Honor Of Kings Research Articles

Anxiety, Depression, and Stress Are Associated With Internet Gaming Disorder During COVID-19: Fear of Missing Out as a Mediator.

BackgroundMany teenagers suffered negative emotional states, especially anxiety and depression, during the COVID-19 outbreak, and most teenagers choose Internet games to cope with negative emotion. Previous evidence indicated that fear of missing out is related with anxiety and depression in teenagers with Internet gaming disorder, but it is unclear how fear of missing out influences depression, anxiety, or stress.MethodsBased on an I-PACE model, using Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scale (DASS-21), Fear of Missing Out Scale, and Internet Gaming Addiction Scale, and 324 middle school students as participants, this study explored the mediating effect of fear of missing out on depression, anxiety, or stress and Internet gaming disorder.ResultsThe results showed that depression and stress are significantly related to Internet gaming disorder through the partial mediating of fear of missing out. Anxiety is not significantly related to Internet gaming disorder through the full mediating of fear of missing out, and anxiety and stress have a greater predictive effect on Internet gaming disorder through fear of missing out. Results also demonstrated that students who play Honor of Kings or Player Unknown's Battlegrounds have more risk to develop Internet gaming disorder.ConclusionsThe results indicated that fear of missing out as a mediator regulates the relationship among depression, anxiety, and stress and Internet game disorder. Specifically, under the mediation of fear of missing out, teenagers with anxiety are more likely to develop Internet gaming disorder, while teenagers with depression or stress might be prone to other types of Internet use disorders.

From “Gathering People for Fun” to the Construction of Multiple Meanings: Analysis of Game Communication of Online Game Players

Nowadays, with the innovation and progress of social media and social ways, people’s social needs are gradually expanding, and social ways are also becoming diversified. As a national social sports game, Honor of Kings has reconstructed and innovated people’s social activities in social functions and ways in recent years. Now players come to Honor of Kings not only for fun, but also for more diversified motives. This paper analyzes and studies the players of Honor of Kings through semi-structured interviews, and analyzes them from the four dimensions of individual, group, virtual and reality, so as to explore the different meanings of the king’s glory to different players.

The Influence of Social Attribute in Games on Consumers - The Example of The Phone Game “Honor of Kings”

With the continuous development of the gaming industry, more and more manufacturers are joining the competition in the gaming industry. This study takes “Honor of Kings” as an example and proposes a novel factor that influences game consumers - social attributes. The study focuses on two aspects: ’Why it has social attributes’ and ’How social attributes affect consumers’. It gives players an understanding of the concept of social attributes and provides game manufacturers with a novel direction to improve the revenue of their games.

Analysis of Chinese traditional elements in Chinese e-sports games Application in International Chinese Education

Honor of Kings is one of the games most concerned and loved by modern young people, especially teenagers. The game contains rich traditional Chinese cultural elements, such as the shaping of heroes, the skin of traditional Chinese festivals, etc. When teaching international Chinese , select appropriate content and integrate it into the teaching process, so that traditional Chinese culture can be displayed in front of students in another vivid and interesting way, reproducing the vitality of traditional Chinese culture.

Which Heroes to Pick? Learning to Draft in MOBA Games With Neural Networks and Tree Search

Hero drafting is essential in multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game playing as it builds the team of each side and directly affects the match outcome. State-of-the-art drafting methods fail to consider: 1) drafting efficiency when the hero pool is expanded; 2) the multiround nature of a MOBA 5v5 match series, i.e., two teams play best-of- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$</tex-math></inline-formula> and the same hero is only allowed to be drafted once throughout the series. In this article, we formulate the drafting process as a multiround combinatorial game and propose a novel drafting algorithm based on neural networks and Monte Carlo tree search, named JueWuDraft. Specifically, we design a long-term value estimation mechanism to handle the best-of- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$</tex-math></inline-formula> drafting case. Taking <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Honor of Kings</i> , one of the most popular MOBA games at present, as a running case, we demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of JueWuDraft when compared to state-of-the-art drafting methods.

