Tam Lin, Fair Janet, and the Sexual Revolution: Traditional Ballads, Fairy Tales, and Twentieth-Century Children's Literature

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha P. Hixon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Traditional Ballads

Blackness, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Dominican Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Stacy Ann Creech
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Specific Construction

From pre-Columbian times through to the twentieth century, Dominican children's literature has struggled to define itself due to pressures from outside forces such as imperialism and colonialism. This paper examines the socio-political contexts within Dominican history that determined the kind of literature available to children, which almost exclusively depicted a specific construction of indigeneity, European or Anglo-American characters and settings, in an effort to efface the country's African roots. After the Educational Reform of 1993 was instituted, however, there has been a promising change in the field, as Dominican writers are engaged in producing literature for young people that includes more accurate representations of Blackness and multiculturalism.

The Alluring Nature of Children's Culture: Fairy Tales, the Carnival and the World Wide Web

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-184
Author(s):  
Željka Flegar
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Time Out ◽  
The Social ◽  
Children's Culture ◽  
Language And Ideology

This article discusses the implied ‘vulgarity’ and playfulness of children's literature within the broader concept of the carnivalesque as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1965) and further contextualised by John Stephens in Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction (1992). Carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales are examined by situating them within Cristina Bacchilega's contemporary construct of the ‘fairy-tale web’, focusing on the arenas of parody and intertextuality for the purpose of detecting crucial changes in children's culture in relation to the social construct and ideology of adulthood from the Golden Age of children's literature onward. The analysis is primarily concerned with Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes (1982) and J. K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007/2008) as representative examples of the historically conditioned empowerment of the child consumer. Marked by ambivalent laughter, mockery and the degradation of ‘high culture’, the interrogative, subversive and ‘time out’ nature of the carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales reveals the striking allure of contemporary children's culture, which not only accommodates children's needs and preferences, but also is evidently desirable to everybody.

The Children’s Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary System

This chapter explores the development of the children’s novel throughout the twentieth century. This period represents a change from the protection of childhood to the commodification of childhood, and from essentially gentleman-amateur publishing to highly professional production and marketing. But for all its successes, the idea that the children’s novel is necessary inferior to its adult counterpart dies hard. This is the more illogical because novels for children do not have exact counterparts in the adult literary ‘system’. From an adult point of view, all children’s literature is necessarily ‘popular’ or ‘lowbrow’, or at its ‘best’ merely ‘middlebrow’. Equally, the term ‘literature’ is not useful or relevant in the criticism of children’s novels, and the most valued texts in children’s literature may be precisely those that have the least to offer the adult.

scholarly journals Looking for national and genre identity in the modern Russian and Hungarian author fairy tale (on the example of the texts by A. Kabakov, A. Stepanov and A. Mosonyi)

2020 ◽  
pp. 383-398
Author(s):  
Polina V. Korolkova
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Adult Reader ◽  
Modern Russian

The essay deals with the interaction between the genre transformations of the author fairy tale and the national problematics, as well as the question of the modern strategies of genre renewal on the example of the texts by modern Russian and Hungarian writers (“The Moscow fairy tales” by A. Kabakov, “The fairy tales not about people” by A. Stepa-nov, “The Budapest fairy tales” and “The supermarket fairy tales” by A. Mosonyi). Among other questions, I address the so-called “genre me-mory” (M. Lipovetsky’s term), which in the texts by Kabakov, Stepanov, and Mosonyi functions at the level of entire cycles but rarely at the level of separate texts. With regard to the fi eld of children’s literature, the na-tional locus makes the texts appear more modern-looking and therefore appealing to an adult reader who rediscovers the details of everyday life. The opposite strategy is often applied in the philosophical, parable or political fairy tales, when the authors give priority to the nation-specifi c, nuanced and recognizable locus, which at the same time receives the features of the fairy tale or mythological space.

“Who Are You?”: Modernism, Childhood, and Historical Consciousness in Faulkner’s The Wishing Tree

2017 ◽  
pp. 122-134
Author(s):  
Hannah Godwin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Child Reader

This chapter considers an “uneasy yet potentially fruitful confluence” between modernist writing and children's literature in the only Faulkner tale penned specifically for children. Drawing on “the Romantic reverence for the child as transcendent and inspirational,” a reverence qualified to some degree by twentieth-century psychoanalysis and its suspicion of childhood innocence, modernist artists portrayed the child as “a vessel of consciousness” and “instinctual, intense perceptions,” and thus a source of “defamiliarizing perspectives” that fostered artistic experimentation. In The Wishing Tree, writing for young readers may have helped Faulkner awaken his creative potential. The Wishing Tree's rich mix of fantasy and history “works to imbue the child reader with a sense of historical consciousness” while recognizing her as the bearer “of a more hopeful future”.

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