Children's Lit Prelim

General-Audience and Crossover Works 2

- Adult-to-children crossovers: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) - inspired an entire genre of optimistic, adventurous castaway novels called "Robinsonade." - Some thought children shouldn't read novels - Sarah Trimmer's posthumous An Essay on Christian Education (1812) asserts that novels should not be read to children; Maria Edgeworth and her father in Practical Education (1798) espouse the view that anything fantastic is not only not worthwhile but could be dangerous in that they enflame children's fears and passions. Instructional Works and Didactic Literature - Textbooks: Some texts written and published before 1744 were specifically for children, but almost all of these were religious or instructional texts or didactic works of fiction and poetry; oldest textbook for children = Aelfric's Colloquy (around the year 1000 or so); also, Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (written for his ten-year-old son around 1391) - Religious Works: lots of Puritan examples; also John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) - Sunday School texts: Sunday School movement began in the mid-18th century, bolstered by the Religious Tract Society (founded in England in 1799) and by the American Tract Society (founded in New York in 1825); Peter Hunt notes the shift in emphasis in religious children's literature around this time from strictly religious or theological instruction to more social education of children, women, and the poor. - The Rational Moralists: those influenced by philosophers like Locke and Rousseau; emphasized moral instruction rather than specifically religious instruction; Maria Edgeworth published several collections of stories for children such as The Parent's Assistant (1796), which includes a story called "The Purple Jar," a moral tale about choosing utility over a pretty thing. - Didactic poetry and Fiction: John Bunyan's A Book for Boys and Girls; or, Country Rhymes for Children (1686); Elaine Ostry in Social Dreaming: Dickens and the Fairy Tale (2002) asserts that all children's literature conveys some kind of morality, even as it may claim to be non-didactic; Isaac Watts's Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715) whose "Against Idleness and Mischief" is parodied by Carroll in Alice.

Science Fiction

- Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Various definitions of science fiction imply that the genre's use of scientific explanation leads to a kind of verisimilitude - or believability - that fantasy does not seek. Utopian and Dystopian

Picture Books, Visual Media, and Digital Texts

- Barbara Bader's American Picture Books: From Noah's Ark to the Beast Within (1976) - draws attention to the many elements in a picture book: text, illustrations, total design, item of manufacture, commercial product, social, cultural, historical document, and foremost an experience for the child. - Visual literacy (Think about picture books in these terms.)

19th century

- Christina Rossetti's Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872; expanded in 1893) - Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Hilaire Belloc - humorous and nonsense poetry of the nineteenth century. Was meant to entertain children and to immerse child readers in the pleasures of playing with words; encouraged wordplay and experimentation with language. - Alliteration and portmanteau words (two words combined to make a new one)

Orphans and Good Girls

- Emerged in the first decades of the 20th century. - Kate Douglas Wiggins's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903); Burnette's A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911); L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908); Eleanor Porter's Pollyanna (1913). - All manage to greater or lesser degrees to convert spinster or widower relatives from cold curmudgeons into loveable caretakers. - The good girl appears to be one corollary of the bad boy. Ex. Beth from Little Women - They echo one model of female adulthood: the angel in the house. A phrase coined by Coventry Patmore in his 1854 poem of that name. - Good girls in literature are so often written as tragic figures.

Detective and Mystery Fiction

- Feature children and young adults as the mystery-solving protagonists. - The appeal of these genres for younger readers may lie in their emphasis on children's toughness and insight. - Exs. Hardy Boys (1927-2005) and Nancy Drew (1930-2003); 39 Clues series (2008-2011) by Rick Riordan and others

Problems with Representing the Past -

- Historical fiction is sometimes controversial. Elements to consider: - Accuracy - Readers unfamiliar with a historical figure or era are unable to object to inaccuracies. What is the author's responsibility there? - Authenticity - Refers to whether or not the fictional additions or imaginings are within the realm of likelihood or possibility for the period. MacLachlan's Sarah, Plain and Tall has been criticized because the whole situation of the novel (Sarah, as a single woman, traveling several hundred miles alone to live unmarried, for a trial period, with a widowed man and his children in response to a newspaper ad for a wife) simply would not have happened in the nineteenth century. - Presentism - The idea that the work depicts an ideology of psychology more characteristic of the present than of the past. Perry Nodelman observes that "history is always about the present." Sometimes authors use historical fiction deliberately to comment on the present (as in Kimberly Holt's When Zachary Beaver Came to Town (1999), which is set during Vietnam but written just after Desert Storm). Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), though set during the witch trials of the 1600s, is a commentary on McCarthyism. - The frequent inclusion of explanatory paratextual materials (afterwards, forwards, epilogues, etc.) in historical fiction confirms the expectation that they will be used as an educational tool. - The epilogue of Curtis's The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 presents a fairly thorough overview of the Black civil rights movement as well as adding information about the specific church bombing depicted near the end of the novel. - The author's note to M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing similarly is a metadiscussion about historical fiction, especially the difficulties of rendering the speech of its 18th-century characters and treating the complex themes of the American Revolution within the confines of the novel.

The Romantic Childhood William Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789) and William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) and "Ode: Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807)

- Influenced by Locke and Rousseau - Developed the Romantic idealization of childhood - The conception of children as somehow purer and more virtuous than adults, closer to nature and God, and beautified by their naiveté.

Differences Among Contemporary Children -

- It's important to remember that children within a given historical period had different experiences, and focusing too much on historical changes and patterns could obscure variations among their experiences. - Anomalies to consider: Child crime, child sex, child soldiers (force us to rethink popular assumptions about children's fragility)

Contemporary Series Fiction

- Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High - Paved the way for later girls' series. Exs. Cecily von Zeigesar's Gossip Girl (2002 - ); Lisi Harrison's The Clique series (2004 - ); Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (I question the inclusion of this one! ?????)

Latino/Latina Children's Literature -

- One of the fastest-growing demographics in the United States. - Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising (2000) - Victor Martinez's Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida (1996) - National Book Award winner - Also, Gary Soto, Pat Mora, and Felipe Herrera

historical fiction

- Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer suggest that the popularity of certain periods is linked to the school social studies curriculum. School curricula also tend to reflect the traditional approach to history that constructs it from political and military conflict. -"Trauma theory" - Another approach to children's historical fiction. Freud observed children's play and their tendency to reenact frightening or unpleasant events. To the extent that history is constituted by trauma, the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories that we call "history," can be understood as attempts to repeat, work through, and master traumatic events. Children are often imagined as both extremely vulnerable and also especially resilient and adaptable. In its repetition of trauma, historical fiction for young readers provides an opportunity for children and young adults to engage with trauma. - Nostalgia and Nationalism - In American culture, the Western frontier persists as a source of nostalgic reflection in pop culture because it is associated with freedom from the restrictions of civilized life. The less glamorous conditions of the frontier life are either overlooked or are used as conditions for adventure.

Artistic Considerations -

- Size of the book - Sometimes smaller picturebooks give an impression of intimacy, and their small size may be a result of an assumption that children are well suited to small things. - Size of the picture on the page - The amount of "white space"; Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy World (1965) is known for cramming images into the margins, setting a mood of hectic activity, while Ian Falconer's Olivia (2000) has several pages on which the titular character is isolated against a white space, making her the undisputed star of the action. - Composition of the objects on the page - Molly Bang's Picture This: How Picture Books Work (2000) - establishes several compositional principles: - Smooth, flat, horizontal shapes give us a sense of stability and calm. - Vertical shapes are more exciting and more active. - Diagonal shapes are dynamic because they imply motion or tension. - The middle of the page is the most effective "center of attention" because it is the point of greatest attraction. - The larger an object is in a picture, the stronger it feels. - The use, amount, and quality of color - Warm colors (reds, oranges, and yellows) add energy; cool colors (blues and greens) are more tranquil. Less saturated colors seems more restful; highly saturated colors add intensity. - The strength of line - A text with a number of fine lines will seem very detailed and intricate, whereas bold lines are more vigorous and may seem less realistic. - The medium used - The actual materials used in the creation of the book. - Mixed media - Used by many books to tell a story. Combine photographs with illustrations, for example. - Setting - Will the background be highly developed or minimal? Some books have to setting but have a solid color or white background. - Text within the Pictures - Adds an extra layer of interpretation or even irony. Maurice Sendak's We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy: Two Nursery Rhymes (1993) feature newspaper clippings which draw the reader's attention to the troubled world in which the book is set and to the great division between rich and poor.