페미니즘을 배경으로 여성 플레이어들의 심리와 행동에 관한 연구 -Honor of kings 중심으로-

MOBA게임은 매우 유행하는 게임 유형이다. Honor of Kings은 MOBA와 모바일 게임의 장점을 모두 갖추고 있다. 2017년 기준 1억 명이 넘는 여성 사용자가 Honor of Kings를 즐기고 있으며, 중국 시장에서의 성과를 성공적으로 이끌어 내고 있기에 본 연구에서는 Honor of Kings가 어떻게 많은 여성 게이머들을 유치했는지에 대해 연구했다. 페미니즘 이론의 측면에서 살펴볼 때, 여성 게이머들이 Honor of Kings에서 어떻게 체험을 하고 있는 지를 이해하는 것이 필요하다. 여성 게이머들의 체험이 어떻게 게임 디자인에 영향을 미치고 게임 시장과 어떠한 연결점이 있는지는 게임 산업의 전반적인 발전에 기인한다는 의미를 가지고 있다. 따라서 본 연구는 15명의 여성에 대한 인터뷰를 통해 다음과 같은 결론을 내렸다. 첫째, 여성 게이머들은 게임을 진행할 때 여성 캐릭터를 선택하는 경향이 있다. 이것은 인물의 ‘외재 미’와 관계가 있다고 본다. 둘째, Honor of Kings에서 일부 캐릭터의 성별은 여성에게 더욱 적합하기 때문에 대중들에게 딱딱한 인상을 주었고, 이는 여성들이 ‘법사’나 ‘보조’ 캐릭터 역할만 맡아야 한다는 인식이 자리 잡고 있다. 셋째, Honor of Kings에서 여성 게이머들이 차별당하는 것은 단순히 남성 게이머 뿐만 아니라 여성 게이머들도 종종 자신의 능력을 부인하는 경향이 있다. 넷째, 다른 성별로 인해 여성 게이머들은 Honor of Kings 중 특권이 있거나 도움이 되는 지에 대해 서로 다른 견해를 지니고 있다. 이는 여타 게임 모델과 관련성이 있다. 다섯째, 여자 게이머들이 성차별 등의 불평등한 문제를 인지할 때 이를 해결하고자 하는 반응을 보인다. 여섯째, Honor of Kings에서 성비와 공정성을 강화시키려고 한다. 예를 들어 보고 제도를 구축하고 다양한 게임 모델을 개발하여 게이머들이 다양한 선택할 수 있도록 한다. 마지막으로, Honor of Kings에서 영웅 이미지 디자인은 여성 게이머에게 더욱 호의적이다. 캐릭터의 예쁜 피부는 더욱 많은 여성 사용자들을 끌어들이며, 이는 Honor of Kings에 적지 않은 수입을 증대시켰다. 본 논문의 연구결과는 Honor of Kings이 더욱 완성 될 수 있도록 도와주고 캐릭터 포지셔닝, 캐릭터 디자인, 공평 제도, 게임 경쟁 모델 등 측면에서 다른 유형의 게임에도 참고 의미를 제공할 수 있다.

We-intention to continue playing mobile multiplayer games: the role of social play habit

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to develop and test a theoretical model that accounts for an individual's we-intention to continue playing a mobile multiplayer game.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on habit-intention and habit formation theories, this study conceptualizes social play habit as a determinant of the we-intention to continue playing and identifies its antecedents. The proposed model was tested through a survey of 277 players of Honor of Kings, a popular mobile multiplayer game.FindingsThe results indicate that developing social play habit is critical to the formation of a we-intention to continue playing in the context of mobile multiplayer games. The results also suggest that technological (social features embedded in the game) and individual (desire for co-play and privacy concerns) factors jointly influence social play habit.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to the literature on we-intention by conceptualizing social play habit and verifying its role in facilitating a shared intention to continue playing mobile multiplayer games. Our work responds to the call for understanding the mechanism by which multiple people form a shared intention to continue using an information technology at a collective level. Our findings provide significant insights into the design of information technologies for collaboration.Originality/valueThis study is among the first to extend the literature on gaming habits by considering other players' involvement. Specifically, our study shifts researchers' attention from gaming habits characterized by individual properties to social gaming habits characterized by communal properties.

