Children’s literature and posthumanism have long shared much in common. As a genre, children’s fiction abounds in non-human creatures and hybrid human-animal beings, toys, robots and other machines and it can offer readers multiple and alternative ways of envisioning human interconnections with the artificial. As Maria Nikolajeva puts it “Negotiations within the hybrid human-animal or human–machine body are omnipresent in real life, but in fiction they can be amplified, and in children’s fiction they can be used for didactic purposes” (Nikolajeva, 2016, p. 135). Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

While concern over the human impact on the environment has existed for decades, there is now a call for a new sense of urgency which demands a shift to transform the understanding of our place in and our impact on the physical world, as well as of the relationships we share with other life forms that cohabit the earth. Such concerns may seem less pressing at times like the present when the most devastating virus to date in modern history is transforming the society in which we live. Living in the middle of a pandemic has left us with a disturbing sense of unreality. Books that used to read like science fiction have lately become uncomfortably real. While fiction allows us a way to escape reality, it can also provide us with a window through which to confront our fears and even contribute towards change. However, the present crisis is part of a much broader problem, one deeply connected to our dysfunctional relation with nature. Dexter, Miriam Robbins. (2010, Spring). The Ferocious and the Erotic: ‘Beautiful’ Medusa and the Neolithic Bird and Snake. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 26(1), 25–41. Time passes, and the Iron Man is treated as merely another member of the community. However, astronomers monitoring the sky make a frightening new discovery: an enormous space-being, resembling a dragon, moving from orbit to land on Earth. The creature (soon dubbed the "Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon") crashes heavily on Australia (which it is large enough to cover the whole of) and demands that humanity provide him with food (anything alive) or he will take it by force.fruit of a human and reason-centred culture that is at least a couple of millennia old, whose contrived blindness to ecological relationships is the fundamental condition underlying our destructive and insensitive technology and behaviour. To counter these factors, we need a deep and comprehensive restructuring of culture that rethinks and reworks human locations and relations to nature all the way down (Plumwood, 2002, p. 8). El hombre de hierro, illus. by Laura Carlin. Barcelona: Vicens Vives, 2011 ISBN 9788468206219 OCLC 794039831 The first North American edition was also published in 1968, by Harper & Row with illustrations by Robert Nadler. Its main title was changed to The Iron Giant, and internal mentions of the metal man changed to iron giant, to avoid confusion with the Marvel Comics character Iron Man. American editions have continued the practice, as Iron Man has become a multimedia franchise.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-02-13 23:03:40 Boxid IA177901 Boxid_2 CH110001 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor More recently, Eman El Nouhy ( 2017) has compared Hughes’s narrative to that of the Medusa, claiming that by fusing the myth he is able “to facilitate an archetypal awakening that might reach his readers’ unconscious and hence force them to recognize the atrocities they have committed against Nature, who is also ‘‘the female in all its manifestations’’” (El Nouhy, 2017, p. 349). Despite noting the female aspect, El Nouhy fails to mention the importance of Lucy in the novel, and instead repeatedly insists that Hughes uses the Medusa myth as a metaphor for a “defiled, victimized woman—for Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide shortly after she discovered that Ted Hughes had committed adultery” ( 2017, p. 350) overlooking the overtly environmental dimension of the novel and the fact that Hughes had already written The Iron Man as a healing myth for his children and as a way to express his own grief. This book (at least to me) shows all the beauty and talent that the late Ted Hughes had at his disposal. Years before the environmental disasters become headline news (although to be honest if you start looking there have been people warning of it for years if not decades) and presents us with a answer. A Vasember, transl. into Hungarian of The Iron Man by Katalin Damokos, illus. György Korga . Budapest: Móra Könyvkiadó, 1981 ISBN 978-963-11-2373-9

Need Help?

Basu, Balaka, Broad, Katherine R., and Hintz, Carrie (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary Dystopian. Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. NY: Routledge. Alter, Charlotte, Haynes, Suyin and Worland, Justin. (2019). TIME 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg, TIME.com. https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg. Accessed 21 May 2021. By promoting environmental values such as an ethics of care, reciprocal respect and empathy and by unifying humans, nature and technology, The Iron Woman successfully puts forward Hughes’s own social and political concerns and reads as a potential healer of broken bonds between humanity and nature offering a redemptive sense of hope. These creatures were obviously not aliens quarantined on another planet. Cell by watery cell they were extensions of ourselves, our early warning system, physically our own extremities. The Letters Editor asked me to cut out all the gruesome, close-up stuff about the disintegrating tumour-crammed body bags of the otters. I insisted, this was the whole point of my letter. He then refused to publish it […] And when I asked him why, he told me: ‘We simply can’t put that sort of thing in front of our readers at breakfast’ (Hughes, 1992, p. 34).