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* Kate McLoughlin and Malin Lidström Brock, eds. Tove Jansson Rediscovered. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Pp. 249.
This collection of essays is based on a conference held at the Pembroke College, Oxford, England, in March 2007. Of the fifty-five papers presented at the conference by scholars from thirteen countries, nineteen were chosen for the publication. According to the astute introduction, the book aims at updating Tove Jansson's literary standing. It clearly achieves its purpose. Most of us are familiar, to the point of tedium, with the cuddly Moomin figures as they appear on coffee mugs, bibs, pencil holders, and numerous other commercial products. Some may even have read as children the Moomin stories, but relatively few are acquainted with Tove Jansson's adult fiction or have pondered her life philosophy. For all of us, the present collection opens up new vistas. It presents Jansson as a highly complex figure, a children's author, novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, painter, illustrator, and cartoonist. The essay writers come from seven different countries and represent a wide range of scholarly disciplines, from education to women's studies to theology.
The majority of the articles deal with the Moomin books, originally published between 1945 and 1970. Agneta Rehal-Johansson in her essay "The Trickster Children's Author" examines the impact of two major revisions of the series, in 1956 and between 1968 and 1970. While the first revision mainly concerned stylistic issues, the later one was more dramatic, de-emphasizing fairytale and supernatural elements and resulting in a complex suite of novels which allow numerous and even contrasting readings of life in the Moomin valley.
A number of writers apply psychological approaches to the Moomin tales. Claire Sharpe, for instance, studies Fillyjonk's reactions to immediate physical danger in Moominvaley in November (1971) as an example of depersonalization as a defense mechanism.
Jukka Mikkonen avails himself of Schopenhauer's theory of "eristical dialectic" in analyzing Little My1S rhetoric and discursive devices (97). He concludes that although Little My and the Schopenhauerian debater have much in common, ultimately Little My deviates from the Schopenhauerian norm. Whimsical in her behavior, one might even say ruthless, Little My has an obsessive desire to win disputes, employs unconventional means of argumentation, such as mockery and scare tactics, and disregards the effects...