Now available in paperback! Until now, there was no theoretical research of character in children's fiction and very few comprehensive theoretical studies of literary characters in general. In her latest intellectual foray, the author of From Mythic to Linear ponders the art of characterization. Through a variety of critical perspectives, she uncovers the essential differences between story ('what we are told') and discourse ('how we are told'), and carefully distinguishes between how these are employed in children's fiction and in general fiction. Yet another masterful work by a leading figure in contemporary criticism.
As undergraduate and graduate courses in children's literature become more established and numerous, there is an intense need for a textbook that offers aesthetic rather than educational approaches to children's literature. This work fills that void by providing students of children's literature with a comprehensible and easy-to-use analytical tool kit, showing through concrete demonstration how each tool might best be used. The chapters are organized around familiar and easily recognized features of literary texts (e.g. author, genre, character). Theoretical issues are illustrated by specific texts from the North American children's literature canon. The book explores the particular aesthetics of children's fiction and the ways critical theory may be applied to children's texts, while remaining accessible to a college readership without prior specialized knowledge of literary theory. Each chapter includes a short introduction to a specific theoretical approach (e.g. semiotics, feminist, psychoanalytic), an example of its application to a literary text, a number of activities (study questions, reading exercises), and suggestions for further explorations.
This book considers one of the most controversial aspects of children’s and young adult literature: its use as an instrument of power. Children in contemporary Western society are oppressed and powerless, yet they are allowed, in fiction written by adults for the enlightenment and enjoyment of children, to become strong, brave, rich, powerful, and independent -- on certain conditions and for a limited time. Though the best children’s literature offers readers the potential to challenge the authority of adults, many authors use artistic means such as the narrative voice and the subject position to manipulate the child reader. Looking at key works from the eighteenth century to the present, Nikolajeva explores topics such as genre, gender, crossvocalization, species, and picturebook images. Contemporary power theories including social and cultural studies, carnival theory, feminism, postcolonial and queer studies, and narratology are also considered, in order to demonstrate how a balance is maintained between the two opposite inherent goals of children’s literature: to empower and to educate the child.
How Picturebooks Work is an innovative and engaging look at the interplay between text and image in picturebooks. The authors explore picturebooks as a specific medium or genre in literature and culture, one that prepares children for other media of communication, and they argue that picturebooks may be the most influential media of all in the socialization and representation of children. Spanning an international range of children's books, this book examine such favorites as Curious George and Frog and Toad Are Friends, along with the works of authors and illustrators including Maurice Sendak and Tove Jansson, among others. With 116 illustrations, How Picturebooks Work offers the student of children's literature a new methodology, new theories, and a new set of critical tools for examining the picturebook form.
How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfer fictional experience into real life? Why do they care about fictional characters? How does fiction enhance young people's sense of self-hood? Supported by cognitive psychology and brain research, this ground-breaking book is the first study of young readers' cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction. It explores how fiction stimulates perception, attention, imagination and other cognitive activity, and opens radically new ways of thinking about literature for young readers. Examining a wide range of texts for a young audience, from picturebooks to young adult novels, the combination of cognitive criticism and children’s literature theory also offers significant insights for literary studies beyond the scope of children’s fiction. An important milestone in cognitive criticism, the book provides convincing evidence that reading fiction is indispensable for young people’s intellectual, emotional and social maturation.
Originally published in 1996. A detailed analysis of the art of children's literature covering world literature for children, children's literature as a canonical art form, the history of children's literature from a semiotic perspective, and epic, polyphony, chronotope, intertextuality, and metafiction in children's literature.
Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world, nationhood and identity, the mapping of sexual awakening onto postcolonial awareness, hybridity and trans-racial romance, transgressive sexuality, the sexually abused adolescent body, music as a code for identity formation, representations of adolescent emotion, and what neuroscience research tells us about young adult readers, writers, and young artists. Throughout, the volume explores the ways writers configure their adolescent protagonists as awkward, alienated, rebellious and unhappy, so that the figure of the young adult becomes a symbol of wider political and societal concerns. Examining in depth significant contemporary novels, including those by Julia Alvarez, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce, Malorie Blackman and Meg Rosoff, among others, Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.
