) the rise of picture books; and 3) the manifestation of Hong Kong as a city in the selected works. The focus of this project will be on the inter-connectedness between the city culture of Hong Kong and the local visual-textual narrative. It has been raised by a number of critics (Lo 2009; Yesi 2012; Wong 2020) that Hong Kong literature is always related to its city culture. Hong Kong literature embraces its colonial history and politics, geopolitical role as an international city in Asia, and indispensable city culture. This raises the issue of how children’s literature will align with these characteristics of Hong Kong literary texts. Additionally, in the study of Hong Kong literature, the graphic narrative does not enjoy equal status with textual narrative. Even if the graphic narrative has been examined as a communication mode of picture books (Nodelman 1988; Nikolajeva and Scott 2004) and comic books (McCloud 1993; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996; Groensteen and Miller 2013), it is being underestimated by the local academia (Dong 1995; Liu 1997; A Nung 1997; Ho 1997) who do not see the contribution of visual narrative to Hong Kong literature. In order to provide a more comprehensive and expand the scope of reading literary texts, this project will include the study of the visual narration and its collaboration with textual narrative.
Contextualized in light of the contemporary urban context, this proposed project will examine the varying ways in which children’s literature is engaged with the landscape of Hong Kong as a city space, both in terms of realism and as an idea, such as the fantasy of the city as a space of interconnectedness and transverses, evolving dynamics, and culturally interlocking network. It will examine the visual-textual representation of Hong Kong in Children’s Paradise Magazine (1953-1995), an important children’s magazine series that manifests the evolution of visual-textual collaboration, and how the current trend of picture books has opened a new platform for Hong Kong children’s literature and, thence, shed new light on the understanding of the city in a brand new visual-textual narrative. The proposed study will investigate the aforementioned issues with qualitative content analyses of selected primary texts and a quantitative examination through a corpus machine, Google Vision API, so as to take an overview of the image of city in both textual and visual narrative. The investigation will be supplemented by the interviews of publishers, writers, and illustrators so to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the current trend.