Crosscurrents Of Children S Literature

This volume combines a wide variety of primary texts with critical readings, examines the texts within the context of critical debates, explores the ways in which children's literature combines instruction and entertainment, oral and written traditions, words and pictures, fantasy and realism, classics and adaptations, and perspectives on childhood and adult life. It spans a wide range of literary periods, genres, and cultural traditions, and examines how these overlapping forms and genres, diverse influences, and evolving values and attitudes towards children and childhood have shaped the body of literature written for young adults and children.

The Mythology of the Animal Farm in Children’s Literature: Over the Fence analyzes the ways in which myths about farmed animals’ lives are perpetuated in children’s materials. Specifically, this book investigates the use of five recurring thematic devices in about eighty books for young children published during the past five decades. The close readings of texts and images draw on a wide range of fields, including animal theory, psychoanalytic and Marxian literary criticism, child development theory, histories of farming and domestication, and postcolonial theory. In spite of the underlying seriousness of the project, the material lends itself to humorous and not overly heavy-handed explications that provide insight into the complex workings of a literary genre based on the covering up of real animal lives.

Historical Ditionary of Children's Literature, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about children's literature.

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.

This practitioner-oriented introduction to literature for children ages 5–12 covers the latest trends, titles, and tools for choosing the best books and materials as well as for planning fun and effective programs and activities. The third edition of Children's Literature in Action provides an activity-oriented survey of children's literature for undergraduate and graduate students seeking licensure and degrees that will lead to careers working with children in schools and public libraries. Author Sylvia M. Vardell draws on her 30 years of university teaching and extensive familiarity with the major textbooks in the area of children's literature to deliver something different: a book that focuses specifically on the perspective and needs of the librarian, with emphasis on practical action and library applications. Its contents address seven major genres: picture books, traditional tales, poetry, contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and informational books. Each chapter includes practical applications for the educator who shares books with children and who develops literature-based instruction. Chapters are enriched by author comments, collaborative activities, featured books, special topics, and activities including selected awards and celebrations, historical connections, recommended resources, issues for discussion, and assignment suggestions. This new edition incorporates the 2018 AASL National School Library Standards.

The book presents aspects of cross-currents of theorizing of self, culture and society in the contemporary Taiwan. Social theorizing has been addressed critically, reflectively and creatively by the philosophical, religious, psychological and literary traditions of one of the world’s great civilizations Theorizing is a dynamic movement of self, culture, society and the world as it is related to our actions, reflections, meditations to understand the world more meaningfully and holistically as well as to transform it. But much of social theorizing in the modern world is primarily Euro-American and despite the socalled globalization of knowledge, this condition of one-sided Euro-American valorization of knowledge and neglect of others continues unabated. There is very little attention to theorizing about the human condition emerging from other parts of the world such as Taiwan and its global implication. This book transforms this condition by mapping the field of theorizing in a wider spectrum of philosophy, psychology, religions, social sciences and humanities in contemporary Taiwan.

Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. Children’s Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter. The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. Children’s Literature is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word. “Lerer has accomplished something magical. Unlike the many handbooks to children’s literature that synopsize, evaluate, or otherwise guide adults in the selection of materials for children, this work presents a true critical history of the genre. . . . Scholarly, erudite, and all but exhaustive, it is also entertaining and accessible. Lerer takes his subject seriously without making it dull.”—Library Journal (starred review) “Lerer’s history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years. . . . With his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a child’s imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read.”—San Francisco Chronicle “There are dazzling chapters on John Locke and Empire, and nonsense, and Darwin, but Lerer’s most interesting chapter focuses on girls’ fiction. . . . A brilliant series of readings.”—Diane Purkiss, Times Literary Supplement