Literary Genres as a Response to Children's Needs -

- The influential head of the New York Public Library from 1918-1941, Anne Carroll Moore, believed that children thrived on stories of the fantastic, in particular fairy tales. - Fantasy is valued for its capacity to stretch children's imaginations and to help them learn to adapt to an unfamiliar world. Realism provides insight into exciting human realities, helping children to reflect on the world they know well, but to see it from a new angle.

Romance

Romance - Daphne Kutzer's "'I Won't Grow Up- Yet': Teen Formula Romance" (1986 in ChLA) - Teen romances are concerned with the beginnings of the romantic search, not with the final triumph. - A recent shift in the genre has featured an increasing diversity of romantic partnerships. Exs. Jacqueline Woodson's If You Come Softly (1998, interracial couple); Nina Revoyr's The Necessary Hunger (1997, two female basketball players); Nick Burd's The Vast Fields of Ordinary (2009, to males and interracial). - Romance novels are often critiqued as formulaic fiction lacking in quality. - Janice Radway's now-classic study Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984) - Examines Romance series (Harlequin Romances) and how women use them actively (book clubs) to hone their critical skills.

Wordless Picture Books -

- Raymond Briggs's The Snowman (1978) and David Wiesner's Tuesday (1991) - imply that images are the central requirement for a picturebook narrative to function. There is no such thing as a picturebook without images. However, many definitions of the picturebook stress the interrelation of both text and image, so wordless picturebooks may not even qualify as picturebooks.

Most common time periods represented in historical fiction:

- The Middle Ages: Marguerite de Angeli's The Door in the Wall (1949); Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice (1995); Avi's Crispin: The Cross of Lead (2002) - The American Revolution: Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain (1943); Christopher and James Lincoln Collier's My Brother Sam is Dead (1974); M. T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (2006) - The American Civil War and Reconstruction: Harold Keith's Rifles for Watie (1957); Irene Hunt's Across Five Aprils (1964); Mildred Taylor's The Land (2001) - The Frontier Experience: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie (1935); Patricia MacLachlan's Sarah, Plain and Tall (1985); Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House (1999) - World War I: Michael Foreman's War Game (1994); Linda Newberry's The Shell House (2002); Michael Morpurgo's Private Peaceful (2003) - The Great Depression: Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976); Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (1997); Christopher Paul Curtis's Bud, Not Buddy (1999); Pan Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising (2002) - The Holocaust: Ian Serriallier's Escape from Warsaw [also pub. As The Silver Sword] (1956); Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic (1988); Louis Lowry's Number the Stars (1989)

Ezra Jacks: Snowy Day

- The Snowy Day makes a useful case for investigating how children's literature addresses race and ethnicity and how an understanding of some of the critical controversies reviewed in this chapter is useful for explicating texts. - Nancy Larrick's 1965 article in the Saturday Review "The All-White World of Children's Books" notes the rarity of African-American characters in children's literature and raises questions about how Keats's background complicates the book's depiction of race. - Peter is an African-American boy, but how do we know this? Only the color of his skin and perhaps his hair, no ethnic markers. Therefore, race is constructed in the book as merely a surface-level, visual trait.

Formula Fiction

- Treasured not because they break the mold but because they fit a predictable pattern. - Exs. Sweet Valley High series (1983-2003); also the Babysitter's Club series

The Working Child

- Children are necessary and useful contributors to the household, practical additions to families, and sources of labor. - Fully capable of supporting themselves and acting independently of adults Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) - Enormously influential exposé about the "army of homeless boys" living and working on the streets in New York City in the 1880s. - Examples: Horatio Alger's "Ragged Dick" (1868); Walter Dean Myer's historical novel The Glory Field (1994)

Diverse Girlhoods

- Girls' books portray a variety of girls - tomboys, good girls, bratty girls, etc. - Villains = overly vain girls; spitefully jealous girls. - To be a good girl is to suffer endless trials gracefully and without complaint, and becoming a young woman typically involves taming some of the effusiveness and imagination of girlhood in order to serve others with a more moderate temperament.

The Unconventional Boy

- Laurie in Little Women; Cedric Errol in Burnette's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and Colin in The Secret Garden (1911) - Suffers from hysteria, a mental illness historically associated with girls and women; Arthur in Tom Brown's Schooldays is shy and saintly - He an Colin are both transformed into more conventional boys over the course of their novels. - Modern version - Jesse from Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia (1977) - Newberry winner; befriends a tomboyish new neighbor Leslie.

Boys and Boyhood in Children's Literature -

The Boys' School - The boys' school story was one of the first genres developed specifically to entertain boy readers. - Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) set the pattern; Harry Potter is the modern-day realization of the genre. - Allows boys to enact traditional forms of boyhood while practicing many of the hallmarks of adult men's culture. Boys' Adventure Fiction - Themes of empire and imperialism are often central to adventure fiction, but not all boys' adventure stories so explicitly invoke empire. Ex. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island - Jim gains experience and capital and is ready to take his place as a young man. - Gary Paulsen's Hatchet (1987) - Focuses on survival The Bad-Boy Book - Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy (1869) and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) - Both about boys named Tom who can't stay out of trouble. - Twain captures a conception of boyhood that is distinct from manhood and is even honored as such. - Modern version = Christopher from Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) - Has Asperger's Syndrome and is falsely accused of killing his neighbor's dog. Gone is the old "Boys will be boys" adage from Twain.

Questions of Definition - children's literature

Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) - The term literature was not only limited to creative or imaginative writings but also included philosophy, essays, history, and letters - the whole body of valued writing in a society. - What about children's literature? How is it defined? Is it defined by what they read or by what is written for them?

Realism

- - Those stories which could actually happen, those containing no element of magic. Grounded in the Greek term "mimesis," which refers to imitation or representation of the physical world. - Literary realism as a movement is associated with 19th-century French writers like Honore de Balzac, who were committed to portraying "life as it actually was." - Naturalism - Extended literary realism by depicting characters as products of their environments. - New Realism - Encompasses books that deal with taboo topics like drugs, birth, sexual abuse, puberty, etc.; new realism in young adult lit arose partly as a response to the social upheaval and change of the 1960s and 70s, as adolescent readers in particular sought fiction that spoke to their immediate experiences. - Examples: Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1964); Robert Lipsyte's The Contender (1967); S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967); Paul Zindel's The Pigman (1968); Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War (1974)

Chapter 9: Fantasy, Realism, and Genre Fiction

- A good, functional definition of the fantastic from Lucy Armitt's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (2005): "Fantasy sets of worlds that genuinely exist beyond the horizon, as opposed to those parts of our own world that are located beyond that line of sight but to which we might travel, given sufficient means." Attributes of fantasy: - Elements of the magical or supernatural - An imaginary world unlike the world we know - A distant setting, both in place and time (???) - Events and experiences that could not take place in the known world, defying known laws of physics and science. Attributes of realism: - A world we already know; sometimes quite a faithful rendition of environments familiar to children and young adults - An emphasis on verisimilitude, which means that events in the novel could happen - Avoidance of the magical and supernatural

20th century

- A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927) - in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson; evokes a sense of childhood innocence and playfulness. - Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) - exuberant delight in creating words; encourages readers to be creative. - John Ciardi's The Reason for the Pelican (1959), The Man Who Sang the Sillies (1961), and You Read to Me, I'll Read to You (1962) - combines whimsy with realistic depictions of children's pleasures and frustrations. - 1965 - John Rowe Townsend coined the term "urchin poetry" - streetwise poetry which makes an attempt to speak to children without idealizing them and without assuming that the world they live in is perfect. Examples: Roald Dahl and Shel Silverstein - Jack Prelutsky (the first children's poet laureate of the United States) - hair to Dahl and Silverstein; My Dog May Be a Genius (2008) - Contemporary poetry for children does not shy away from exploring the tensions children might feel at home or school and probes the fault lines between self and other. The contemporary poem also provides a sharp contrast with the didacticism of the earlier poetry for children such as the poems of Isaac Watts, in which Industry and hard work are praised to the exclusion of anything else.

