Abstract
Despite the general reluctance of American publishers to feature war-related stories in children’s books, two books, Wings for Per (1944) by the d’Aulaires and Wheel on the Chimney (1954) by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Tibor Gergely, are statements about wartime conditions in Europe made palatable by their reconfiguration into a well-established fairy tale structure—that of “home-away-home”—which effectively guaranteed a happy resolution. Both books were conceived as stories of the trauma of dislocation and forced migration in Europe at the hands of the Nazis, but, in the process of rendering the tales suitable for American children, were reshaped into familiar fairy tale tropes, reaffirming the stability of the family and reinforcing the American nationalist assertion that the Second World War was a “just war.”
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Conrad, J. (2017). Flying Home: Aestheticizing and Americanizing Experiences of Exile and Migration in the Second World War as Fairy Tales of Return and Restoration. In: Buttsworth, S., Abbenhuis, M. (eds) War, Myths, and Fairy Tales. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2684-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2684-3_6
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