Crossing Boundaries With Children S Books

This annotated bibliography-organized geographically by world region and country, describing nearly 700 books representing 73 countries-is a valuable resource for librarians, teachers, and anyone else seeking to promote international understanding through children's literature. It is the third volume sponsored by the United States Board on Books for Young People. The first, Carl M. Tomlinson's Children's Books from Other Countries (1998) is a compendium of international children's literature with annotations of both in and out of print books published between 1950 and 1996. Susan Stan's The World Through Children's Books (2002) was the second and it included books published between the years 1997 and 2000. Crossing Boundaries includes international children's books published between 2000 and 2004, as well as selected American books set in countries other than the United States. Editor Doris Gebel has compiled an important tool for providing stories that will help children understand our differences while simultaneously demonstrating our common humanity.

“As the first part of the title indicates, my interest in looking at intertextuality and transformation still maintains a prominent place throughout this book as well. If we believe that ‘no text is an island,’ then we will understand that the relationships between and within texts across the years become a fascinating place for academic inquiry. I included the word ‘boundaries’ into the title because we never get tired of voicing our opinions about texts which traverse relegated boundaries, such as genre or medium. Not only am I interested in discussing what these changes across boundaries mean socially, historically, and culturally, but also what they mean geographically, which accounts for the second part of my title. “I am very excited that this book will be placing even more emphasis on children’s literature in an international scene than my first book did, in the sense that I have added more scholars on an international level. I hesitate to list the nationalities of all of the contributors here because quite a few have themselves crossed international boundaries in different ways, by either studying abroad or finding permanent residency in foreign countries. Nevertheless, the writers have lived extensively in or identify as being from Australia, Canada, England, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United States of America, and Wales.” —Introduction

Rulers of Literary Playgrounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children’s Literature offers multifaceted reflection on interdependences between children and adults as they engage in play in literary texts and in real life. This volume brings together international children’s literature scholars who each look at children’s texts as key vehicles of intergenerational play reflecting ideologies of childhood and as objects with which children and adults interact physically, emotionally, and cognitively. Each chapter applies a distinct theoretical approach to selected children’s texts, including individual and social play, constructive play, or play deprivation. This collection of essays constitutes a timely voice in the current discussion about the importance of children’s play and adults’ contribution to it vis-à-vis the increasing limitations of opportunities for children’s playful time in contemporary societies.

This book brings in the focus on the borders between different contexts that need to be crossed, in the process of education. Despite the considerable efforts of various groups of researchers all over the World, it does not seem that traditional educational psychology has succeeded in illuminating the complex issues involved in the schoolfamily relationship. From a methodological perspective, there is no satisfactory explanation of the connection between representations and actual practice in educational contexts. Crossing Boundaries is an invitation to cultural psychology of educational processes to overcome the limits of existing educational psychology. Eemphasizing social locomotion and the dynamic processes, the book try to capture the ambiguous richness of the transit from one context to another, of the symbolic perspective that accompanies the dialogue between family and school, of practices regulating the interstitial space between these different social systems. How family and school fill, occupy, circulate, avoid or strategically use this space in between? What discourses and practices saturate this Border Zone and/or cross from one side to the other? Crossing Boundaries gathers contributions with the clear aim of documenting and analysing what happens at points of contact between family culture and scholastic/educational culture from the perspective of everyday life. This book is in itself an attempt to cross the border between the "theorizing on the borders" (and how “the outside world” and “the others” are perceived from a certain point of view) and “the practices" that characterize the school-home interaction.

How can children grow to realize their inherent human rights and respect the rights of others? This book explores this question through children's literature from 'Peter Rabbit' to 'Horton Hears a Who!' to Harry Potter. The authors investigate children's rights under international law - identity and family rights, the right to be heard, the right to be free from discrimination, and other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights - and consider the way in which those rights are embedded in children's literature.

Although the idea that graphic narratives represent an important literary form is still debated in academic circles, in recent years comics scholarship has emerged into wider contexts. This collection of new essays considers various literary approaches to graphic narrative and sequential art. The authors examine the politics of comic form and narrative, the ways in which graphic narrative and sequential art “cross over” into other forms and genres, and how these articulations challenge the ways we read and interpret texts. By bringing literary theory to bear on graphic narrative and balancing readings of individual texts with larger ideas about comics scholarship as a whole, this work expands our understanding of the form itself and its engagement with political culture.

This book offers a historical analysis of key classical translated works for children, such as writings by Hans Christian Andersen and Grimms’ tales. Translations dominate the earliest history of texts written for children in English, and stories translated from other languages have continued to shape its course to the present day. Lathey traces the role of the translator and the impact of translations on the history of English-language children’s literature from the ninth century onwards. Discussions of popular texts in each era reveal fluctuations in the reception of translated children’s texts, as well as instances of cultural mediation by translators and editors. Abridgement, adaptation, and alteration by translators have often been viewed in a negative light, yet a closer examination of historical translators’ prefaces reveals a far more varied picture than that of faceless conduits or wilful censors. From William Caxton’s dedication of his translated History of Jason to young Prince Edward in 1477 (‘to thentent/he may begynne to lerne read Englissh’), to Edgar Taylor’s justification of the first translation into English of Grimms’ tales as a means of promoting children’s imaginations in an age of reason, translators have recorded in prefaces and other writings their didactic, religious, aesthetic, financial, and even political purposes for translating children’s texts.

This book explores consent and respect with children especially in relation to body boundaries, both theirs and others. A child growing up knowing they have a right to their own personal space, gives that child ownership and choices as to what happens to them. These concepts are presented in a child-friendly and easily-understood manner.