Power Relations and Superheroics -

- Adventure fiction is defined in part by an interest in power, and the protagonist of an adventure is usually empowered by special knowledge or skills. - Cawelti - Two types of adventure heroes: a superhero with exceptional strength or ability and "one of us." Both represent the fantasy of transcending one's limitations and either being or becoming extraordinary and powerful. - Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1914) - quintessential adventure story. Stories like it are called Wild Child stories. He is a superhero type of hero (unaffected by elements, can carry massive animals on his shoulders, learns English from books with no context whatsoever, etc.)

Colonialism and Imperialism -

- Adventure fiction set in exotic locales are associated with nation and empire and have political implications, especially when contrasted with the double meaning of the word "domestic." - Given their generic conventions and ideological investments, many novels of adventure are concerned with colonialism, imperialism, and international politics. - Because adventure fiction is premised on travel away from home, it requires a space in which to enact adventure. - Exploration has typically been associated with commercial interests and tainted by greed or economic urgency, often at the expense of native, non-white populations. - Children and children's culture are subject to the same discourses as adults and adult culture, and they are marked by the same motives and investments, even if the details and modes of representation differ somewhat. - Ex. Jean de Brunhoff's picturebook The Story of Babar (1931) - Controversial for its depiction of an African elephant who is adopted by a rich, old, white lady and domesticated/civilized.

General-Audience and Crossover Works

- Aesop's Fables: 6th century BCE; came to be associated with children but were not intended only for children nor read only by children; first English translation published by William Caxton in 1484; recommended by John Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). - Chapbooks: become popular in the 16th and 17th centuries; small, illustrated stories which were cheap and disposable. - Folk and Fairy Tales: Ruth Bottigheimer makes a distinction between folk and fairy tales (Folk = passed down and modified through generations, ordinary protagonists; unhappy endings; not specifically for children. Fairy = often include magical elements and happier endings; some came from original compositions); first fairy tales were published by Giambattista Basile in 16th and 17th century Italy; term "fairy tale" coined by Countess d'Aulnoy in Paris in the late 1600s'early 1700s; Charles Perrault's Les contes de fées in 1697 (Zipes emphasizes that Perrault's tales were not for children); Grimms' first edition in 1812; Andrew Lang The Blue Fairy Book in 1889.

Boys and Popular Literature

- Annette Wannamaker's Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child (2009) - Suggests that more popular forms of fiction tend to represent and reinforce conventional or dominant constructions of gender and race; more "literary" texts are more likely to complicate or critique them. Ex. Dav Pilkey's The Adventures of Captain Underpants (1997); Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series (2007- )

The Child as Radically Other -

- Are children fundamentally different from adults or are they miniature, incomplete versions? - Is the line between childhood and adulthood a defined rupture or cutoff, or does one period gradually shade into the other? - Is a peewee football player previewing an adult sport, or are adult footballer's reenacting a childhood sport? - The child at play represents an experience or imaginative feat unique to childhood and lost to adults. - Examples: Bill Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes (1985-1995); J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904)

Key Terms and Controversies - 6

- Artistic Freedom and Ethical Responsibility: What responsibility do authors have to represent other races accurately? Should it be their artistic right to include any representations they want? Jane Yolen has written publicly in defense of artistic freedom in The Horn Book Magazine. Yolen concludes her defense of artistic freedom by noting that some stories would never be told if no one outside of a racial or ethnic group were ever permitted to tell those stories. Addressing the Native American experience, the contributors to A Broken Flute indicate that the practice of "borrowing" the stories of Native peoples lacks the kind of reciprocity that might ameliorate the offense.

Key Terms and Controversies - 2

- Audience: The reader's familiarity with a cultural, racial, or ethnic group can affect how a work is received or interpreted. We need to think about the experiences that can lead to different reader responses. Carolivia Herron's Nappy Hair (1997) - Intended the book to be a celebration of African American hair in an effort to reclaim a feature that has often been denigrated and mocked; turned out to be highly controversial, especially when white elementary school teachers try to use it. Katharine Capshaw Smith's "Introduction: The Landscape of Ethnic American Children's Literature" (2002, MELUS) - Suggests that this expectation of multiple audiences is especially in play for ethnic children's literature because of the didactic function to which it is put.

Key Terms and Controversies - 5

- Authenticity and Accuracy: See earlier notes about accuracy and authenticity for definitions of these terms. Members of a group might have a range of ideas about what qualities or practices are critical to a culture or identity. Consensus might not be reachable even among members of a particular racial or ethnic group. Writing ethnic children's literature requires thoughtfulness and care, and reading it critically entails being conscious of how readers might contest the accuracy or authenticity of a word and how contested details bear on the meaning of the work. Gerald McDermott's picturebook Arrow to the Sun (1974) - Caldecott winner but has been criticized for troubling cultural inaccuracies.

Key Terms and Controversies -

- Authorship and Ownership: Who has the right to represent people of different races or cultures? Can an author ever adequately represent people of a different race or culture? Can a writer's imagination be powerful enough to create a viable work of fiction about a culture the writer has observed only from the outside? This is especially problematic when the author is a member of the culturally and politically dominant and privileged group (i.e. white) and is writing about a subordinate or oppressed minority. Ex. Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) - Did he have the right to collect those folk tales and to publish and profit from them? Doris Seale's A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children (2005) - "Taking something that was not offered to you does not make it yours. It makes it stolen."

Ezra Jacks: Snowy Day 2

- Barbara Bader in a 2002 article in Horn Book refers to The Snowy Day as "color-blind" in that it emphasizes the universality of experience across race rather than racial and cultural specificity. It absorbs the African American experience into a universal notion of the human race. - Peter's racial background has virtually no effect on his activities or on the book, which therefore represents race as inconsequential and unimportant. Though this might look like progress, it is a denial of reality. The Snowy Day might be read as envisioning a utopian future in which race does not matter. - The protagonist encounters a world of almost complete whiteness, indicating that the world is a white one, and though Peter may frolic and have fun, this white world is still a dangerous and threatening place. The only conceivable danger in the book is the snow, which invokes whiteness.

Adventure fiction

- Became wildly popular during the mid-nineteenth century. - Adventure has its roots in ancient mythology, argues Joseph Campbell, who describes adventure in terms of the hero's journey or quest. - Campbell's basic formula: separation - initiation - return - John G. Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976). - "The central fantasy of the adventure story is that of the hero - individual or group - overcoming obstacles and dangers and accomplishing some important and moral mission." - The adventure novel typically involves leaving home and exploring the world, which most children have not yet had the opportunity to do in reality, thereby fueling an interest in literary alternatives. - Thematizes discovery as one of its defining features. - Adventure embodies fantasies that compensate for some of the conditions or deficiencies of children and childhood. - Early example: R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857) - Protagonists in adventure fiction must fend for themselves and are free from the constraints of civilization and the presence of authority figures, which provides them with the experience of independence. - Most of the characters remain relatively flat. The novels instead focus on their survival of obstacles and dangers.

Native Americans in Children's Literature -

- Because of the troubling association of Native Americans with savagery as well as the notion of children as savages, some of the most canonical children's books in both Britain and America have included American Indian characters. - The villain in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is Injun Joe. - Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) features frequent reference to Indians. - Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911) famously features "redskins." - Wilder's Little House series (1930s and 40s) remains extremely controversial for the kind of comments it makes about Native Americans. - Lynn Reid Banks's The Indian in the Cupboard (1980) embodies many Native American stereotypes, including broken English. - Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons (1994) - Newberry winner; the protagonist has a great-great grandmother with Native American ancestry, which she likes because it makes her feel "close4r to nature," but she herself has no connection to her grandmother's people. Good Examples - Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House (1999) - Depicts an Ojibwe girl living in the 19th century; an alternative to Little House's depiction. - Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) - National Book Award winner - Joseph Bruchac's numerous folk tale collections, novels, and picturebooks.

Expanding the Picturebook Genre -

- Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) - Winner of the Caldecott Medal; wordless pages alternate with pages of text, like a silent film; sometimes the words advance the plot, and sometimes the images do; challenges the boundaries of the picturebook form while in some ways being an ideal expression of the form, since it is so heavily reliant on the interaction of text and image. - Concept books (written to instruct children in concepts such as shapes, colors, counting, time, and the alphabet) have been reinvented; Ex. Stephen T. Johnson's Alphabet City (1996) and City by Numbers (2003). - Graphic novels - Comic books emerged in the 1930s, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s, graphic novels received increased attention for their literary possibilities; Art Spiegelman's Maus (vol. 1 in 1986; vol. 2 in 1991) - awarded the Pulitzer Prize; other landmark works are Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1986-87), Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2000), and Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese (2006). - Placing graphic novels alongside picturebooks prompts a reevaluation of each form and raises questions of how the two differ, how they address different audiences, and how their marketing affects public perception of what they are and how they work.

