The Nation In Children S Literature

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.

The single largest category of Beowulf representation and adaptation, outside of direct translation of the poem, is children’s literature. Over the past century and a half, more than 150 new versions of Beowulf directed to child and teen audiences have appeared, in English and in many other languages. In this collection of original essays, Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize examine the history and processes of remaking Beowulf for young readers. Inventive in their manipulations of story, tone, and genre, these adaptations require their authors to make countless decisions about what to include, exclude, emphasize, de-emphasize, and adjust. This volume considers the many forms of children’s literature, focusing primarily on picture books, illustrated storybooks, and youth novels, but taking account also of curricular aids, illustrated full translations of the poem, and songs. Contributors address issues of gender, historical context, war and violence, techniques of narration, education, and nationalism, investigating both the historical and theoretical dimensions of bringing Beowulf to child audiences.

Children's Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation is the story of the development of English children's literature, focusing on how stories inspire children to adhere to the values of society. Such English authors as Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling have entertained, inspired, confronted social wrongs, and transmitted cultural values--functions previously associated with folklore. Their stories form a new folklore tradition that grounds personal identity, provides social glue, and supports a love of England and English values. This book examines how this tradition came to fruition.

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.

Children’s books seek to assist children to understand themselves and their world. Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature demonstrates how settler-society texts position child readers as citizens of postcolonial nations, how they represent the colonial past to modern readers, what they propose about race relations, and how they conceptualize systems of power and government. Clare Bradford focuses on texts produced since 1980 in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand and includes picture books, novels, and films by Indigenous and non-Indigenous publishers and producers. From extensive readings, the author focuses on key works to produce a thorough analysis rather than a survey. Unsettling Narratives opens up an area of scholarship and discussion—the use of postcolonial theories—relatively new to the field of children’s literature and demonstrates that many texts recycle the colonial discourses naturalized within mainstream cultures.

A lively and illustrated inquiry of how children's literature reflects the curious mind of a child—now available in paperback. Outstanding Academic Title for 2007, Choice Magazine In this engaging book, Jerry Griswold examines the unique qualities of childhood experience and their reappearance as frequent themes in children's literature. Surveying dozens of classic and popular works for the young—from Heidi and The Wizard of Oz to Beatrix Potter and Harry Potter—Griswold demonstrates how great children's writers succeed because of their uncanny ability to remember what it feels like to be a kid: playing under tables, shivering in bed on a scary night, arranging miniature worlds with toys, zooming around as caped superheroes, and listening to dolls talk. Feeling Like a Kid boldly and honestly identifies the ways in which the young think and see the world in a manner different from that of adults. Written by a leading scholar, prize-winning author, and frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, this extensively illustrated book will fascinate general readers as well as all those who study childhood and children's literature.

The Nation and the Child – Nation Building in Hebrew Children’s Literature, 1930–1970 is the first comprehensive study to investigate the active role of children’s literature in the intensive cultural project of building a Hebrew nation. Which social actors and institutions participated in creating a Hebrew children’s literature? How did they envision their young readership and what new cultural roles did they prescribe for them through literary texts? How tolerant was the children’s literary field to alternative or even subversive national options and how did the perceptions of the “national child” change in the transition from the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine to a sovereign state? This book seeks to provide answers to such questions by focusing on the literary activities of leading taste-setters and writers for children, from the most intense period of Israeli nation building – the 1930s and 1940s, the two last decades of the pre-state era, and the 1950s, the first decade following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 – through the 1960s, when the nation-building fervor gradually waned.

Focusing on questions of space and locale in children’s literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. The collection is comprised of four sections that take up the space between children and adults, the representation of 'real world' places, fantasy travel and locales, and the physical space of the children’s book-as-object. In their essays, the contributors analyze works from a range of sources and traditions by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Maria Edgeworth, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jenny Robson, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Knox, and Claude Ponti. While maintaining a focus on how location and spatiality aid in defining the child’s relationship to the world, the essays also address themes of borders, displacement, diaspora, exile, fantasy, gender, history, home-leaving and homecoming, hybridity, mapping, and metatextuality. With an epilogue by Philip Pullman in which he discusses his own relationship to image and locale, this collection is also a valuable resource for understanding the work of this celebrated author of children’s literature.