Abstract
This chapter examines four of the British nature poet Ted Hughes’s marine animal poems for children in an ecocritical perspective, including a discussion of how accompanying illustrations may change or add new features to the poems and their environmental potential. Bjørlo explores the poems and their collaboration with illustrations in a Norwegian poetry collection and compares these versions with illustrations of the same poems in selected British editions. In her analyses Bjørlo draws on theories within ecocriticism, posthumanism and animal studies, as well as intermedial studies. Bjørlo concludes that illustrated versions may serve to revitalize, but also to diversify, ecopoetic traits embedded in Hughes’s animal poetry.
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I am grateful to Faber & Faber and the Ted Hughes Estate for permission to quote from Hughes’s works.
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Bjørlo, B.W. (2018). Marine Animals in Ted Hughes’s Poetry for Children: Ecocritical Readings of Selected Illustrated Poems. In: Goga, N., Guanio-Uluru, L., Hallås, B., Nyrnes, A. (eds) Ecocritical Perspectives on Children's Texts and Cultures. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90497-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90497-9_11
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