Contemporary Domestic and Adventure Stories -

- Can contemporary literature still be classified in terms of domestic and adventure fiction? - Our definitions of what it means to be a man, woman, boy, or girl have changed, and our sense of national identity has changed in an increasingly globalized and postcolonial world. - Martin Green's The Great American Adventure (1984) - Distinguishes between seven types of adventure in terms of their protagonists: - the castaway (Robinson Crusoe) - the musketeer (historical swashbucklers) - the frontiersman (like castaway but more interaction with civilization; Little House on the Prairie) - the avenger (linked with gothic elements; seeks revenge; The Graveyard Book) - the wanderer (defined by travel; Christopher Paul Curtis's Bud, Not Buddy) - the sagaman (Icelandic sagas and myths; The Hobbit) - the hunted man (contemporary thrillers; Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese) - More examples of modern hybrids: Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) and Gary Paulsen's Hatchet (1987) (both of which have a psychological complexity usually missing from more traditional adventures of the nineteenth century); E. L. Kronigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler (1967) (kids hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art instead of the woods or an island).

Escaping civilization or home -

- Castaway novels - Part of their appeal is the fantasy of escaping civilization, which is associated with domesticity. - There is a desire for freedom, thus the adventure not only provides readers with models of extraordinary heroism and superhuman powers but also feeds into a gendered desire to escape the confines of the home, which is associated with the influence of women. - The influence of women on boys in early childhood had long aroused concerns about the "feminizing" effect of home life. - Organizations such as the Boy Scouts which enacted adventure scenarios, emerged precisely to "revitalize masculinity" in boys. - Concerns about the emasculation of boys, which became especially notable during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were compounded by the perceived effects of class status on gender performance. Middle-class boys were thought to be the victims of over-civilization. - As in domestic fiction, class remains a significant component of adventure since the class status of boys presumably affected their enactment of masculinity or femininity. - This desire for escape and freedom from the confines of the home that lies at the center of adventure accounts for the prominence of the outdoors, travel, and exotic locations that are perceived to be outside of familiar and hence applicable social norms.

The Golden Age (1865-1915)- 2

- Crossover appeal of Golden Age books: Many of the books were just as popular among adults; Beverly Lyon Clark argues in Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature (2003) that during the Golden Age, children and adults were increasingly imagined as segregated and distinct audiences, so by the early decades of the 20th century, books written for or marketed to children had much smaller followings among adults, testifying to the ways children's literature was coming to be imagined as only for children. - Tensions that define children's literature of the Golden Age: - Didacticism, education, and practicality: some thought children's lit should teach lessons and socialize children - Pleasure, popularity, and profitability: others were concerned with developing the commercial children's lit industry and thus focused on works that were pleasurable and popular. - Aesthetics, innovation, and literariness: some saw children's lit as a form of creative, artistic expression.

Magical Realism -

- Has traditionally been associated with Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. - Features magic in our own world; a matter-of-fact world in which the extraordinary exists side by side with the mundane realities of everyday. - Similar to Townsend's notion of fantasy that inhabits our world and Mendelsohn's concept of the intrusion fantasy. - As a genre, magical realism is marked by hybridity (or mixture), indicating that the line between the fantastic and the realistic is not absolute.

Rethinking the Writing of History -

- Historical fiction is often used to teach the content of history, but it also might be used to examine how history is written. - Perry Nodelman: The work of historians is to shape events into acceptable patterns of cause and effect, making the stories they tell resemble the plots of fiction. - Hayden White's landmark Tropics of Discourse (1978) - Argues that historical writing always includes "tropes" or figurative language. The techniques and strategies used by historians and creative writers can be shown to be substantially the same. Even nonfiction histories involve elements of narrative and acts of interpretation. - Whereas history is broad, fiction tends to be more specific, operating on a smaller scale, often at the level of a small slice of an individual life. Ex. Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic - Perceiving the historical event (the Holocaust) through the eyes of one relatable character (Hannah) might help make an incomprehensible event easier to assimilate. - The child's perspective: Christopher Paul Curtis's The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 - His fictional treatment of the actual 1963 bombing of an African American church which killed for girls. An adult who looks back on having experienced this event would have to reconstruct his or her childhood perception, which would be filtered through all the accumulated knowledge and thinking of the intervening years. Curtis's fiction allows him to adopt the creative position of a child's perspective, which requires creative critical thinking on his part.

History of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Children's Literature -

- In 19th-century American children's literature, characters of color appeared mostly as secondary to white protagonists and as stereotyped caricatures. - Usually produced by white writers with little investment or experience with thinking beyond traditional racial hierarchies, these depictions of racial difference in children's literature socialized child readers into the racist ideologies of the broader culture. - Though designed as anti-slavery propaganda, abolitionist stories often promoted racial stereotypes and the inferiority of African Americans. Ex. The Child's Anti-Slavery Book: Containing a Few Words about American Slave Children and Stories of Slave-Life (1859) - Even works that served to critique slavery or racism tended to fall back on easily recognizable stereotypes or expectations of people of color. Exs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). - British children's literature of the 19th century was similarly mired in racist representations and racial hierarchies that privileged white Britons over colonial subjects of color. - Daphne Kutzer's Empire's Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books (2000) - Some of the most revered of British children's texts support the culture of imperialism. Exs. R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857); Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess (1905) - Problematic representation of racialized "others" continued in Brit lit well into the 20th century. Exs. Hugh Lofting's The Story of Dr. Dolittle (1920) and The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle (1922); Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) - the Oompa-Loompas were originally African pygmies, but newer versions invented their fictional Loompaland.

The Sacred Child -

- Inspired by the child labor movement and the institution of compulsory education laws. - Children are precious and fragile aesthetic objects to admire rather objects to use as practical tools. - They must be protected, watched, and fussed over. - Also influenced by a decrease in the number of children born to a given household by the early twentieth century and increased life expectancy due to advances in medical care and nutrition. (Basically, parents were going for quality over quantity.) - This view is particularly influenced by class - One of the more dominant understandings of children - Examples: Eleanor Porter's Pollyanna (1913); Jacqueline Woodson's Miracle Boys (2000)

Features of adventure fiction:

- Is set primarily outside, often in locales that are exotic to the protagonist or the implied reader and require travel across great distance - Involves escaping an undesirable situation, surviving dangerous obstacles, discovering or retrieving a valued object, or achieving an extraordinary goal - Focuses more on action and plot than on psychology and character development - Depicts much physical activity, violence, or struggle - Imagines danger as overt, external, and unusual - Understands rewards as material treasures or as personal experience or transformation - Typically focuses on boys or men as protagonists - Often includes romance or flirtation as a component of the plot - Sometimes involves relations between races or nations - Scale is one of the key differences between the two. We can think about domestic fiction as operating on a smaller scale than adventure.

Chapter 7: Historical Fiction

- Its popularity can be linked to the history of didacticism in writing for youth and to the continuing sense that works for children and young adults should be educational. - The historical novel coalesced as a form in the early nineteenth century. Among its first practitioners were Sir Walter Scott - Waverly (1814) takes place in the middle ages - and James Fenimore Cooper - The Spy (1822) takes place during the American Revolution. - First historical novels specifically for children: Harriet Martineau's The Settlers at Home (1841) and Frederick Marryat's The Children of the New Forest (1847). - Georg Lukacs's The Historical Novel (1937) - Distinguishes between works simply set in an earlier period and true historical novels. The real historical novel does not just treat history as an incidental backdrop for events or interactions that could just as well take place in the present. Instead, historical fiction makes the period of its setting a defining and integral feature of the work. - In historical fiction, history impinges on characters and scenes, it sometimes includes historical figures as characters, and it situates its characters amid well-known historical events. - Reading historical fiction for children critically involves noting why certain periods might be represented and what stories or themes they make possible.

