Children’s Literature and Childhood Discourses

Children’s Literature and Childhood Discourses
Author: Anna Cermakova
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2024-04-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1350176990

Children's literature shapes what children learn about the world. It reflects social values, norms, and stereotypes. This book offers fresh insights into some of the key issues in fiction for children, from the representation of gender to embodied cognition and the translation of children's literature. Connecting classic children's texts such as Alice in Wonderland with contemporary fiction including Murder Most Unladylike, the book innovatively brings together perspectives from corpus linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and human geography. It explores approaches to experiencing fiction, as well as methods for the study of literary texts. Childhood discourses are investigated through the materiality of texts, the spaces that literature takes up in libraries, the cultural history of fiction moulded through performances, as well as reading environments that shape childhood experiences, such as fashion and urban spaces. Children's Literature and Childhood Discourses emphasizes the crucial link between fictional stories and real life.

The Nation in Children's Literature

The Nation in Children's Literature
Author: Kit Kelen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2013-02-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136248943

This book explores the meaning of nation or nationalism in children’s literature and how it constructs and represents different national experiences. The contributors discuss diverse aspects of children’s literature and film from interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches, ranging from the short story and novel to science fiction and fantasy from a range of locations including Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Norway, America, Italy, Great Britain, Iceland, Africa, Japan, South Korea, India, Sweden and Greece. The emergence of modern nation-states can be seen as coinciding with the historical rise of children’s literature, while stateless or diasporic nations have frequently formulated their national consciousness and experience through children’s literature, both instructing children as future citizens and highlighting how ideas of childhood inform the discourses of nation and citizenship. Because nation and childhood are so intimately connected, it is crucial for critics and scholars to shed light on how children’s literatures have constructed and represented historically different national experiences. At the same time, given the massive political and demographic changes in the world since the nineteenth century and the formation of nation states, it is also crucial to evaluate how the national has been challenged by changing national languages through globalization, international commerce, and the rise of English. This book discusses how the idea of childhood pervades the rhetoric of nation and citizenship, and how children and childhood are represented across the globe through literature and film.

Narrative, Literacy and Other Skills

Narrative, Literacy and Other Skills
Author: Edy Veneziano
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2019-05-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027262918

In recent years, narrative skills have been receiving increasing attention from researchers for their relevance in the development of language, literacy and socio-cognitive abilities. This volume brings together studies focusing on two key issues in the development of children’s narrative skills. The first part of the Volume addresses the issue of the interrelatedness between narrative skills and literacy, language and socio-cognitive development, as well as of the impact of narrative practices on the promotion of these different skills. The second part of the Volume addresses the issue of how early interactional experiences, particular contextual settings and specific intervention procedures, can help children promote their narrative skills. The studies span a wide age range, from toddlers to late elementary school children, concern different languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew and Italian), and consider narrative skills and practices from a rich variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.

Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children's Literature

Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children's Literature
Author: Blanka Grzegorczyk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2014-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317962613

This book considers how contemporary British children’s books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public. A central assumption of this volume is that Britain’s imperial past continues to play a key role in its representations of race, identity, and history. The insistent inclusion of questions relating to colonialism and power structures in recent children’s novels exposes the complexities and contradictions surrounding the fictional treatment of race relations and ethnicity. Postcolonial children’s literature in Britain has been inherently ambivalent since its cautious beginnings: it is both transgressive and authorizing, both undercutting and excluding. Grzegorczyk considers the ways in which children’s fictions have worked with and against particular ideologies of race. The texts analyzed in this collection portray ethnic minorities as complex, hybrid products of colonialism, global migrations, and the ideology of multiculturalism. By examining the ideological content of these novels, Grzegorczyk demonstrates the centrality of the colonial past to contemporary British writing for the young.

Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures

Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures
Author: Liza Tsaliki
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030464369

This book revolves around neoliberal notions governing children and youth – a trend that permeates and dominates contemporary perceptions of "the young." In fact, given how the disciplinary power of neoliberalism swiftly becomes a common conceptual currency across national and cultural borders, discussing the way in which neoliberal self-governance permeates the cultures of childhood and youth is even more pertinent. This is followed by research on media discourses of children and their cultural practices in Norway, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Serbia, Greece, and the US.

Childhood, Literature and Science

Childhood, Literature and Science
Author: Jutta Ahlbeck
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351983016

How do we understand, imagine and remember childhood? In what ways do cultural representations and scientific discourses meet in their ways of portraying children? Childhood, Literature and Science aims to answer these questions by tracing how images of childhood(s) and children in Western modernity are entangled with notions of innocence and fragility, but also with sin and evilness. Indeed, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how different child figures emerge or disappear in imaginative and social representations, in the memories of adult selves, and in expert knowledge. Questions about childhood in Western modernity, culture and science are also addressed through insightful analysis of a variety of materials from the Enlightenment age to the present day – such as fiction, life narratives, visual images, scientific texts and public writings. Analysing childhood as a discursive construction, Childhood, Literature and Science will appeal to scholars as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Childhood Studies, History, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Sociology of the Family.

Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age

Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age
Author: Bernard Wilson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2020-03-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9811526311

This volume provides a key analysis of Asian children’s literature and film and creates a dialogue between East and West and between the cultures from which they emerge, within the complex symbiosis of their local, national and transnational frameworks. In terms of location and content the book embraces a broad scope, including contributions related to the Asian-American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Individually and collectively, these essays broach crucial questions: What elements of Asian literature and film make them distinctive, both within their own specific culture and within the broader Asian area? What aspects link them to these genres in other parts of the world? How have they represented and shaped the societies and cultures they inhabit? What moral codes do they address, underpin, or contest? The volume provides further voice to the increasingly diverse and fascinating output of the region and emphasises the importance of Asian art forms as depictions of specific cultures but also of their connection to broader themes in children’s texts, and scholarship within this field.

Figuring Korean Futures

Figuring Korean Futures
Author: Dafna Zur
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1503603113

This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. Starting in the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak directly to a child-reader. This child audience was perceived as unique because of a new concept: the child-heart, the perception that the child's body and mind were transparent and knowable, and that they rested on the threshold of culture. This privileged location enabled writers and illustrators, educators and psychologists, intellectual elite and laypersons to envision the child as a powerful antidote to the present and as an uplifting metaphor of colonial Korea's future. Reading children's periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, Dafna Zur argues that the figure of the child was particularly favorable to the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as to the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization. She demonstrates the ways in which Korean children's literature builds on a trajectory that begins with the child as an organic part of nature, and ends, in the post-colonial era, with the child as the primary agent of control of nature. Figuring Korean Futures reveals the complex ways in which the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.

Discourses of Home and Homeland in Irish Children’s Fiction 1990-2012

Discourses of Home and Homeland in Irish Children’s Fiction 1990-2012
Author: Ciara Ní Bhroin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2021-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030733955

In the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children’s fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and of unprecedented growth in Irish children’s literature. Close readings of selected texts by five award-winning authors are linked to social, intellectual and political changes in the period covered and draw on postcolonial, feminist, cultural and children’s literature theory, highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of home and the value of children’s literature as a lens through which to view culture and society as well as an imaginative space where young people can engage with complex ideas relevant to their lives and the world in which they live. Examining the works of O. R. Melling, Kate Thompson, Eoin Colfer, Siobhán Parkinson and Siobhan Dowd, Ciara Ní Bhroin argues that Irish children’s literature changed at this time from being a vehicle that largely promoted hegemonic ideologies of home in post-independence Ireland to a site of resistance to complacent notions of home in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Children’s Literature

Children’s Literature
Author: K. Lesnik-Oberstein
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2004-08-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230523773

Children's Literature: New Approaches is a guide for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students of children's literature. It is structured through critics reading individual texts to bring out wider issues that are current in the field. Includes chronology of key events and publications, a selective guide to further reading and a list of Web-based resources.