Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture

Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture PDF Author: Amie A. Doughty
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443898015
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores a wealth of topics in children’s and young adult literature and culture. Contributions about picture-books include analyses of variants of the folktale “The Little Red Hen” and bullying. Race and gender are explored in essays about picture-books featuring children as consumable objects, about books focused on African American female athletes, and about young adult dystopian fiction. Gender itself is further explored in articles about Monster High, Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts, and The Hunger Games and Divergent. Essays about fantasy literature include an exploration of environmentalism in Rick Riordan’s The Heroes of Olympus, a discussion of Severus Snape as a Judas figure, an explication of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, and an analysis of ghosts and nationalism in Eva Ibbotson’s The Haunting of Granite Falls. An essay about Horrible Histories explores television, genre, and the way history is coded. Other contributions explore how teaching literature to reluctant readers can be effective through multimodal texts and how Harry Potter has played a role in the popularity of young adult literature for adult readers.

Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture

Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture PDF Author: Amie A. Doughty
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443898015
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book

Book Description
This collection of essays explores a wealth of topics in children’s and young adult literature and culture. Contributions about picture-books include analyses of variants of the folktale “The Little Red Hen” and bullying. Race and gender are explored in essays about picture-books featuring children as consumable objects, about books focused on African American female athletes, and about young adult dystopian fiction. Gender itself is further explored in articles about Monster High, Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts, and The Hunger Games and Divergent. Essays about fantasy literature include an exploration of environmentalism in Rick Riordan’s The Heroes of Olympus, a discussion of Severus Snape as a Judas figure, an explication of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, and an analysis of ghosts and nationalism in Eva Ibbotson’s The Haunting of Granite Falls. An essay about Horrible Histories explores television, genre, and the way history is coded. Other contributions explore how teaching literature to reluctant readers can be effective through multimodal texts and how Harry Potter has played a role in the popularity of young adult literature for adult readers.

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture PDF Author: Derritt Mason
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496831004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ+ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What makes for a good “coming out” story? Will increased queer representation in young people’s media teach adolescents the right lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason considers these questions through a range of popular media, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture—queer visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the promise that “It Gets Better” and the threat that it might not—challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people’s media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes that we see “queer YA” as a body of transmedia texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect—specifically, anxiety—instead of content.

Mothers in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Mothers in Children's and Young Adult Literature PDF Author: Lisa Rowe Fraustino
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496807006
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Living or dead, present or absent, sadly dysfunctional or merrily adequate, the figure of the mother bears enormous freight across a child’s emotional and intellectual life. Given the vital role literary mothers play in books for young readers, it is remarkable how little scholarly attention has been paid to the representation of mothers outside of fairy tales and beyond studies of gender stereotypes. This collection of thirteen essays begins to fill a critical gap by bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives by a rich mix of senior scholars and new voices. Following an introduction in which the coeditors describe key trends in interdisciplinary scholarship, the book’s first section focuses on the pedagogical roots of maternal influence in early children’s literature. The next section explores the shifting cultural perspectives and subjectivities of the twentieth century. The third section examines the interplay of fantasy, reality, and the ethical dimensions of literary mothers. The collection ends with readings of postfeminist motherhood, from contemporary realism to dystopian fantasy. The range of critical approaches in this volume will provide multiple inroads for scholars to investigate richer readings of mothers in children’s and young adult literature.

Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature PDF Author: Melanie Duckworth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000469182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
From the forests of the tales of the Brothers Grimm to Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree, from the flowers of Cicely May Barker’s fairies to the treehouse in Andy Griffith and Terry Denton’s popular 13-Storey Treehouse series, trees and other plants have been enduring features of stories for children and young adults. Plants act as gateways to other worlds, as liminal spaces, as markers of permanence and change, and as metonyms of childhood and adolescence. This anthology is the first compilation devoted entirely to analysis of the representation of plants in children’s and young adult literatures, reflecting the recent surge of interest in cultural plant studies within the environmental humanities. Mapping out and presenting an internationally inclusive view of plant representation in texts for children and young adults, the volume includes contributions examining European, American, Australian, and Asian literatures and contributes to the research fields of ecocriticism, critical plant studies, and the study of children’s and young adult literatures.