Analysis on Marketing Strategies of Tencent Games—Take Honor of Kings as an Example

This paper mainly focuses on the marketing strategies of Tencent Games. Tencent Games has the largest revenue all over the world. It is considered that the effective marketing strategies play important roles in global competition. Many researches have been focusing on this topic. In this article, strategies are summarized into four main points: product marketing, entertainment marketing, cross-border cooperation and intellectual property creation. Then the author conducts out a deep case study of Honor of Kings, introducing the most striking and latest strategies of the game. The game has cross-border cooperation with a cosmetics brand, idolizes the in-game characters and gets hold of festivals to launch virtual products. The experience of Tencent Games indicates that different strategies fit different periods and the developer should listen to the users and follow the trend.

Supervised Learning Achieves Human-Level Performance in MOBA Games: A Case Study of Honor of Kings.

We present JueWu-SL, the first supervised-learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) program that achieves human-level performance in playing multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games. Unlike prior attempts, we integrate the macro-strategy and the micromanagement of MOBA-game-playing into neural networks in a supervised and end-to-end manner. Tested on Honor of Kings, the most popular MOBA at present, our AI performs competitively at the level of High King players in standard 5v5 games.

Payment-Guard: Detecting fraudulent in-app purchases in iOS system

As a successful business model, “in-app purchase” has been adopted by massive applications (Apps) gradually. Users can purchase various virtual goods in different kinds of Apps, such as the license to download movies or songs. In-app purchase helps App operators gain huge income, and meanwhile provides users with flexibility in using Apps. Recently, iOS Apps have suffered the attack of fraudulent purchase. Attackers leverage the vulnerabilities in iOS payment system to purchase virtual goods at zero or low cost. More seriously, unscrupulous attackers solicit customers publicly and provide purchasing services, which has caused huge financial loss to business entities. It becomes of great importance to detect the fraudulent in-app purchases in iOS Apps, and then take measures such as confiscating goods to minimize profit loss. In this paper, we propose a system called Payment-Guard to achieve this objective, which designs various features to characterize a purchase from four perspectives including App account behavior, device behavior, IP behavior and union behavior of (App account, device, IP), then conducts detection based on the features. We perform comprehensive experiments based on data collected from “Honor of Kings” App, which is one of the most famous MOBA games in China and allows players to recharge App accounts for virtual currency. Experimental results demonstrated that Payment-Guard can detect 92.2% malicious in-app purchases and with only 2% false positive rate.

Mastering Complex Control in MOBA Games with Deep Reinforcement Learning

We study the reinforcement learning problem of complex action control in the Multi-player Online Battle Arena (MOBA) 1v1 games. This problem involves far more complicated state and action spaces than those of traditional 1v1 games, such as Go and Atari series, which makes it very difficult to search any policies with human-level performance. In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning framework to tackle this problem from the perspectives of both system and algorithm. Our system is of low coupling and high scalability, which enables efficient explorations at large scale. Our algorithm includes several novel strategies, including control dependency decoupling, action mask, target attention, and dual-clip PPO, with which our proposed actor-critic network can be effectively trained in our system. Tested on the MOBA game Honor of Kings, the trained AI agents can defeat top professional human players in full 1v1 games.

Research of the Attractiveness Factors of MOBA Mobile Games Based on Evaluation Grid Method

The purpose of this paper is to explore the game player’s experience and preference for MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) mobile games, and to identify the attractiveness quality factors that affect the MOBA mobile game design. In this paper, Honor of Kings is the subject of discussion and research; qualitative research methods are adopted to go deeper into interviews involving deeper gamers; the attractiveness of the MOBA mobile game is summarized; the evaluation grid is constructed and analyzed, which provides a reference for the subsequent MOBA mobile game design and improvement.

