The Case of the Flat Rectangles: Children's Literature on Page and Screen The Francelia Butler Lecture, Children's Literature Association, June 2010 Ann Arbor, Michigan

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Ann Arbor

Children's literature has long been dominated by the flat rectangle of the page, and more recently, of the screen. It is easy to assume that the recent flood of literary-related commodities and collectibles represents something very new. But popular culture has spawned a similar industry of multimodal materials for well over a century, and children's authors such as Beatrix Potter and L. Frank Baum mastered the art of the spin-off and the collectible in the very early days of the twentieth century. This article investigates questions about changes in children's literary culture through the lens of past, present, and future, and explores a shifting future world where texts become ever more hybrid, porous, slippery, and unfinished.

The Place of Girls in the Traditions of Minstrelsy and Recitation

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Lynne Vallone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
American Black ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Children's literature criticism has been enhanced by classic and recent work that considers and analyses the important roles children play in performance, but there is a gap in current scholarship on drama as children's literature. This gap concerns how the place of children – especially girls and notions of girlhood – has changed over time in texts and cultural productions around the traditions of recitation and minstrelsy.1Robin Bernstein has argued persuasively that the ‘scripts’ of a racist past inform the cultural constructions of the present and that children's material and popular culture is often its repository: ‘Sentimentalism or minstrelsy may have peaked in the lives of adults in the nineteenth century, but the popular cultures of childhood … delivered, in fragmented and distorted forms, the images, practices, and ideologies of sentimentalism and minstrelsy well into the twentieth century’ (7). This essay attempts to bridge this gap in scholarship by investigating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American black and white girlhood through readings of recitation pieces and playtexts, important aspects of children's literary culture, broadly conceived

scholarly journals Trajectories in Argentine Children's Literature: Constancio C. Vigil and Horacio Quiroga

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Lauren Rea
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Horacio Quiroga ◽  
Transformative Impact

Children's author and publishing entrepreneur Constancio C. Vigil was a Uruguayan who spent most of his working life in Argentina. He was best known for his children's magazine Billiken (1919 to present). Vigil's contemporary and compatriot Horacio Quiroga also made the move across the River Plate and went on to have a transformative impact on Argentine literary culture, in part through his Jungle Tales for Children (1924). Both Quiroga and Vigil aspired to have their works for children accepted as school reading books, recognising the role of school authorities in the formation of the national canon. Vigil and Quiroga's trajectories of inclusion and exclusion, and their extraordinary contribution to the Argentine and Latin American cultural landscape in the first half of the twentieth century, provide a window onto the curation of an Argentine national children's literature at the same time as challenging the very nature of such a category.

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 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 Milliyet Çocuk and the Making of Children's Literary Culture in Turkey in the 1970s

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Deniz Arzuk
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Majority Group

This article is based on a systematic content analysis of Milliyet Çocuk, a children's magazine published by a left-leaning publishing house in the politically polarised context of Turkey in the late 1970s. It outlines the socio-political and cultural context, defines Milliyet Çocuk's position in the structure of the publishing field and questions how a non-majority group made space for themselves in a nation's children's literature. The archival material used in this article has been collected for the course New Perspectives in Cultural History, taught by Prof. Cengiz Kırlı. My research is funded by the Swedish Institute.

“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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