In a previous paper I have interpreted Edgar Rice Borroughs novel Tarzan of the Apes (1914) as a Bildungsroman, where the civilizing of Tarzan goes through three stages – the mirror scene, the acquisition of literacy, and the encounter with – and subsequent sacrifice of Jane. I also tried to investigate how these stages or motifs have been treated in later retellings, including the latest Disney film version. Apparently there is more than one Tarzan: There is a Tarzan of the Books trying to become a man through the encounter with books and letters. But there is also a Tarzan of the Films, focusing more on Weissmuller’s athletic and sensual body and the romance with Jane.

Retelling means both recalling and interpreting, and in this paper I shall present and discuss some recent Scandinavian contributions that may be said to mark a changing perspective on the Tarzan mythology: they all focus on their childhood reading experience of Tarzan. Of the four texts I will present, two of them (Conny Svensson’s Tarzan in the Book Devouring Age (1997) and Bo Green Jensen’s The First Landscape (1999) are written by middle-aged men of varying academic backgrounds, apparently adressing their own generation, and in prose. The other two are a picture book by Torill Thorstad Hauger (Tarzan in the Attic, 1993) and a young adult novel by the H.C. Andersen Price Winner Tormod Haugen (The Call of the Jungle, 1987).

Reconstructing a childhood reading experience, whether it be in fiction or non fiction, proves to be as risky as children’s literature itself: our pictures (of the pictures) of the past are at the same time responding to current pictures or constructions and aspirations – for childhood, for reading as well as for gender.

Can these texts be said to reflect a changing perspective on the question of reading and gender? What sort of ‘socially orientated metanarratives’ (John Stephens’s term) may they convey?

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