History of Picture books

- Johann Amos Comenius's Orbis Sensualium Pictus or The Visible World in Pictures (1658) - sometimes described as the first picturebook; written in Latin and German by a Czech educator. - Picturebooks became a commercial form in the nineteenth century. Visionary English publisher Edmund Evans began to publish the work of master illustrators such as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway. - Kate Greenaway's A Apple Pie (1886) - known for its pictures of idealized children. - Caldecott in particular did a great deal to develop the picturebook as a form that required word and image to work together. Maurice Sendak said, "Caldecott's work heralds the beginning of the modern picture book. He devised an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint that never happened before." - Beatrix Potter - took the picturebook to a new level - The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

Poetry for Children -

- John Bunyan and Isaac Watts - wrote religious allegory poetry to instruct and entertain child readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. - Mother Goose - Charles Perrault's Tales of My Mother Goose (1697) contains no poetry, but the Mother Goose persona has since become associated with nursery rhymes. - Mary Cooper's Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book (1744) - earliest surviving book of nursery rhymes. - John Newberry's Mother Goose's Melody; or, Sonnets for the Cradle (written 1765-66; pub. 1780). - Some of Randolph Caldecott's best-known illustrations were based on nursery rhymes. - With these early children's poets, the ideology of childhood as separate from adulthood had not yet solidified, so many of these volumes contain adult material, like poop jokes.

Types of the Fantastic -

- John Row Townsend's Written for Children: An Outline of English Language Children's Literature (1992) - divides children's fantasy into three categories: - Anthropomorphic - Animals or inanimate objects are endowed with human qualities; Charlotte's Web (1952); Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877) - Secondary Worlds and High Fantasy - Fantasies that create imaginary worlds or countries; Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000); Ursula LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea (1968); Alice; Narnia; LOTR * High fantasy = The subset of fantasy most associated with elevated quests and lofty struggles between good and evil. - Fantasy that Inhabits Our World - Require some disturbance of the natural order of things; the miraculous touching upon ordinary life; Edward Eager's Half Magic (1954); Edith Nesbit's works; David Almond's Skellig (1998) and also Kit's Wilderness (1999). Similar to magical realism

LGBT Representation in Books for Young Adult Readers

- Kenneth Kidd has observed that the young adult genre has been extraordinarily receptive to lesbian/gay themes, often because coming out is associated with the confusing time of adolescence. - Pioneer = John Donovan's I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969) - Artie in Judy Blume's Forever (intimated to be gay) tries to kill himself and is eventually institutionalized. - Other exs.: Aidan Chambers's Dance on My Grave (1982); Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind (1982); Block's Weetzie Bat (1989); David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy (2003) - Block's 1996 short story "Dragons in Manhattan" is the first appearance of a transsexual character in YA lit. - Julie Anne Peters's Luna (2004) - First YA novel to feature a transgender protagonist. - Also: Ellen Wittlinger's Parrotfish (2007); Brian Katcher's Almost Perfect (2010) - Features an adolescent boy who falls for the new girl in school and later learns that she is transgender.

The Feral Tale

- Kenneth Kidd's term - About children raised in the wild; depict boys who are unencumbered by home or civilization. - Ex. Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894) and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1914) - These boys possess either extraordinary abilities themselves or intelligent animal companions who are ferocious protectors. - Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and Fred Gipson's Old Yeller (1956) - Both boys struggle with self-doubt but are nonetheless represented as hearty and resourceful survivalists who ultimately triumph over nature and their circumstances.

Jewish Children's Literature -

- Landmarks of ethnic children's literature came in swift succession in the latter half of the 20th century. - H. A. and Margaret Rey's Curious George (1941) - Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family series (began in 1951) - Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1969) - deals explicitly with Margaret's Jewish heritage - Exra Jack Keats's Snowy Day (1962) - First Caldecott-winning book with an African-American protagonist. - Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963) - Caldecott winner the year after Keats - Robert Lipsyte's The Contender (1967) - Michael Cart argues in From Romance to Realism: 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature (1996) that it is a greater literary success than The Outsiders (!!!!) published that same year. - David Wisniewski's Golem (1996) - Caldecott winner.

An Expanded Canon -

- Langston Hughes's The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932) - Francisco Alarcon's Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems (1997) - bilingual poetry picture book. - Grace Nichols's Come on into My Tropical Garden: Poems for Children (1988) - features Caribbean dialect - Janet S. Wong's A suitcase of seaweed and other poems (1996) - reflects the reality of today's multicultural American families. - Naomi Shihab Nye's This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (1996) - known for its focus on cross-cultural exchange; Nye is a prolific anthologist of poems by and for children, with an emphasis on international dialogue.

Realist Fiction and Problem Novels

- Lit for and about older girls and young women includes the romance, or more specifically the novel of first love. Ex. Maureen Daly's Seventeenth Summer (1942) - Anticipates the emergence of the specifically young adult novel two decades later and also realist fiction like that of Judy Blume. - Blume's Forever (1975) - About a girl's first sexual encounter; contains echoes of Daly. Blume's name is now virtually synonymous with the contemporary girl book.

Gender and Sexuality in Children's Literature -

- Long history of viewing boys and girls as distinct audiences. (See history of children's lit above) - The assumption of a bifurcated audience of boys and girls might seem especially pronounced in 19th-century classics, but it remains true of more contemporary realist works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Horror

- Many adults are less comfortable with children as readers of horror. First of all, horror is often dismissed as "junk" literature. - Exs. R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series (1992-97) and Fear Street Saga (1989-2005); Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981)

Poetry Picture Books, Verse Novels, and Concrete Poetry -

- Many children's picturebooks can themselves be read as poetry. - One of the key features of poetry is economy of language; every word counts. Since picturebooks also require economy of language, they are quite suited to poetic expression. - Jaqueline Woodson's verse novel Locomotion (2003) - narrated through the poems of Lonnie Collins Motion, nicknamed "Locomotion." - Concrete poems - a single or several words arranged into a specific shape; dependent on visual interpretation; highlight poetry's capacity to make meaning through visual elements such as the placement of words on a page.

Fantasy -

- Many works from the medieval period center on magical and supernatural beings (Beowulf, King Arthur, etc.), but readers at the time may not have seen supernatural or magical figures as "fantastic" in the same way that later readers did. - The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries drew a sharper line between the true and the fictional. - In the realm of children's literature, the Romantic emphasis on the world that could not be seen, the world of fantasy, was explored to great effect beginning in the late nineteenth century. - Significant early moments in children's fantasy: Britain - Alice; George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and The Princess and Curdie (1883); Peter Pan; Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) among others; America - Oz - For the Victorians, fantasy was also a means of creating a protected childhood marked by whimsy and the imagination. - The twentieth century (specifically post-war) was dominated by Lewis and Tolkien. After them, fantasy for children and young adults grew significantly in popularity.

Domestic and Family Stories

- Most common type of story for girls - Previously-mentioned books like Little Women and Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family (1951) - Sometimes all a book needs to fit this category is a girl protagonist. - These girls have adventures, but those adventures are circumscribed by the home or neighborhood. Girls' Adventure Fiction - Alice - Combines elements of adventure with fantasy and nonsense. - L. T. Meade (British) published both girls' school stories and girls' adventure stories, such as Four on an Island (1892) - castaway novel. - Carol Ryrie Brink's Baby Island (1937) - Two sisters are shipwrecked on an island with four babies; combines domestic and adventure elements/makes domestic duties an adventure. - Girls' frontier stories also combine domesticity and adventure. Ex. Little House on the Prairie and Brink's Caddie Woodlawn (1935). - Even animal companions in children's literature are gendered; boys get dogs, girls get horses.

Domestic Fiction -

- Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978) - "Home life is presented, overwhelmingly, as unhappy." Because domestic fiction is mostly restricted to the home, the home itself must be the source of the tension, uncertainty, or threat driving the narrative. - Both lived experience and children's domestic fiction defy expectations of the home as a safe haven from the dangers of the outside world and can include physical or emotional threats, abuse, or strife. - Conflict between rambunctious and imaginative child and his or her strict, cold, or cantankerous caregiver. Illness - - The body itself is another site of danger through illness, injury, or disease. Ex. Beth in Little Women. Domestic work, including the care of others, physically endangers girls and women. Power - - Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. (1985) - "It is no exaggeration to say that domestic fiction is preoccupied, even obsessed, with the nature of power." - The experience of childhood is marked by negotiations between one's desires and the restrictions placed on those desires by other people, available resources, and the conditions of the environment. Ex. The genteel-poor March family in Little Women with an absent father much of the time and Marmee always supporting causes. - In many works, the children come to influence adult characters and the tone of the household as much as or more than the adults influence them.

