Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture

Abstract

This volume brings together 22 scholars to look at the complexities of children's culture. Chapters focus on a variety of issues, many of which are hotly disputed - from what it means to be a child to the pace by which a child leaves childhood. The contributors ask questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially-scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about masculine topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired commonplaces about gender, race and class? Can different critical approaches - new historicism, narratology, or post-colonialism - enable us to gain leverage on the different implications of gender, age, race and class in our readings of children's books and children's literature?