Del 4 - Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition

Mighty Child

Time and power in children's literature

Inbunden, Engelska, 2015

1 789 kr

Slutsåld

The Mighty Child offers an existentialist approach to the theorization and criticism of children’s literature, nuancing the academic claim that children’s literature, specifically defined as ‘didactic’, alienates childhood from adulthood and disempowers its implied child reader. This volume recentres the theoretical debate around the constructions of time and power which characterize conceptions of childhood and adulthood in children’s literature. The ‘hidden’, didactic adult of children’s literature, this volume argues, is not solely the dictatorial planner of the child’s future, but also a disempowered entity, yearning for unpredictability in the semi-educational, semi-aesthetic endeavor of the children’s book. Leaning on current work in the field of children’s literature theory, on French phenomenological existentialism, and on the philosophy and sociology of childhood, The Mighty Child is addressed to contemporary theorists and critics of children’s literature.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2015-01-14
Vikt575 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieChildren’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition
Antal sidor226
FörlagJohn Benjamins Publishing Co
ISBN9789027201584

Tillhör följande kategorier

Barn- och ungdomslitteratur inom Skonlitteratur

1. Table of figures; 2. Acknowledgements; 3. Introduction; 4. Part I. Time; 5. From puer aeternus to puer existens: The advent of the child "thrown forth"; 6. Childhood and the future; 7. Part II. Otherness; 8. "Gaps", desire, and the didactic discourse; 9. Problems of others; 10. Part III. Commitment; 11. "An exigence and a gift": Committed children's literature; 12. The pedagogical romance; 13. Conclusion; 14. Bibliography; 15. First names index; 15. Name index; 16. Subject index; 16. Nouns index

The Mighty Child’s reading of time and power in children’s literature redefines basic concepts of children’s literature studies, such as the child, adult, didacticism or hope, and marks new pathways for children’s literature scholarship and criticism. Its coherent, informed and lucid confronting and merging of existentialist writings with recent children’s literature criticism and divergent children’s literature texts – from classics to recent work, from novels to poetry, from picturebooks to crossover literature – can be seen as a demonstration of one of the multiple intellectually stimulating directions which children’s literature studies might take if they dare to try. Future theoretical and historical testing of its arguments and conclusions, their development, confirmation or rejection, will hopefully have the same revealing effect.