Like a Glass Slipper on a Step-Sister: How the One-Ring Rules Them All at Trial

When a child first hears “glass slipper,” she makes subconscious assumptions. Glass being sparkling conveys beauty. Being fragile it must be dainty, like Cinderella herself. To dance in these fragile slippers, Cinderella must have grace. But dancing for hours in the slippers must be painful. This notion plants a seed of overlooking pain to attain beauty. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung both described the manner in which we think in symbols. In today's research Daniel Kahneman illustrates in Thinking Fast and Slow that we all think in symbols and make subconscious assumptions. Thus symbols and objects make their way into our stories. In literature, one such object is the endowed object, a material object that reverberates with symbolic significance throughout the story. Items such as the glass slipper, the one ring, and the holy grail convey theme, emotion, and character, and even create structural beats. These objects weave their way into trial narratives as well. Examples include the leather glove from the O.J. Simpson case and Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. Trial and appellate attorneys can use the literary concept of endowed objects to identify a key piece of physical evidence that weaves a thread of narrative continuity through the case and resonates in the mind of the judge or juror. My article presents the literary concept of endowed objects, provides examples from literature and from trials, discusses how attorneys can identify and use evidence to create an endowed object, and explores evidentiary and ethical limitations regarding these objects. I examine endowed objects and other symbols in fiction works such as Coretta Scott King Honor Book, Like Sisters on the Homefront, The Hunger Games, 1984, Anna Karenina, Lord of the Rings, The Natural, and Every Time a Rainbow Dies. I also examine the role such objects played in the trials of Lincoln assassination conspirator, Dr. Samuel Mudd, Timothy McVeigh, Orenthal (O.J.) Simpson, and John Wayne Gacy.

An Interview with Marilyn Nelson

An Interview with Marilyn Nelson David Anderson (bio) Marilyn Nelson has been a familiar figure on the American poetry scene since she published her first book, For the Body, with Louisiana State University Press in 1978. The author of numerous poetry books, children's books, and translations, she has received many prestigious awards and fellowships during her long career, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, the 1998 Poet's Award, the Boston Globe/Hornbook Award, the Lion and Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry, and the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize. She has been a National Book Award finalist three times, and her books have been selected three times as Coretta Scott King honor books, and once for John Newbery honors. She has received two NEA creative writing fellowships, as well as a Guggenheim fellowship. From 2001-2006, she was the poet laureate of Connecticut. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1946, Nelson traveled widely in her youth as part of a military family. Both parents were racial pioneers: her father was a Tuskegee Airman, and had a distinguished career as an Air Force navigator and missile control officer, while her mother was often the first African American teacher in many of the school systems in which she taught. Nelson accordingly grew up with a strong sense of familial pride, and an awareness of the broader historical or spiritual significance of daily life, both of which inform much of her poetry. Dominant themes in Nelson's poetry are respect for family, the recovery of African American history, and the search for the sacred in everyday life. Mama's Promises (1985), for instance, uses maternity and motherhood to explore questions about love, responsibility, and the mysteries and ethics of divine creation. In The Homeplace (1991), Nelson uses genealogical research to redefine the meaning of family and reconnect to her ancestry, which includes her mother's family in antebellum and postbellum Kentucky and rural Oklahoma, as well as her father's fellow Tuskegee compatriots. Magnificat (1994) uses a friend's monastic vocation to explore the differences between human and divine love and the tensions between secular and sacred worlds. In Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), Nelson sketches out the remarkably complex and creative life of George Washington Carver—an ascetic humanitarian whose spirituality is directly related to his many artistic and scientific accomplishments. In A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), Nelson writes a crown of sonnets that serves as a ritual of mourning, contemplation of evil, and healing. The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems (2005) contains a pilgrimage to Bahia, Brazil—a center of the Brazilian slave trade—to explore the home of the syncretistic religion of candomblé, and the spiritual legacy of the African Diaspora. In my interview with Nelson, we discussed her family's influence on her writing, her use of poetry to recover history, her development as a poet, and central themes in several of her volumes. David Anderson: My first question concerns your interest in narrative. You write books of poetry that often have extended narratives, whether about family history, George Washington Carver, or most recently, The Cachoeira Tales, which refashions The Canterbury Tales to reflect on the African diaspora. Why does narrative attract you so much? [End Page 383] Marilyn Nelson: I'm interested in stories. I'm interested in history, but I'm also just interested in stories. The epigraph of The Cachoeira Tales is "Life is nothing but stories." I was asked to read my poems at a national convention of storytellers once. The woman who had invited me was apologetic because storytellers don't like to listen to people read on the page. They think you should be memorizing it or just making it up or performing it. She warned me that the audience might not be receptive unless I recited from memory. I said, "That's not what I do. I read." So I read, and afterwards several of the storytellers came up to say that they hadn't realized that poets could be storytellers too. So, I was really honored by that. It's also, I think, what I want to do. I'd like to...

