From Editors
Abstract
This issue of the scientific journal Children’s literature: interdisciplinary discourse brings together scholarly studies that outline both theoretical and practical aspects of interpreting literature for children and youth, highlighting literary, pedagogical, intermedial, and language-stylistic approaches. The central focus is placed on reading as an intellectual practice, the literary text as a dynamic space for the development of critical thinking and key competencies, and the transformation of both classical and contemporary works into new media formats and diverse educational contexts.
Tetiana Kachak explores the potential of contemporary Ukrainian children’s literature as a resource for fostering critical thinking, proposing strategies for working with texts across genres and demonstrating how systematic reading cultivates reflective, reasoned, and socially engaged readers. The issue of intermedial translation is examined by Maryna Vardanyan and Daria Vengelovska, who analyze the adaptation of Lesia Ukrainka’s drama-fairy tale The Forest Song into the 3D animation format Mavka. The Forest Song. The researchers trace how the classical text is transformed into a new semiotic system, preserves its cultural core, and simultaneously acquires the features of a contemporary fantasy narrative.
Margaryta Kirieieva analyzes the symbolic dimension of traumatic memory and ecological catastrophe based on Antin Mukharskyi’s novella Skeleton from Chernobyl, emphasizing the synthesis of the fantastic and the realistic, as well as the parallels between the Chernobyl tragedy and the ongoing war. Language-stylistic features of the teen detective genre are examined by Nataliia Lytvyn, who highlights the genre-narrative specificity of Olena Ryzhko’s novella The King of the Darknet and outlines the role of youth slang, digital vocabulary, and speech registers in constructing the literary world.
The pedagogical aspect of interdisciplinary discourse is represented by Tetyana Blyznyuk and Larysa Krul, who justify the effectiveness of using English-language children’s literature to develop foreign-language communicative competence in young learners within a narrative-oriented teaching framework. Halyna Korytska and Olena Nyukalo investigate the development of key competencies through fairy tales, demonstrating the potential of Halyna Huzovska-Korytska’s The Fox Merchant to foster entrepreneurial thinking, emotional intelligence, and social responsibility.
Tamara Babiychuk’s overview of children’s literature from the Zhytomyr region presents creative portraits of local authors and emphasizes the nation-centered and educational potential of their works, highlighting the importance of the regional literary context in forming cultural memory and national identity among young readers.
We invite scholars, educators, librarians, publishing and digital media experts, and all those interested in the development of interdisciplinary research in children’s literature, reading, and education to collaborate with us. Our journal serves as a platform for discussions on artistic models for understanding the contemporary world in texts for children and youth, and for consolidating the academic and educational community around issues of children’s literature, publishing, and reading in the face of modern challenges.
