Reading Nature and Cultures

The globally acclaimed novel »The Whale Rider« by Witi Ihimaera connects with today’s pressing issues: decolonization, environmental protection, cultural resilience. The contributors to this volume offer readers intercultural and interdisciplinary perspectives on this work through accessible scholarly and personal analyses. They show how literature can bridge nature and cultures, myth and reality, Indigenous stories and international audiences. Readers gain new insights into Māori literature and its global contexts – making this a compelling read for scholars and curious minds alike.

Julia Sander (Dr. phil.) ist Professorin für Neuere deutsche Literatur an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Kinder- und Jugendmedien und deren Didaktik, Critical Literacy und Leseförderung in Ganztagsschulen.

Anke Vogel (Dr.) is a research and teaching associate in the Book Studies Department at the Gutenberg Institute for World Literacy and Written Media at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany. Her research and teaching interests include book market research, especially digital transformation, communication, sustainability, as well as reading and readers research and children’s and young adult book studies.

Wolfgang Jäger is a teacher at a secondary school in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His fields of research are children’s and young adult media and their didactics, democracy education, and digitization in education.