Poetics of Children's Literature

Poetics of Children's Literature
Author: Zohar Shavit
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2009-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0820334812

Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children's literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work. Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children's literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre's canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children's literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.

The Poetics of Childhood

The Poetics of Childhood
Author: Roni Natov
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 113572170X

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Irish Children’s Literature and the Poetics of Memory

Irish Children’s Literature and the Poetics of Memory
Author: Rebecca Long
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350167266

Focusing on the mythological narratives that influence Irish children's literature, this book examines the connections between landscape, time and identity, positing that myth and the language of myth offer authors and readers the opportunity to engage with Ireland's culture and heritage. It explores the recurring patterns of Irish mythological narratives that influence literature produced for children in Ireland between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. A selection of children's books published between 1892, when there was an escalation of the cultural pursuit of Irish independence and 2016, which marked the centenary of the Easter 1916 rebellion against English rule, are discussed with the aim of demonstrating the development of a pattern of retrieving, re-telling, remembering and re-imagining myths in Irish children's literature. In doing so, it examines the reciprocity that exists between imagination, memory, and childhood experiences in this body of work.

Children's Literature

Children's Literature
Author: Barbara Stoodt
Publisher: Macmillan Education AU
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1996
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780732940126

The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature

The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature
Author: Bernice E. Cullinan
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 930
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780826417787

Provides articles covering children's literature from around the world as well as biographical and critical reviews of authors including Avi, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Anno Mitsumasa.

From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children's Poetry

From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children's Poetry
Author: Debbie Pullinger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2017-05-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474222331

The connection between childhood and poetry runs deep. And yet, poetry written for children has been neglected by criticism and resists prevailing theories of children's literature. Drawing on Walter Ong's theory of orality and on Iain McGilChrist's work on brain function, this book develops a new theoretical framework for the study of children's poetry. From Tongue to Text argues that the poem is a multimodal form that exists in the borderlands between the world of experience and the world of language and between orality and literacy – places that children themselves inhabit. Engaging with a wide range of poetry from nursery rhymes and Christina Rossetti to Michael Rosen and Carol Ann Duffy, Debbie Pullinger demonstrates how these 'tactful' works are shaped by the dynamics of orality and textuality.

The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry

The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry
Author: Katherine Wakely-Mulroney
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317045548

This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children’s poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children’s poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises – and why we delight in – its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children’s poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of “like sounds,” William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children’s poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

Children's Literature

Children's Literature
Author: Elizabeth Lennox Keyser
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300094892

Annual of The Modern Language Association Division on Children’s Literature and The Children’s Literature Association ARTICLES: Perry Nodelman Speculations on the Characteristics of Children’s Fiction; Roderick McGillis The Pleasure of the Process; Thomas Travisano Of Dialectic and Divided Consciousness; Margaret R. Higonnet A Pride of Pleasures; Perry Nodelman The Urge to Sameness; Kenneth Kidd Boyology in the Twentieth Century; Marilynn Olson Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque; Peter Hollindale Plain Speaking; Hamida Bosmajian Doris Orgel’s The Devil in Vienna; Joseph Stanton Maurice Sendak’s Urban Landscapes. VARIA: Andrea Immel James Pettit Andrews’s "Books" (1790); Penny Mahon "Things by Their Right Name"; Phyllis Bixler The Lion and the Lamb. IN MEMORIAM: R. H. W. Dillard In Memoriam: Francelia Butler, 1913–1998; John Cech In Mansfield Hollow: For Francelia; Eric Dawson Francelia’s Dream. REVIEWS: Anita Tarr "Still so much work to be done"; Gillian Adams A Fuzzy Genre; Kenneth Kidd Crosswriting the School Story; Raymond E. Jones A New Salvo in the Literary Battle of the Sexes; Stephen Canham From Wonderland to the Marketplace; Jan Susina Dealing with Victorian Fairies; Gregory Eiselein Reading a Feminist Romance; Anne K. Phillips The Wizard of Oz in the Twentieth Century; June Cummins "Where the Girls Are"—and Aren’t; Deborah Stevenson Letters from the Editor; Hamida Bosmajian Dangerous Images; Roberta Seelinger Trites The Transactional School of Children’s Literature Criticism. DISSERTATIONS OF NOTE: Mary Mayfield and Rachel Fordyce

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Author: Roland Greene
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 1678
Release: 2012-08-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691154910

Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.