The Developing Child -

- Opposite of Child as Other. Children are on a path of development into adulthood. - Birth of the academic child-study movement in the twentieth century G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904) - First study of its kind. - Described by Kenneth Kidd as "the founding father not only of child psychology but of American psychology more generally." - Presided over the child study movement at Clark University, where Sigmund Freud joined in 1909, and he trained a whole generation of child experts. Freud - Saw the child and childhood experiences as absolutely central to the workings of the human psyche. - Popularized the understanding of the child as existing on a continuum of development into adulthood. Jean Piaget - Swiss Psychologist who laid out his child development theories in the 1920s - Four periods of cognitive development: - sensorimotor: birth to two years - preoperational: two to seven years - concrete operations: seven to eleven years - formal operations: eleven years on - Important: The work of Piaget and other developmental psychologists represents children neither as miniature adults nor as fundamentally different from adults. Rather, the developmental approach understands children as immature or developing beings who are slowly moving toward adulthood in a mostly unbroken line. - Examples: Christopher Robin in A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh books; Most of Judy Blume's characters

African-American Children's Lit in the 20th Century -

- Paul Lawrence Dunbar's book of dialect poems Little Brown Baby (1895) - One possible starting point for a distinctly African American children's literature, according to Violet J. Harris's "African American Children's Literature: The First 100 Years" (1990). - W. E. B. Dubois instituted the genre of black children's literature when he began publishing a children's issue of the literary journal Crisis in 1912 and then expanded it into the magazine for Black children called The Brownies' Book in 1920. He wanted to include children in the fight for civil rights. - Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps also began writing for children in the 1930s. - These authors helped pave the way for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s because their child readers were now grown up. - The period after WWII marked a turning point in American children's literature; more multicultural literature became available. - 1970s = landmark decade: Virginia Hamilton was first African American to win Newberry for M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974); Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) won two years later; Lucille Clifton's The Black BCs and Some of the Days of Everett Anderson (both 1970); Julius Lester's To Be a Slave (1968) won Newberry Honor in 1969); Walter Dean Myers began his career in the 70s

Key Terms and Controversies - 3

- Perspective: The perspective can sometimes be limited or can create a negative impression. Paula Fox's Newberry-winning The Slave Dancer (1973) is meant to expose the horrors of slavery but is narrated by a white 13-year-old boy who is kidnapped and taken aboard a slave ship. The white protagonist's personal distress at having to observe suffering seems more important that the physical and spiritual pain he observes in the slaves. The narrative perspective makes the novel more Jessie's story than the slaves'. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) - The very choice to narrate a story about racism and injustice from the point of view of a white child privileges a white perspective. That the novel depicts a white man attempting to rescue a black man from racism and injustice participates in a liberal white fantasy of rescue as a way of mitigating the guilt of racial exploitation and racial privilege. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, on the other hand, is narrated by a black child.

The Sinful Child

- Puritan theology and social customs - Corrupted by the original sin of the biblical Adam and Eve - Easily swayed to do wrong and susceptible to evil - Evangelical Sunday School movement emerged in Britain between the 1750s and 1780s to address the need to save and educate children in religion. Hesba Stretton (pen name Sarah Smith)'s Jessica's First Prayer (1867) - English Methodist - The child is in need of both spiritual and economic care and salvation Secular forms - Pseudopsychological language of impulse control and developmental maturity - Pseudoanthropological language of savagery or untamed wilderness - Examples: William March's The Bad Seed (1954); William Blatty's The Exorcist (1971); Edward Bloor's Tangerine (1997)

Key Terms and Controversies - 4

- Reclamation: Can classic works with problematic or overtly racist elements be reclaimed and repurposed effectively? Harris's Uncle Remus story collections constitute one of the largest and most significant repositories of African-American folklore. Had he not collected and published them, the tales might have been lost to subsequent generations. Julius Lester claims that the figure of Uncle Remus was used as a retrospective justification for slavery. He also re-wrote Helen Bannerman's now-infamous picturebook Little Black Sambo (1899) as Sam and the Tigers (1996).

- Features of domestic fiction:

- Set primarily in and around the home with little significant movement or travel across great distances. - Addresses social and personal relations within family and community - Involves concern with poverty, wealth, property, and social class - Provides psychological insight into characters; explores psychological motivations. - Depicts little physical action or activity - Imagines danger in the form of illness or disease, social intrigues or insults, or the loss of status or reputation - Represents rewards as moral, spiritual, or social - Typically focuses on girls or women as protagonists - Often includes romance or flirtation as a component of the plot

Chapter 11: Genders and Sexualities -

- Sexual content is some of the most controversial material in literature when it comes to child readers, and childhood and children's culture are key battlegrounds for attitudes about gender and sexuality.

Sexuality in Children's Lit - The Sexuality of Children

- Sexuality permeates both childhood and children's culture. - Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990) - Points out that there are many other qualities besides sex/gender that could have emerged as the basis of sexual classification; this idea becomes especially apparent when thinking about children. - Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) - Deals heavily with children. Claims that the notion of sexual desire or pleasure must be divorced from overt genital contact and from the assumption that the genitals must be involved in order for a particular act to count as sexual. - Children are not yet fully trained to limit their perception of what counts as proper or pleasurable. - Peter Hunt asserts that food in children's literature is often possibly a substitute for sex (Hansel and Gretel, Alice's tea party, etc.). - When children clutch dolls or stuffed toys, they are treating their toys as lovers, deriving pleasure from contact and companionship. - The sexuality of children can often go undetected, but learning to read children's literature critically means being attentive to the desires and pleasures of children and childhood. Queering the Classics - Kenneth Kidd, in and into to ChLA, playfully speculates about the decidedly queer friendship of Mole and Rat in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) - The two set up a cozy domestic partnership; it's not a gay text per se, but it is about gendered male-male interaction. - Eve Sedgwick's term for these kinds of ostensibly platonic relationships between men is "homosocial."

Defining the Picturebook -

- Should be spelled as one word to signify that the text and image are combined into a unified form. - Not simply an illustrated book - Whereas the text of an illustrated book can stand alone without the pictures, a picturebook relies on the interdependence of word and image.

The Romantic Childhood Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) - his treatise on education

- Similar to Locke - Parents should avoid restrictive educational and disciplinary practices. - Children have natural innocence and virtue that must be celebrated and gently molded by an adult - Warns against forcing adult reason onto the child - Emphasizes the link between childhood and nature

Time-Travel and Time-Slip Narratives -

- Some organizations exclude time travel narratives from the category of historical fiction. - "Time-slip" - A subcategory of time-travel fiction in which the travel happens accidentally, without the traveler's consent or control (Outlander). Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic is an example, with Hannah traveling from present-day New York to Holocaust Poland and then back again, having witnessed the terrible historical events firsthand. - Other time-slip narratives may not entail actual time travel but alternate between sections set in the present and in the past. Exs. Aidan Chamber's Postcards from No Man's Land (1999 - Printz and Carnegie winner) and Sachar's Holes. - Works of these genres use the past to provide a new perspective on the present or to make the contemporary character appreciate the present more or gain insight on the present.

Children's Literature and the History of Childhood -

- The New England Primer - first published between 1687 and 1690; one of the most widely-owned books in the New World for about two centuries. - John Cotton's Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (1646) - often called Milk for Babes; included in the primer; possibly the first work printed in the American colonies specifically for children; a short catechism. - Benjamin Keach's War with the Devil (1673) - also included in the primer; dialogue between Christ and the devil. - Children's literature of the nineteenth century records the shifting conceptualization of the child from profitable worker to sentimental object. - Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863) - features an encounter between a child who fits the traditional model of the child laborer (a chimney sweep) and one already living the modern version of the sacred child (a young girl); he comes out of the chimney into her room.

Romantics

- The Romantic poets placed a new emphasis on children and childhood, with many writers speaking from the child's point of view. - William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" is narrated with the voice of a child; tells a tale of thwarted childhood innocence. - William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" describes a divine child "trailing clouds of glory." His idea of childhood suggests that not only are children capable of understanding and appreciating poetry, they are privileged readers of poetry. - Jane Taylor's "The Star" in Rhymes for the Nursery (1806) became "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and not long afterwards was frequently published as an anonymous rhyme. - Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Voices (1885) - inheritor of the Wordsworthian tradition; written in the late Victorian period but had a Romantic emphasis on the child's point of view. It is, however, hard to know whether its child-centrism is the source of its appeal to children, or whether children are guided to love Stevenson's poetry by the enthusiasm adults have for it.

