Elusive Childhood

Elusive Childhood PDF Author: Susan Honeyman
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 081421004X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"Elusive Childhood examines how discourse touched by the identity politics of youth might be revised for fairness. Susan Honeyman demonstrates this potential by reading representations of children from throughout the Modern episteme in works of such writers as Henry James, Edith Wharton, and James Baldwin. Identity politics have changed the way we classify literature by opening up the canon, but they have also changed the way we approach literature. We've learned to recognize that biology is not destiny - sex doesn't necessarily determine gender or orientation, nor do fictitious absolutes like blood ratios measure ethnocultural identity, and so in an effort to avoid false generalizing about "others" we endorse individual self-representation, all the while recognizing how society constructs us." "But when it comes to representing the position we call childhood, there is little opportunity in legitimated discourse for children's self-representation and inadequate attention to social constructedness. Recognizing political inequity in literary representations of children, Honeyman proposes a method of reading child figuration in relief to impose as little adult prejudice as possible. This might be impossible for adults, yet it is necessary to attempt."--BOOK JACKET.

Elusive Childhood

Elusive Childhood PDF Author: Susan Honeyman
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 081421004X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"Elusive Childhood examines how discourse touched by the identity politics of youth might be revised for fairness. Susan Honeyman demonstrates this potential by reading representations of children from throughout the Modern episteme in works of such writers as Henry James, Edith Wharton, and James Baldwin. Identity politics have changed the way we classify literature by opening up the canon, but they have also changed the way we approach literature. We've learned to recognize that biology is not destiny - sex doesn't necessarily determine gender or orientation, nor do fictitious absolutes like blood ratios measure ethnocultural identity, and so in an effort to avoid false generalizing about "others" we endorse individual self-representation, all the while recognizing how society constructs us." "But when it comes to representing the position we call childhood, there is little opportunity in legitimated discourse for children's self-representation and inadequate attention to social constructedness. Recognizing political inequity in literary representations of children, Honeyman proposes a method of reading child figuration in relief to impose as little adult prejudice as possible. This might be impossible for adults, yet it is necessary to attempt."--BOOK JACKET.

Child-sized History

Child-sized History PDF Author: Sara L. Schwebel
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826517927
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The classroom canon of young adult novels in historical context

Scenes from a Childhood

Scenes from a Childhood PDF Author: Jon Fosse
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910695531
Category : FICTION
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
A haunting collection from one of Norway's most celebrated writers.

Critical Children

Critical Children PDF Author: Richard Locke
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527993
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
The ten novels explored in Critical Children portray children so vividly that their names are instantly recognizable. Richard Locke traces the 130-year evolution of these iconic child characters, moving from Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip in Great Expectations to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; from Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw to Peter Pan and his modern American descendant, Holden Caulfield; and finally to Lolita and Alexander Portnoy. "It's remarkable," writes Locke, "that so many classic (or, let's say, unforgotten) English and American novels should focus on children and adolescents not as colorful minor characters but as the intense center of attention." Despite many differences of style, setting, and structure, they all enlist a particular child's story in a larger cultural narrative. In Critical Children, Locke describes the ways the children in these novels have been used to explore and evade large social, psychological, and moral problems. Writing as an editor, teacher, critic, and essayist, Locke demonstrates the way these great novels work, how they spring to life from their details, and how they both invite and resist interpretation and provoke rereading. Locke conveys the variety and continued vitality of these books as they shift from Victorian moral allegory to New York comic psychoanalytic monologue, from a child who is an agent of redemption to one who is a narcissistic prisoner of guilt and proud rage.

Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children's Novels to Refresh Our Tired Soul

Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children's Novels to Refresh Our Tired Soul PDF Author: Mitali Perkins
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 1506469108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Join award-winning author Mitali Perkins as she explores the promise of seven timeless children's novels for adults living in uncertain times. Through works by Louisa May Alcott, C. S. Lewis, L. M. Montgomery, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and other literary uncles and aunts, Perkins unpacks wisdom to help us thrive.

Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You are So Old and Wise

Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You are So Old and Wise PDF Author: Katherine Rundell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526610078
Category : Children's stories
Languages : en
Pages : 83

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Book Description
_______________A pocket-sized, unmissable essay on the importance of children's literature by the bestselling and award-winning author, Katherine Rundell._______________'It's a very short book but it packs a real punch... A real delight' - Financial Times'Rundell is the real deal, a writer of boundless gifts and extraordinary imaginative power whose novels will be read, cherished and reread long after most so-called "serious" novels are forgotten' - Observer'Rundell's pen is gold-tipped' - Sunday Times_______________Katherine Rundell - Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and prize-winning author of five novels for children - explores how children's books ignite, and can re-ignite, the imagination; how children's fiction, with its unabashed emotion and playfulness, can awaken old hungers and create new perspectives on the world. This delightful and persuasive essay is for adult readers.

The Story of Childhood

The Story of Childhood PDF Author: Libby Brooks
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408857685
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Childhood. We've all known it, but do we remember what it was like? Can we as adults relate to children or do we misunderstand them? Do we hanker after an unrealistic ideal of innocence that probably never was? To what extent has childhood become an adult-imagined universe? There is so much social anxiety surrounding their behaviour, nutrition, sexuality, consumerism and educational achievement that children may well have become the victims of inappropriate adult perceptions. In today's ASBO-afflicted Britain, Libby Brooks suggests that there is much we don't understand about contemporary childhood. The Story of Childhood explores this idea as Libby Brooks talks to nine very different children between the ages of four and sixteen growing up in Britain today. The public schoolboy, the young offender, the teenage mum, the country lad, for example, talk amusingly, frankly, and sometimes shockingly about their own lives conveying a sense of immediate experience that is thought-provoking and illuminating. Enriched by insights from literature, sociology, history and psychology, this is a remarkable piece of writing. Anyone who cares about the welfare of children should read this important book.

American Childhood

American Childhood PDF Author: Anne Scott MacLeod
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820318035
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In this collection of fourteen essays, Anne Scott MacLeod locates and describes shifts in the American concept of childhood as those changes are suggested in nearly two centuries of children's stories. Most of the essays concern domestic novels for children or adolescents--stories set more or less in the time of their publication. Some essays also draw creatively on childhood memoirs, travel writings that contain foreigners' observations of American children, and other studies of children's literature. The topics on which MacLeod writes range from the current politicized marketplace for children's books, to the reestablishment (and reconfiguration) of the family in recent children's fiction, to the ways that literature challenges or enforces the idealization of children. MacLeod sometimes considers a single author's canon, as when she discusses the feminism of the Nancy Drew mystery series or the Orwellian vision of Robert Cormier. At other times, she looks at a variety of works within a particular period, for example, Jacksonian America, the post-World War II decade, or the 1970s. MacLeod also examines books that were once immensely popular but currently have no appreciable readership--the Horatio Alger stories, for example--and finds fresh, intriguing ways to view the work of such well-known writers as Louisa May Alcott, Beverly Cleary, and Paul Zindel.

A Child of Books

A Child of Books PDF Author: Oliver Jeffers
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 0763690775
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
A young reader introduces a boy to the many imaginative worlds that books bring to life.

A Child's Book of Stories

A Child's Book of Stories PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Children's stories
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
Folk tales from England, Norway and India, as well as fairy tales from Grimm, Andersen and Perrault, fables from Aesop, and tales from the Arabian nights.