How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfer fictional experience into real life? Why do they care about fictional characters? How does fiction enhance young people's sense of self-hood? Supported by cognitive psychology and brain research, this ground-breaking book is the first study of young readers' cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction. It explores how fiction stimulates perception, attention, imagination and other cognitive activity, and opens radically new ways of thinking about literature for young readers. Examining a wide range of texts for a young audience, from picturebooks to young adult novels, the combination of cognitive criticism and children’s literature theory also offers significant insights for literary studies beyond the scope of children’s fiction. An important milestone in cognitive criticism, the book provides convincing evidence that reading fiction is indispensable for young people’s intellectual, emotional and social maturation.
How Picturebooks Work is an innovative and engaging look at the interplay between text and image in picturebooks. The authors explore picturebooks as a specific medium or genre in literature and culture, one that prepares children for other media of communication, and they argue that picturebooks may be the most influential media of all in the socialization and representation of children. Spanning an international range of children's books, this book examine such favorites as Curious George and Frog and Toad Are Friends, along with the works of authors and illustrators including Maurice Sendak and Tove Jansson, among others. With 116 illustrations, How Picturebooks Work offers the student of children's literature a new methodology, new theories, and a new set of critical tools for examining the picturebook form.
Originally published in 1996. A detailed analysis of the art of children's literature covering world literature for children, children's literature as a canonical art form, the history of children's literature from a semiotic perspective, and epic, polyphony, chronotope, intertextuality, and metafiction in children's literature.
Focusing on questions of space and locale in children’s literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. The collection is comprised of four sections that take up the space between children and adults, the representation of 'real world' places, fantasy travel and locales, and the physical space of the children’s book-as-object. In their essays, the contributors analyze works from a range of sources and traditions by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Maria Edgeworth, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jenny Robson, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Knox, and Claude Ponti. While maintaining a focus on how location and spatiality aid in defining the child’s relationship to the world, the essays also address themes of borders, displacement, diaspora, exile, fantasy, gender, history, home-leaving and homecoming, hybridity, mapping, and metatextuality. With an epilogue by Philip Pullman in which he discusses his own relationship to image and locale, this collection is also a valuable resource for understanding the work of this celebrated author of children’s literature.
This book bridges the fields of Children’s Literature and Italian Studies by examining how turn-of-the-century children’s books forged a unified national identity for the new Italian State. Through contextualized close readings of a wide range of texts, Truglio shows how the 19th-century concept of recapitulation, which held that ontogeny (the individual’s development) repeats phylogeny (the evolution of the species), underlies the strategies of this corpus. Italian fairy tales, novels, poems, and short stories imply that the personal development of the child corresponds to and hence naturalizes the modernizing development of the nation. In the context of Italy’s uneven and ambivalent modernization, these narrative trajectories are enabled by a developmental melancholia. Using a psychoanalytic lens, and in dialogue with recent Anglophone Children’s Literature criticism, this study proposes that national identity was constructed via a process of renouncing and incorporating paternal and maternal figures, rendered as compulsory steps into maturity and modernity. With chapters on the heroic figure of Garibaldi, the Orientalized depiction of the South, and the role of girls in formation narratives, this book discloses how melancholic itineraries produced gendered national subjects. This study engages both well-known Italian texts, such as Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio and De Amicis’ Heart, and books that have fallen into obscurity by authors such as Baccini, Treves, Gianelli, and Nuccio. Its approach and corpus shed light on questions being examined by Italianists, Children’s Literature scholars, and social and cultural historians with an interest in national identity formation.
Now available in paperback! Until now, there was no theoretical research of character in children's fiction and very few comprehensive theoretical studies of literary characters in general. In her latest intellectual foray, the author of From Mythic to Linear ponders the art of characterization. Through a variety of critical perspectives, she uncovers the essential differences between story ('what we are told') and discourse ('how we are told'), and carefully distinguishes between how these are employed in children's fiction and in general fiction. Yet another masterful work by a leading figure in contemporary criticism.
Children’s literature is a contested terrain, as is multicultural education. Taken together, they pose a formidable challenge to both classroom teachers and academics.... Rather than deny the inherent conflicts and tensions in the field, in Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors, Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct these terrains by proposing a reframing of the field.... Surely all of us – children, teachers, and academics – can benefit from this more expansive understanding of what it means to read books." Sonia Nieto, From the Foreword Critical multicultural analysis provides a philosophical shift for teaching literature, constructing curriculum, and taking up issues of diversity and social justice. It problematizes children’s literature, offers a way of reading power, explores the complex web of sociopolitical relations, and deconstructs taken-for-granted assumptions about language, meaning, reading, and literature: it is literary study as sociopolitical change. Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in children’s literature, this book prepares teachers, teacher educators, and researchers of children’s literature to analyze the ideological dimensions of reading and studying literature. Each chapter includes recommendations for classroom application, classroom research, and further reading. Helpful end-of-book appendixes include a list of children’s book awards, lists of publishers, diagrams of the power continuum and the theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis, and lists of selected children’s literature journals and online resources.
Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation is the first academic work to examine World Masterpiece Theater (Sekai Meisaku Gekijô, 1969-2009), which popularized the practice of adapting foreign children's books into long-running animated series and laid the groundwork for powerhouses like Studio Ghibli. World Masterpiece Theater (Sekai Meisaku Gekijô, 1969-2009) is a TV staple created by the Japanese studio Nippon Animation, which popularized the practice of adapting foreign children's books into long-running animated series. Once generally dismissed by critics, the series is now frequently investigated as a key early work of legendary animators Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki. In the first book-length examination of the series, Maria Chiara Oltolini analyzes cultural significance of World Masterpiece Theater, and the ways in which the series pioneered the importance of children's fiction for Japanese animation studios and laid the groundwork for powerhouses like Studio Ghibli. Adapting a novel for animation also means decoding (and re-coding) socio-cultural patterns embedded in a narrative. World Masterpiece Theater stands as a unique example of this linguistic, medial, and cultural hybridisation. Popular children's classics such as Little Women, Peter Pan, and Anne of Green Gables became the starting point of a full-fledged negotiation process in which Japanese animators retold a whole range of narratives that have one basic formula in common: archetypal stories with an educational purpose. In particular, the series played a role in shaping the pop culture image of a young girl (shôjo). Examining the series through the lens of animation studies as well as adaptation studies, Oltolini sheds new light on this long-neglected staple of Japanese animation history.
Considered by critics to be Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, Barry Lyndon has suffered from scholarly and popular neglect. Maria Pramaggiore argues that one key reason that this film remains unappreciated, even by Kubrick aficionados, is that its transnational and intermedial contexts have not been fully explored. Taking a novel approach, she looks at the film from a transnational perspective -- as a foreign production shot in Ireland and an adaptation of a British novel by an American director about an Irish subject. Pramaggiore argues that, in Barry Lyndon, Kubrick develops his richest philosophical mediation on cinema's capacity to mediate the real and foregrounds film's relationship to other technologies of visuality, including painting, photography, and digital media. By combining extensive research into the film's source novel, production and reception with systematic textual analysis and an engagement with several key issues in contemporary academic debate, this work promises not only to make a huge impact in the field of Kubrick studies, but also in 1970s filmmaking, cultural history and transnational film practice.
From The Hobbit to Harry Potter, how fantasy harnesses the cultural power of magic, medievalism, and childhood to re-enchant the modern world Why are so many people drawn to fantasy set in medieval, British-looking lands? This question has immediate significance for millions around the world: from fans of Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones to those who avoid fantasy because of the racist, sexist, and escapist tendencies they have found there. Drawing on the history and power of children’s fantasy literature, Re-Enchanted argues that magic, medievalism, and childhood hold the paradoxical ability to re-enchant modern life. Focusing on works by authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, and Nnedi Okorafor, Re-Enchanted uncovers a new genealogy for medievalist fantasy—one that reveals the genre to be as important to the history of English studies and literary modernism as it is to shaping beliefs across geographies and generations. Maria Sachiko Cecire follows children’s fantasy as it transforms over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including the rise of diverse counternarratives and fantasy’s move into “high-brow” literary fiction. Grounded in a combination of archival scholarship and literary and cultural analysis, Re-Enchanted argues that medievalist fantasy has become a psychologized landscape for contemporary explorations of what it means to grow up, live well, and belong. The influential “Oxford School” of children’s fantasy connects to key issues throughout this book, from the legacies of empire and racial exclusion in children’s literature to what Christmas magic tells us about the roles of childhood and enchantment in Anglo-American culture. Re-Enchanted engages with critical debates around what constitutes high and low culture during moments of crisis in the humanities, political and affective uses of childhood and the mythological past, the anxieties of modernity, and the social impact of racially charged origin stories.
Looking at key works from the eighteenth-century to the present, Nikolajeva explores topics such as genre, gender, crossvocalization, species, and picturebook images in order to demonstrate how a balance is maintained between the two opposite inherent goals of children’s literature: to empower and to educate the child.
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