Asian-American Children's Literature -

- The history of Asian American children's literature extends back to the 19th century. - Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon (1928) - First Asian American (India) to win the Newberry. - Arthur Bowie Chrisman's Shen of the Sea (1925), Elizabeth Foreman Lewis's Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze (1932), and Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese's The Five Chinese Brothers (1938) - Asian characters written by European-American authors; possess a decidedly orientalist flavor that exoticizes Asian people and cultures; marked by racial stereotypes. - 1970s = Critical turning point in Asian-American literature: Laurence Yep's first novel in 1973 and Dragonwings (1975) won Newberry Honor - First book to present a significant portrayal of the Asian American presence, dealing with Asians and their lives in America. - Linda Sue Park's A Single Shard (2001) and Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira (2004) - Both Newberry winners. - Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese (2006) - Printz Award winner.

LGBT Representation in Books for Young Readers

- The queerness of early childhood literature has most often taken the form of either gender-variant children - tomboys and sissy boys - or gay and lesbian parents. Ex. Leslea Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies (1989); Michael Willhoite's Daddy's Roommate (1990); Johnny Valentine's One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads (1994); Nancy Garden's Molly's Family (2004; also wrote Annie on My Mind) - Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell's And Tango Makes Three (2004) - Based on the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who became companions and adopted a chick; associates queer sexuality with nature and portrays gay parents as cute and loveable. - Gay protagonists (i.e. not parents) are much more rare, but more are starting to appear. Ex. James Howe's The Misfits (2001) and its sequel Totally Joe (2005) - Books with gender-variant protagonists: Tomie dePaola's Oliver Button Is a Sissy (1979); Sharon Dennis Wyeth's Tomboy Trouble (1998); Leslea Newman's The Boy Who Cried Fabulous (2004); Harvey Fierstein's The Sissy Duckling (2002) - The last two echo classic fables.

Chapter 6: Domesticity and Adventure

- These two themes speak to the centrality of home in the life of the child and the exploration of the wider world for which the child is meant to prepare. - Perry Nodelman's The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature (2008) - Argues that a basic pattern of movement from home to away and then back home again constitutes one of the defining features of children's literature. - Children are prone to experience the home as the center of the world, and they are restricted to the home in ways that adults are not. Thus, domestic fiction constitutes a large portion of children's literature. - Adventure fiction foregrounds discovery and travel. Adventures are set primarily outside and typically involve motifs of exploration, escape, and survival. - Children are primed to take particular interest in narratives of both domesticity and adventure, the former reflecting a closer approximation of more common realities and the latter providing alternative fantasies of the extraordinary.

historical fiction 2

- Wilder's Little House on the Prairie taps into these positive associations with frontier life by depicting the frontier as a space of familial harmony and adventurous play. - Rebecca Barnhouse's Recasting the Past: The Middle Ages in Young Adult Literature (2000) - Notes that many of our stereotypes about the medieval period come from the Victorian era, which idealized and romanticized the Middle Ages. - The appeal of certain popular time periods is also related to a nostalgic sense of these periods as times of national or cultural origin; they articulate national identity. However, many have been criticized for, among other things, their inaccurate portrayal of minorities (such as Native Americans) and for reinforcing national myths about the births of the United States and Britain. - These works are as much about the present as they are about the past. - The Scott O'Dell Award - given annually since 1984 to a work of historical fiction for children or young adults; established by O'Dell himself, best known for his novel The Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Birth of Children's literature

1744 - the year children's literature was born - John Newberry published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book - designed not only for instruction but also for pleasure; came with a toy; featured a letter from Jack the Giant Killer; Peter Hunt calls is a "commercial, mixed-media text." -Newberry's contemporaries: - Thomas Boreman: Preceded Newberry; began publishing exclusively for children as early as 1730; most successful series - The Gigantick Histories of the Curiosities of London (1740-1743); small enough to fit in a child's hand. - Mary Cooper: The Child's New Plaything was in its second edition by the time Newberry published his pocket-book; her second book - Tommy Thumb's Song Book (1744) - considered the first collection of nursery rhymes in English. Sarah Fielding's The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy (1749) - First work which can be described as a novel for children; the notion of a full-length fictional work for children was unheard of. - The publication of The Governess, along with the work of Boreman, Newberry, and Cooper, marks the birth of children's literature as we have come to know it. - Children's lit before the 18th century can be divided into two groups: - General-audience and crossover texts - Educational books, including religious texts, and didactic poetry and stories

Childhood Gender -

Boys and Girls - Many stereotypical expectations about gender are linked to traditional family roles and to how men and women in heterosexual relationships are expected or thought to relate to one another, to divide household labor, and event to relate to children. Tomboys and Sissies - Michelle Abate's Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History (2008) - Notes that the concept dates back to the late 16th century, though the figure of the tomboy was not prevalent in American culture until the 19th century. - Ex. Little Women; Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did (1872) - Abate also notes that often in literature a tomboy's closest friend is a "sissy" boy rather than another girl (see: Jo and Laurie in Little Women; over the course of the novel, Laurie becomes more conventionally boyish and then manly, while Jo vows to become more ladylike.) - One of the common plotlines involving gender-variant children is precisely their maturation into gender-conforming adults or older youth.

Genre -

- A guide to readers that conditions their responses to a work; less a classification than a series of signals to guide the reader. - Generic conventions might be seen as a contract between reader and audience where an awareness of genre comes through wide exposure to different texts and genres and through watching other readers respond to them as well.

Girls and Girlhood in Children's Literature - The Girls' School Story

- Both adapted from models for boys and innovated independently of boy books. - Sara Fielding's The Governess (1749) preceded Tom Brown by over a century; set in a small, girls' dame school; anticipates the later formation of the school story. - Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did (1873) helped establish the pattern for subsequent girls' school stories in the United States and Britain. - Evelyn Sharp's The Making of a Schoolgirl (1897) parodies the boys' school story.

Poetry

- Distinguishes between three terms: nursery rhymes, verse, and poetry (nursery rhymes = songs and rhymes specifically for children; verse = poetry that pursues limited objectives, conforms to chosen meters; poetry = describes a certain use of language written in pursuit of more open-ended goals)

Hybridity: Combining the Two

- Individual texts sometimes straddle the line between the two. Few works reflect only the conventions of a single genre, and many are actually hybrid texts, containing elements of both adventure and domesticity. - The audience for these works can also be equally difficult to pin down. - We cannot take for granted that only girls read domestic fiction or that only boys read adventure stories. - Beverly Lyon Clark's Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America (2003) - Notes the crossover appeal of Alcott's Little Women, which was openly enjoyed by adults and males, as well as girls. - Mark Twain often referred to Tom Sawyer as a boys and girls book, even though it is usually thought of as a boys book.

The Romantic Childhood John Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

- Tabula rasa theory: The mind of a child is a blank state. John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) - Emphasized education and the shaping of children's minds as the major influence on who they are as adults. - Children should be left "free and unrestrained" (39), and their natural gaiety could be spoiled by too much adult interference.

How Words and Images Relate -

How Words and Images Relate - - Perry Nodelman's Words About Pictures (1988) - see summary notes I wrote last year. - Denise I. Matulka's A Picture Book Primer: Understanding and Using Picture Books (2008) - three types of interaction between words and pictures: - Symmetrical: Words and pictures have the same message. - Complementary: Words and images are interdependent, fill each other's narrative gaps - Contradictory: Words and pictures say opposite things

The Significance of Gender and Sexuality in Children's Culture -

In Childhood - Controversial because of the persistent investment in what is perceived to be the "innocence" of children, defined in part by children's enforced ignorance of sexual matters. Access to sex constitutes the line between childhood and adulthood. Even controversial for young adults. - James Kincaid's "Producing Erotic Children" in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004) - Claims that youth and innocence are two of the most exoticized constructions of the past two centuries. Children and adolescents are expected to be sexless, even as our culture valorizes, idealizes, and even eroticizes youth. - Children are actively socialized to behave in ways associated with one gender or another; they are discouraged or punished for showing nontraditional interests. - Many of our notions and values regarding gender and sexuality get worked out through and around children and their bodies.

