Poetics of Children's Literature

Poetics of Children's Literature PDF Author: Zohar Shavit
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820334812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children's literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work. Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children's literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre's canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children's literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.

Poetics of Children's Literature

Poetics of Children's Literature PDF Author: Zohar Shavit
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820334812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children's literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work. Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children's literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre's canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children's literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.

The Poetics of Childhood

The Poetics of Childhood PDF Author: Roni Natov
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135721777
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The Poetics of Childhood investigates the sensibility of childhood and the ways writers try to recapture it. It explores the earliest conceptions of innocence and the development of literature about children through contemporary times. It encompasses the pastoral, the dark pastoral, the anti-pastoral; it addresses picture books, fantasy, and realism. It looks with originality at the literature of childhood, inclusive of children's literature and literature about childhood, so that the child and adult can be seen reflexively--the child in the adult and the various stages of childhood as they are remembered and retained in adulthood. It confronts issues of primal and socially constructed desire adn the use of childhood to talk about desire. It is a poetics, a way of imagining the experience of childhood and explores childhood as a particulary fluid and porous time, it also addresses issues of creativity. This is an essential reference for teachers, parents, artists, and writers.

Children's Literature

Children's Literature PDF Author: Seth Lerer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226473023
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. Children’s Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter. The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. Children’s Literature is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word. “Lerer has accomplished something magical. Unlike the many handbooks to children’s literature that synopsize, evaluate, or otherwise guide adults in the selection of materials for children, this work presents a true critical history of the genre. . . . Scholarly, erudite, and all but exhaustive, it is also entertaining and accessible. Lerer takes his subject seriously without making it dull.”—Library Journal (starred review) “Lerer’s history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years. . . . With his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a child’s imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read.”—San Francisco Chronicle “There are dazzling chapters on John Locke and Empire, and nonsense, and Darwin, but Lerer’s most interesting chapter focuses on girls’ fiction. . . . A brilliant series of readings.”—Diane Purkiss, Times Literary Supplement

Irish Children’s Literature and the Poetics of Memory

Irish Children’s Literature and the Poetics of Memory PDF Author: Rebecca Long
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350167266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Focusing on the mythological narratives that influence Irish children's literature, this book examines the connections between landscape, time and identity, positing that myth and the language of myth offer authors and readers the opportunity to engage with Ireland's culture and heritage. It explores the recurring patterns of Irish mythological narratives that influence literature produced for children in Ireland between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. A selection of children's books published between 1892, when there was an escalation of the cultural pursuit of Irish independence and 2016, which marked the centenary of the Easter 1916 rebellion against English rule, are discussed with the aim of demonstrating the development of a pattern of retrieving, re-telling, remembering and re-imagining myths in Irish children's literature. In doing so, it examines the reciprocity that exists between imagination, memory, and childhood experiences in this body of work.

The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature

The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature PDF Author: Nancy Watson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Although the work of many contemporary Irish writers for children is often complex and sophisticated there is currently very little critical analysis to do it justice. The aim of this book is to redress that situation and to prove that the best writing for children is no less complex and well written than the best adult fiction and offers valuable material for theoreticians. With a detailed examination of selected texts by six Irish writers for children, the book explores the reciprocal relationship between the different time and place of the child reader and the complexity and multiplicity of the world of the adult writer. It suggests that putting the different forms of experience in dialogue with each other promotes a new understanding because it allows for other points of view and other ways of seeing. This book also suggests that the way in which these writers implement the potential of the child reader's different perspective refutes the idea of the 'impossible' relation between adult and child. The opening chapter explores the attempt to re-create childhood and adolescence in a range of Irish memoir and fiction.

Children's Literature

Children's Literature PDF Author: Barbara Stoodt
Publisher: Macmillan Education AU
ISBN: 9780732940126
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description


Types of Children's Literature

Types of Children's Literature PDF Author: Walter Barnes
Publisher: IndyPublish.com
ISBN: 9781404358249
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description


Touchstones

Touchstones PDF Author: Perry Nodelman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Children
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


Rereading Childhood Books

Rereading Childhood Books PDF Author: Alison Waller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1474298281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Childhood books play a special role in reading histories, providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers' memoirs, autobiographical accounts of reading, and interviews with readers, Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember, revisit, and sometimes forget, these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon, Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of children's literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives.

The Feminine Subject in Children's Literature

The Feminine Subject in Children's Literature PDF Author: Christine Wilkie-Stibbs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136699929
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book builds upon and contributes to the growing academic interest in feminism within the field of children's literature studies. Christie Wilkie-Stibbs draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan in her analysis of particular children's literature texts to demonstrate how a feminist analysis opens up textual possibilities that may be applied to works of children's fiction in general, extending the range of textual engagements in children's literature through the application of a new poststructural critical apparati.