Broadening Critical Boundaries in Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture

Broadening Critical Boundaries in Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture PDF Author: Amie A. Doughty
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781527516090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores a wealth of topics in childrens and young adult (YA) literature and culture. The contributions include an examination of the Watchbird cartoons by Munro Leaf and their attempts to teach morals and manners; an ethnographic study about the role of public youth librarians; and an exploration of the role popular video games can play in the secondary classroom. Other topics investigated here encompass the presentation of environmentalism in Hayao Miyazakis films, psychological analyses, and the role of race, gender, and culture in childrens and YA literature.

Tactics of Hope in Latinx Children's and Young Adult Literature

Tactics of Hope in Latinx Children's and Young Adult Literature PDF Author: Jesus Montaño
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826363849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This important study affirms that Latinx children and young adults are uniquely positioned to change the world. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories of conocimiento as a critical lens, the authors examine several literary works including Side by Side / Lado a lado; They Call Me Güero; Land of the Cranes; Efrén Divided; and Gabi, a Girl in Pieces. Using these texts and others, Montaño and Postma-Montaño demonstrate how Latinx literature for young readers reveals the oppressions that affect the everyday lives of Latinx youth in order to destabilize the racist notions that inform them. Whether it is injustices in the agricultural fields, weaponization of deportation and deportability, or forms of exclusion based on gender, ethnicity, and race, the books in this study counter by imagining and then participating in social-justice activism that seeks to transform the world. Ultimately the lessons shared in these books will allow Latinx young people to lead us into a future where equity and belonging are as endemic as they currently are rare.

Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults

Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults PDF Author: Paul Venzo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000393445
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children’s literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction writing, picture books, film and television and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts communicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality.

Young Adult Literature and Culture

Young Adult Literature and Culture PDF Author: Harry Eiss
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144380732X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This book offers a multifaceted approach to the world of young adults, everything from Ray Schrock’s use of Walter Dean Myers’ sports stories to discuss race relations and cultural politics to Joyce Litton’s analysis of the highly popular Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Quartet. The cover illustration is done by Joel Rudinger based on his experiences with the Inuit where he learned many of their legends and myths, resulting in his own excellent work on Sedna, the creation goddess, a story filled with deep tragedy, mystery and the world of the spirits. This mythic world slides into the discussion of Harry Eiss, one that focuses on The Isis Trilogy, best known of Monica Hughes many works, who writes, “Science fiction and fantasy in particular are valid carriers of myth for the 20th century, and most especially for young people.” Margaret Best and Susann deVries also give us literature that uses science. They begin, “The science fair project is the central metaphor and the reality in Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1970), Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bucking the Sarge (2004), and Joyce Maynard’s The Cloud Chamber (2005). After providing an overview science fiction, Sally Sugarman offers a study of the entire genre. “For this study two hundred and thirty-nine high school students from two schools in Vermont and Massachusetts were surveyed.” Alethea K. Helbig provides an overview of her important activities promoting literature for the young. She was a seminal scholar and educator when colleges and universities were just beginning to take the study of such literature seriously, when English departments were initiating serious undergraduate and graduate classes in what previously had been seen as inferior literature. Her life itself provides us with an entertaining and historically valuable autobiographical account of a person at the center of the change that has taken and continues to take place. Jerry Loving expands the horizons of the entire collection of essays, providing a firsthand account of how the young are educated in China, including a detailed history. It begins: “I have been traveling to mainland China at least 4 to 6 times a year as a teacher or education evaluator since 2002. As the visits and years passed, I watched the education system of China slowly improve to the level my schools were like when I went to school in the 50’s and 60’s

Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture

Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture PDF Author: Maria Nikolajeva
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317160991
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
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.

Broadening Critical Boundaries in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture

Broadening Critical Boundaries in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture PDF Author: Amie A. Doughty
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527520706
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores a wealth of topics in children’s and young adult (YA) literature and culture. The contributions include an examination of the Watchbird cartoons by Munro Leaf and their attempts to teach morals and manners; an ethnographic study about the role of public youth librarians; and an exploration of the role popular video games can play in the secondary classroom. Other topics investigated here encompass the presentation of environmentalism in Hayao Miyazaki’s films, psychological analyses, and the role of race, gender, and culture in children’s and YA literature.