Children's Pop Culture and Poetry -

Joseph Thomas's study of children's poetry Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry (2007) - argues that the frequently sexually explicit and violent poems composed by children themselves deserve to be studied alongside more canonical poetry for children because it dismantles nostalgic notions of the innocent, obedient, and controllable child and thus tends to disturb adults, as it implies sexualized, complicated child-agents who are able to control their world through linguistic play and sometimes violent, antiauthoritarian imagery. - Richard Flynn's incisive essay "Can Children's Poetry Matter?" (1993) - questions the notion that an innocent and separate realm of children's poetry should exist.

Defining Sex/Gender -

Sex and Gender - Gayle Rubin coined the term "sex/gender system"; critics like her often make the distinction between sex and gender. (sex = in the pants; gender = in the head) - The two do not always line up in expected ways. - That gender needs to be taught and reinforced indicates that it does not emerge naturally on its own in the kinds of distinct, exaggerated ways we might expect. Gender as Performance - Feminist and gender critics also make distinctions between behaviors and identities. To be perceived as masculine or feminine, one has to do something. - Gender can be understood as a socialized, habitual performance of a certain set of qualities. - Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) - Argues that the "reality" of gender is created through "sustained social performances." The kinds of actions or qualities described as masculine or feminine can change depending on cultural location or historical moment. - Gender can be understood in terms of culturally and historically specific performances. Gender as Identity - One thinks of oneself as having a gendered identity. - Such identities are partially self-determined and partially imposed or policed by others. Gender and Class - Available gender identities and performances also depend on class status.

Domestic fiction 2

Social Class - - The state of one's home is one of the key markers of social and class status, and the fact that domestic fiction is set in the home comments on the class considerations of these novels. Psychological Complexity - - Domestic fiction is known for its focus on character development. - Children's domestic fiction also examines individual psychology and frequently turns on the fears, desires, anxieties, and motivations of its child protagonists. - Domestic fiction can be understood as focusing on interiors and interiority, both of the home and of the mind.

The Golden Age (1865-1915)-

The Growth of the Children's Lit Industry - In the mid-18th century, a struggle ensued between the adult belief that children's books should be educational and the creative and commercial impulse to entertain children and to craft literary works for them. - Contributing factors in the 19th century which lead to a greater emphasis on innovation and imagination: - spread of industrialism and the rise of mass production - more children attending school and learning to read - more families attained middle class status and could afford books for children - the developing view of children as precocious objects to spoil - more writers began to view children as a viable audience - Lewis Carroll's game-changing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - stands in as the starting point of the Golden Age; after Alice, didacticism no longer dominates.

History of Picture books 2

Twentieth Century - - Caldecott Medal (first given in 1938) and the Kate Greenaway Medal in the UK (first given in 1955). - Simon and Shuster's Little Golden Books series - cheaply manufactured and sold in supermarkets; made literature available for families who may not otherwise be able to afford it; often met with hostility from librarians but had an enduring impact nonetheless. - Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's The Stinky Cheese Man (1992) - perfect specimen of a postmodern picturebook, which are known for their use of metafiction, parody, intertextuality, and general experimentation. - Metafictionality - occurs when a fictional text reveals awareness of its own fictional status. - David Macaulay's Black and White (1990) - experiments with multiple story lines and points of view.

The Romantic Childhood

Variety of viewpoints within Romantic view of childhood: - Blank slates - Naturally happy, carefree, innocent, or pure and thus likely to be disappointed, deformed, or corrupted by experience and maturation. - Savage and uncivilized in their proximity to nature and beasts - Natural insights or abilities which adults have lost - Embody an earlier, purer, agrarian past amid urbanization and industrialization - Examples: Mary, Colin, and Dickon in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911); M. C. Higgins in Virginia Hamilton's M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974)

Ethnicity

Ethnicity - - The word "ethnicity" dates only back to the 1940s, and the notion that people have something called "ethnicity" is a relatively recent invention. - The concept of ethnicity foregrounds the ways racial differences are cultural, historical, and constructed; considers the role of history, language, and culture; linked to cultural practices and markers, including language use, symbols, traditions, cuisine, and interpersonal styles. - Note: The term applies not only to people of color but to whites as well. White people, as the majority, seldom think of themselves as ethnic, but we all are. Discussion of ethnic literature usually draw attention to minority ethnic groups. - Ethnicity highlights the tensions between a celebration of cultural pluralism or ethnic pride and the pressure for ethnic groups to assimilate to a larger collective culture and identity. - Some works for children, in depicting ethnic or racial minorities, suggest that the "ethnic" child or family is really just like the unmarked "mainstream" family underneath superficial cultural differences, while other works emphasize the uniqueness of identity and experience. - The concept of ethnicity tends to obscure other group categories. - Questions for children's lit students: - What counts as "ethnic" children's literature? - How is a concern with ethnicity signaled by a work? - How is the ethnicity of a character constructed and asserted? - What is that identity defined against? - Under what conditions do ethnicity and ethnic identity become especially pronounced? - To what extent does the work advocate a sense of universality and similarity or uniqueness and difference?

Experiencing the Fantastic -

Experiencing the Fantastic - - Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) - Claims that fantasy literature is heavily dependent on the dialectic between author and reader. Establishes four categories of fantasy based on the relationship of the fantasy world with our world, or the means by which the fantastic enters the narrated world: - The Portal Quest - Reader is invited through a point of entry into the fantastic; Oz; Narnia; Harry Potter (?) - The Immersive Fantasy - Presents the fantastic as the norm without comment; Dianna Wynn Jones's Howl's Moving Castle (1986); Hobbit; Earthsea; Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle (Eregon etc.) - The Intrusion Fantasy - The fantastic enters the fictional world and brings chaos; Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls (2003); the Mortal Instruments series; similar to magical realism - The Liminal Fantasy - Magic hovers in the corner of our eye; rare/few examples; Holes; Mary Poppins (?) - Mendlesohn's categories represent a shift from Townsend's earlier categories.

The Child as Miniature Adult -

French historian Philippe Aries's controversial Centuries of Childhood - Analyzed depictions of children in art - Asserts that the view of children as mini adults was prominent until at least the thirteenth century but persisted well into the seventeenth. - Children's lit is full of children who are independent, autonomous, precocious and who act independently of adults and perform roles more commonly attributed to adults, such as caring for children or undertaking journeys. - Examples: Kevin in Home Alone; Claudia Kincaid in E. L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler (1967); Peter and Wendy in Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy; Salamanca in Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons (1994)

Questions of Definition - children's literature 2

Harvey Darton's landmark history Children's Books in England (1932) - Narrowly defines children's literature as works which are meant to give them pleasure, not to instruct. Henry Steele Commager's introduction to Cornelia Meigs's A Critical History of Children's Literature (1953) - Broadly defines it as books that are produced for children and books children read, which could include books intended for adults. Jeanie Watson's introduction to Warren W. Woodson's Children's Literature of the English Renaissance (1986) - "A literary work becomes a 'children's book' when a child finds pleasure in it. Children themselves claim their own literature." Peter Hunt complicates things! In An Introduction to Children's Literature (1994), he questions the phrases "written for" and "read by." How can one rely on the intentions of the author or the publisher? What about when books intended for children are frequently read and enjoyed by adults, such as Alice in Wonderland?

Questions of Definition - children's literature 3

Jack Zipes asserts that children's literature per se doesn't exist. There is not literature for children by children. - Adults create the institution of children's literature to serve their ideas about children, what children need, or what is best for children, and thus children's literature belongs really to adults. Perry Nodelman's The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature (2008) - Children's literature should be understood as a coherent genre which possesses a consistent set of qualities, not just a disparate set of texts grouped artificially by virtue of their intended audience of child readers. - His list of features: - implication of children as readers - simple style - focus on action rather than description - apparent simplicity masks hidden complexities - matter-of-fact tone despite the strangeness of the events described - focalization through a child's perspective; use of child protagonists - double perspective of child characters mixed with the voice of a presumably adult narrator. - focus on innocence and knowledge acquisition - pervasive sense of nostalgia and ambivalence - the importance of home and leaving home - As long as adults maintain this sense that children need something special, in distinction to what adults need, and as long as they believe adults can provide this for them in ways children cannot for themselves, children's literature will exist as defined by these generic conventions.