It becomes clear early on that this story, and the Iron Woman herself, is retaliating to the built-up destruction of the planet by humanity's excesses and waste. El hombre de hierro, illus. by Laura Carlin. Barcelona: Vicens Vives, 2011 ISBN 9788468206219 OCLC 794039831 Set in 1937 during the so-called “Roosevelt recession,” tight times compel Mary Alice, a Chicago girl, to move in with her grandmother, who lives in a tiny Illinois town so behind the times that it doesn’t “even have a picture show.”

Greenaway, Betty (Ed.). (1994). Special Issue: ‘Ecology and the Child’. Children’s Literature Quarterly, 19:4. Children’s literature has long been concerned with nature. The way we portray the natural world and the environment we live in matters. The image we present to children and young adults about the world they live in can offer creative settings that can excite their imagination and perhaps prompt them to consider their own relationship with our damaged planet. Yes we have fantasy in full flight both in how it dealt with and how it is concluded but for me that is not the point. The point here is that something that does not have a voice is given one and from there the real power comes. Ironically this could be applied to a lot of things today - where currently there is no way of them to tell their story and share their pain - what would come if of it if suddenly they were able to do so. Nikolajeva, Maria. (2016). Recent Trends in Children’s Literature Research: Return to the Body. International Research in Children’s Literature, 9(2), 132–145. In Confronting Climate Crises Through Education ( 2018) Rebecca L. Young makes a compelling case for how literature and empathetic reading strategies can lead to action and become a rationale for change. Introducing environmental concerns in the classroom literature can be a platform for engaging both children and young adults, thanks to the emotional response created.

After playing this game for two rounds, the dragon is so badly burned that he no longer appears physically frightening. The Iron Man by contrast has only a deformed ear-lobe to show for his pains. The alien creature admits defeat. When asked why he came to Earth, the dragon reveals that he is a peaceful "star spirit" who experienced excitement about the ongoing sights and sounds produced by the violent warfare of humanity. In his own life, he was a singer of the " music of the spheres"; the harmony of his kind that keeps the cosmos in balance in stable equilibrium. These robotic lamentations should convince the reader of her seemingly mechanical origins, however these are the cries of the river and its wildlife, of which she is born. We learn that this river is linked to a nearby waste disposal plant, which is beginning to kill everything natural nearby to it due to its rapacious growth as a business. Basu, Balaka, Broad, Katherine R., and Hintz, Carrie (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary Dystopian. Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. NY: Routledge. L'Uomo di ferro, transl. into Italian of The Iron Man by Ilva Tron, illus. by I. Bruno. Milan: Oscar junior, Mondadori, 2013 ISBN 978-88-04-62032-7 Like Carson, Hughes also believed that humans and nature were part of the same web of life and that you could not harm a part of nature without harming the whole. Raising environmental awareness and instilling in the reader a sense of connection with the natural world was part of the poet's project. From the very beginning of his career, he strived to make his environmental thinking public, and throughout his life he was actively involved in a number of educational projects and charities, many of which were directed at children and young adults. Footnote 2

The Iron Man, illus. by George Adamson: “English language textbook with Japanese annotations” by Yuuichi Hashimoto. Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1980 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 Curry, Alice. (2013). Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.Following this, The Iron Woman can be read as a redemptive story, written for a society that has cut itself off from being part of the larger web of life. By exposing the effects of toxic chemicals from a waste factory, the Iron Woman vows to destroy those who have poisoned the river and marshlands, and all the creature that live there. Der Eisenmann, transl. into German of The Iron Man by U.-M. Gutzschhahn, illus. by Jindra Čapek. Frankfurt-am-Main: S. Fischer (Fischer Taschenbuch) 1997 ISBN 3-596-80154-0

Buell, Lawrence. (1995). The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau. Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gifford, Terry. (1995). Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hughes, Ted. (1992). ‘Introduction’ in Your World. London: HarperCollins. Also published in The Observer Magazine (29 November 1992), 30–39. Written half-way between a modern fairy-tale and a science-fiction myth, Hughes’s narrative describes how a giant “metal man” appears from the sea and falls from a cliff, only to reassemble himself, and begin devouring anything metal. He soon becomes a problem for the local farmers who decide to dig a pit to capture him and bury him. However, after being buried he rises again and when a monstruous alien descends from outer space and threatens the extinction of all life on Earth, the Iron Man defends the people and restores peace.

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When things turn into a national disaster and get out of hand, the children, Lucy and Hogarth, who reappears from The Iron Man, beg the Iron Woman to stop. Eventually the men emerge from the water, with their hair turned white. Hughes’s urgency for that same “deep change” (Hughes, 1993, p. 85) voiced by the Iron Woman, to save Western society, comes in the form of a healing miracle to save nature and humankind. Overnight strange yellow webs grow, dissolving the waste from the factory and turning it into a magic non-toxic fuel. Curiously enough, the same day that Hughes sent The Iron Woman to his publisher at Faber, he read in New Scientist that two Japanese scientists claimed to have found a way to convert plastics into fuel (Morrison, 1999, p. 166). The Iron Man, illus. by George Adamson. London: Faber and Faber, 26 February 1968 ISBN 0571 08247 5 Terrified, humans send their armies to destroy the dragon, but it is unharmed by their weapons. When the Iron Man hears of this global threat, he allows himself to be disassembled and transported to Australia where he challenges the creature to a contest of strength. If the Iron Man can withstand the heat of burning petroleum for longer than the creature can withstand the heat of the Sun, the creature must obey the Iron Man's commands forevermore: if the Iron Man melts or is afraid of melting before the space being undergoes or fears pain in the Sun, the creature has permission to devour the whole Earth. 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). 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.

Young, Rebecca. (2018). Confronting Climate Crises Through Education: Reading Our Way Forward. Lanham, Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield. Bright, Bonnie. (2010). Facing Medusa: Alchemical Transformation through the Power of Surrender. Accessed January 2, 2017, from http://www.depthinsights.com/pdfs/Facing_Medusa_Alchemical_Surrender-BBright-052010.pdf. Plumwood held that humans needed a new ethics to restore harmony in the natural world. Read in the current crisis, her words seem to ring truer than ever. Given this bleak scenario, what value does it have to read a children’s text which is approaching its thirtieth anniversary, when we are currently immersed in a global environmental crisis which has worsened dramatically over the past three decades? Cixous, Helene. (1976, Summer). The Laugh of the Medusa. Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen (Trans.). Signs, 1(4): 875–893.The Iron Man arrives seemingly from nowhere, and his appearance is described in detail. He first appears falling off a cliff, but his various pieces reassemble themselves, starting with his hands finding his eyes and progressing from there. He is unable to find one ear, which was taken by seagulls earlier, and walks into the sea to find it. L'Uomo di ferro, transl. into Italian of The Iron Man by Ilva Tron; illus. by Andrew Davidson; Junior Mondadori series. Milan: Mondadori, 2003 ISBN 88-04-43681-6