Looking Glasses and Neverlands

Looking Glasses and Neverlands PDF Author: Karen Coats
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 158729477X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
A “Choice” Outstanding Academic Title This groundbreaking study introduces and explores Lacan’s complex theories of subjectivity and desire through close readings of canonical children’s books such as Charlotte’s Web, Stellaluna, Holes, Tangerine, and The Chocolate War, providing an introduction to an increasingly influential body of difficult work while making the claim that children’s textual encounters are as significant as their existential ones in constituting their subjectivities and giving shape to their desires.

Looking Glasses and Neverlands

Looking Glasses and Neverlands PDF Author: Karen Coats
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 158729477X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
A “Choice” Outstanding Academic Title This groundbreaking study introduces and explores Lacan’s complex theories of subjectivity and desire through close readings of canonical children’s books such as Charlotte’s Web, Stellaluna, Holes, Tangerine, and The Chocolate War, providing an introduction to an increasingly influential body of difficult work while making the claim that children’s textual encounters are as significant as their existential ones in constituting their subjectivities and giving shape to their desires.

The Hidden Adult

The Hidden Adult PDF Author: Perry Nodelman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801889804
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
What exactly is a children’s book? How is children’s literature defined as a genre? A leading scholar presents close readings of six classic stories to answer these questions and offer a clear definition of children’s writing as a distinct literary form. Perry Nodelman begins by considering the plots, themes, and structures of six works: "The Purple Jar," Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Doolittle, Henry Huggins, The Snowy Day, and Plain City—all written for young people of varying ages in different times and places—to identify shared characteristics. He points out markers in each work that allow the adult reader to understand it as a children’s story, shedding light on ingrained adult assumptions and revealing the ways in which adult knowledge and experience remain hidden in apparently simple and innocent texts. Nodelman then engages a wide range of views of children's literature from authors, literary critics, cultural theorists, and specialists in education and information sciences. Through this informed dialogue, Nodelman develops a comprehensive theory of children's literature, exploring its commonalities and shared themes. The Hidden Adult is a focused and sophisticated analysis of children’s literature and a major contribution to the theory and criticism of the genre.

Ethics and Children's Literature

Ethics and Children's Literature PDF Author: Claudia Mills
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317141393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Exploring the ethical questions posed by, in, and about children’s literature, this collection examines the way texts intended for children raise questions of value, depict the moral development of their characters, and call into attention shared moral presuppositions. The essays in Part I look at various past attempts at conveying moral messages to children and interrogate their underlying assumptions. What visions of childhood were conveyed by explicit attempts to cultivate specific virtues in children? What unstated cultural assumptions were expressed by growing resistance to didacticism? How should we prepare children to respond to racism in their books and in their society? Part II takes up the ethical orientations of various classic and contemporary texts, including 'prosaic ethics' in the Hundred Acre Wood, moral discernment in Narnia, ethical recognition in the distant worlds traversed by L’Engle, and virtuous transgression in recent Anglo-American children’s literature and in the emerging children’s literature of 1960s Taiwan. Part III’s essays engage in ethical criticism of arguably problematic messages about our relationship to nonhuman animals, about war, and about prejudice. The final section considers how we respond to children’s literature with ethically focused essays exploring a range of ways in which child readers and adult authorities react to children’s literature. Even as children’s literature has evolved in opposition to its origins in didactic Sunday school tracts and moralizing fables, authors, parents, librarians, and scholars remain sensitive to the values conveyed to children through the texts they choose to share with them.

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature PDF Author: David Rudd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134028245
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature is a vibrant and authoritative exploration of children’s literature in all its manifestations. It features a series of essays written by expert contributors who provide an illuminating examination of why children’s literature is the way it is. Topics covered include: the history and development of children's literature various theoretical approaches used to explore the texts, including narratological methods questions of gender and sexuality along with issues of race and ethnicity realism and fantasy as two prevailing modes of story-telling picture books, comics and graphic novels as well as ‘young adult’ fiction and the ‘crossover’ novel media adaptations and neglected areas of children’s literature. The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature contains suggestions for further reading throughout plus a helpful timeline and a substantial glossary of key terms and names, both established and more cutting-edge. This is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to an increasingly complex and popular discipline.

Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the 'Twilight' Series

Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the 'Twilight' Series PDF Author: Anne Morey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317129342
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Much of the criticism on Stephenie Meyer's immensely popular 'Twilight' novels has underrated or even disparaged the books while belittling the questionable taste of an audience that many believe is being inculcated with anti-feminist values. Avoiding a repetition of such reductive critiques of the series's purported shortcomings with respect to literary merit and political correctness, this volume adopts a cultural studies framework to explore the range of scholarly concerns awakened by the 'Twilight novels and their filmic adaptations. Contributors examine 'Twilight's debts to its predecessors in young adult, vampire, and romance literature; the problems of cinematic adaptation; issues in fan and critical reception in the United States and Korea; and the relationship between the series and contemporary conceptualizations of feminism, particularly girl culture. Placing the series within a broad tradition of literary history, reception studies, and filmic adaptation, the collection offers scholars the opportunity to engage with the books' importance for studies of popular culture, gender, and young adult literature.

Shattering the Looking Glass

Shattering the Looking Glass PDF Author: Susan S. Lehr
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
"Shattering the Looking Glass is a thorough, comprehensive volume that defines, analyzes, defends, and often critiques the current state of Children's Literature within American Culture. The book is designed to tackle the major concerns revolving around Children's Literature today, including: the influence of politics and political agendas on the market, quality, and themes; the disagreements over the integration of diversity and diverse ideas into books for children; theoretical and academic discourses that are feeding topics, characters, and narrative structures; and, threaded throughout all of these topics, is a discussion of how these texts can be integrated into the classroom. This book is ideal for the in-service professional who wants insights into the current cultural mindset concerning children's literature, as well as professors who integrate theory and culture into undergraduate and graduate education courses."--pub. desc.

Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers

Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers PDF Author: Maria Nikolajeva
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135238235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

Victorian Children’s Literature

Victorian Children’s Literature PDF Author: Ruth Y. Jenkins
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319327623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book reveals how the period’s transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, and national energies offers rich opportunities in which to analyze the relationship between identity and transformation. At the heart of this study is this question: what is the relationship between Victorian children’s literature, its readers, and their psychic development? Ruth Y. Jenkins uses Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to uncover the presence of cultural anxieties and social tensions in works by Kingsley, MacDonald, Carroll, Stevenson, Burnett, Ballantyne, Nesbit, Tucker, Sewell, and Rossetti.

Child Pain, Migraine, and Invisible Disability

Child Pain, Migraine, and Invisible Disability PDF Author: Susan Honeyman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315460912
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
In the twenty-first century there is increasing global recognition of pain relief as a basic human right. However, as Susan Honeyman argues in this new take on child pain and invisible disability, such a belief has historically been driven by adult, ideological needs, whereas the needs of children in pain have traditionally been marginalised or overlooked in comparison. Examining migraines in children and the socially disabling effects that chronic pain can have, this book uses medical, political and cultural discourse to convey a sense of invisible disability in children with migraine and its subsequent oppression within educational and medical policy. The book is supported by authentic migraineurs’ experiences and first-hand interviews as well as testimonials from a range of historical, literary, and medical sources never combined in a child-centred context before. Representations of child pain and lifespan migraine within literature, art and popular culture are also pulled together in order to provide an interdisciplinary guide to those wanting to understand migraine in children and the identity politics of disability more fully. Child Pain, Migraine, and Invisible Disability will appeal to scholars in childhood studies, children’s rights, literary and visual culture, disability studies and medical humanities. It will also be of interest to anyone who has suffered from migraines or has cared for children affected by chronic pain.

The Fire Within

The Fire Within PDF Author: Elena Borelli
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443859400
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Desire for love, desire for knowledge, desire to possess, desire to desire and to be desired: our life is shaped by what we want and by our efforts to achieve it. Hailed by philosophers and psychoanalysts as the core of human identity, desire informs not only our actions, but also our dreams and hopes and their sublimation into art and literature. This collection of essays explores how desire is portrayed in modern and contemporary Italian literature, by analysing some of the most interesting literary figures of the last two centuries. The authors of this collection approach desire from various perspectives – psychoanalytical, sociological, political and semiotic – in order to show that desire, albeit at times not explicitly mentioned, pervades the literary works of modern and contemporary Italy, either as a central theme or as the secret motor of the narrative. Through the fil rouge of desire, the essays of this collection highlight the international dimension of Italian literature, establishing a connection between Italian authors and the major theoretical works of the last two centuries. As the notion of desire, as represented in literary texts, is informed by psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts that operate across the boundaries of nationality and language, modernists and scholars of Comparative Literature will find the papers in this book of considerable interest.