History for Our Children: An Interview with Christopher Paul Curtis, a Contemporary Voice in African American Young Adult Fiction

Christopher Paul Curtis's first book The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 (Delacorte 1995) took the world of Young Adult fiction by storm. Named to the American Library Association's list of Best Books for Young Adults, The Watsons swept more than twenty-five major awards and honors, including the prestigious Newberry Honor Book Award and the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award for African American Writers. His second novel Bud, Not Buddy (Delacorte 1999) seems set to follow the same path. Having also won the Newberry Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award, it continues to receive widespread critical and popular acclaim. Peter E. Morgan: Christopher, your second book, Bud, Not Buddy, has achieved considerable success since its publication. Like The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963, it has won almost every award a young adult book can win, and it has been widely reviewed not only by The Horn Book Magazine and professional publications that one would expect but also in the mainstream adult media like U.S. News and World Report. What does it mean to you to receive this kind of recognition? Christopher Paul Curtis: It's absolutely wonderful, and it's wonderful for a lot of reasons. It's wonderful to get recognition. It's a sort of validation, too, because people figure that if a book wins the Newberry or Coretta Scott King honors, then it's a good book. Writing is such a solitary pursuit--you do it by yourself, and you sometimes think in the back of your mind, Maybe I'm crazy. Sometimes I think, This is a really good story, and other times I read what I have written and think, Oh my God, how could I send this out to anybody? So, you're battling back and forth. And then, when you get recognition like that, it really validates your work. It's a really good feeling. It's great. PEM: It must be good for sales, too. Do you have any idea how many copies of The Watsons have been sold? CPC: Actually, The Watsons has sold over three hundred thousand copies--one-eighty in hardback and one-twenty in paperback. It's been translated into eleven different languages now. The real surprise for me was that the last language of the eleven was Spanish--I would have thought Spanish would have been one of the first. PEM: Do you get international fan mail? CPC: No. I've never gotten a letter from overseas. Most of my letters come from America. It's funny, too, that in Canada, where I live, the book has sold no more than about a thousand copies. It does much better in Germany than in Canada--more than twenty-five hundred copies so far. The translation was up for an award in Germany, the equivalent of the Newberry, and I think that helped it a lot. PEM: Are most of your letters from young readers? CPC: Yes. Young readers and teachers. PEM: How do you respond to them? CPC: You know, at first you are so grateful that somebody is writing to you, that you write long letters back, but after a while there are just so many letters. You want to respond to every single one of them, but, you know, it's impossible. Once I got a letter from a girl who put her picture in with it, and I thought, Oh, that's so sweet, so I wrote back a long letter, and I sent a picture of my family. Well, two days later, letters and pictures from her whole class arrived--for some reason, hers had just arrived first. I couldn't write to every single one of them and send them all pictures, so, I wrote a letter to the teacher and asked her to share that letter with all the other kids. PEM: The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 was the book which allowed you to say good-bye forever to your job as an auto worker at Body Plant No. 1 in Flint, Michigan. Would you say briefly what the story is about? CPC: It's the story of a family in Michigan in 1963. The narrator is Kenny Watson, who is ten years old, and he's got a thirteen-year-old brother who's really hard to live with. …

Shame and Honor in the Book of Esther (review)

Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 303 Reviews the nature of llQPsll cannot be made on internal arguments alone. but must be part and parcel of a more comprehensive theory about the development of the text of scripture. The length of this review gives some indication of how important I consider this book to be for scholars of the scrolls. for text critics. and for all who work on the Psalter. We are indebted to Peter Flint for his diligence and care in presenting this complex and challenging material, and can look forward to many years of lively debate on these issues. Eileen Schuller McMaster University Hamilton. Ontario schuller@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca SHAME AND HONOR IN THE BOOK OF ESTHER. By Timothy S. Laniak. SBLDS 165. pp. 205. Atlanta. GA: Scholars Press, 1998. Cloth. $34.95. Honor and shame are established analytical categories in modem anthropology and have, for some time now. been employed in biblical studies. Timothy S. Laniak has used the rubrics of honor and shame with sound sense to focus a reflection on the social dynamics of the story of Esther. The fIrst chapter introduces the approach and methodological issues. beginning with a brief survey of previous research on the book of Esther. Next, Laniak outlines two patterns in biblical literature, a "guilt and reconciliation " pattern (most common in the prophetic literature, in ritual laws of sacrifice, and in some narrative material), and a "challenge and honor" pattern. This pattern is based on a "crisis of suffering and shame 'without cause'" (p. 9), in which the protagonist faces a crisis and challenge after initial favor, which is reversed by divine intervention and leads to a new status. This pattern can be found in the stories of, for example, Joseph, Daniel. Moses, Job, and Esther. Laniak suggests that because this pattern transcends formal literary boundaries. there is also a corresponding social pattern that mirrors the self-understanding of the community. This gives good reasons for exploring the concepts of honor, shame. and status so central to these stories. The author then goes through a number of biblical terms that are relevant to the understanding of the concepts of honor and Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 304 Reviews shame. This careful analysis and concentrated presentation functions as a lexicographic foundation for the understanding of honor and shame in the Bible and anchors these elusive tenns in the textual material. The introductory chapter concludes with a presentation and critique of honor and shame studies in anthropology and psychology as applied to the study of cultures. The main body of the book is divided into four parts, each treating two chapters of the book of Esther (the fmal part deals with Esth 8-10). Each of these parts corresponds to one movement in the socio-literary "challenge and honor" pattern. The author summarizes the narrative and provides a commentary that focuses on capturing the "structural and thematic centrality of honor and shame." Comparisons are drawn to other biblical stories and to the individual psalms of lament. Anthropological concepts are introduced throughout, interspersed at appropriate points in the analysis in a way that ties in well with the commentary. The theoretical material is integrated critically, with admirable ease and always with priority on the biblical text. Chapter 1, "Context," describes the setting of the book of Esther and introduces the ftrst phase of the pattern, favor. The story begins in the court of King Ahasuerus, richly portrayed. The king's honor is challenged by the disgraceful behavior of his queen, Vashti. Esther, a Jew in the Persian Diaspora, receives unexpected favor by being appointed queen. Referring back to the introduction, the question of binary opposition between honor and shame in the biblical literature is demonstrated. In accordance with the introductory survey on the semantics of honor, the analysis of the king's status is organized according to the categories Substance , Status, Splendor, and Self. The reciprocal dynamics of honor and shame as something that is "fact" (royal splendor, riches, banquets) and also something that is seen by an Other is demonstrated by the analysis of the public responses to each of the meanings of honor: Dependence, Respect , Awe, and Reputation. The movement of Esther...

Evoking the "Holy and the Horrible": Conversations with Joyce Carol Thomas

Joyce Carol Thomas is a poet, novelist, and playwright. Through these three modes of perceiving the world - the poet's spare, sharp-edged wonder; the playwright's cunning orchestration of incident and character; and the novelist's urge to bring us smack-face against life's pain, joy, and recoveries - she evokes dilemmas and struggles which open the way to a better sense of self and often to a glorious personal epiphany. In whatever genre she's keyed to at the moment, Thomas peels back layers of life's complexities by focusing largely on the contradictions, catastrophes, and spiritual triumphs that unfold in a rural African American community. With this community serving as her frame, she constructs lean but expressive portraits of the destructive and redemptive power of love, explores the values and meanings of secular and religious traditions, and lays out stormy initiations for her young black protagonists. Rich in ambiguity and mystery, and steeped in mythical and religious tropes and metaphors, her writing resonates with a wonderfully bracing music. Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the setting for three of her novels: Marked by Fire (1982), Bright Shadow (1983), and The Golden Pasture (1986). Throughout much of her childhood, she was a migrant farm worker, first in Oklahoma and later in the San Joaquin Valley in California, where her family moved when she was ten years old. She traces her love of language and story to the songs and tales of her Mexican co-workers and the expressive rhythms of those who testified at church services. She earned degrees in Spanish and French and taught foreign languages in public schools before pursuing a career as a writer. She has also held positions in English literature and creative writing at Purdue University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Tennessee. In the 1970s, Thomas wrote poetry and plays for adults. Critical acclaim began in 1982 with Marked by Fire, her first novel. In addition to the National Book Award for young-adult fiction, Marked by Fire received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and Booklist's children's Reviewers Choice Award. The title also was listed on numerous best-book lists, including the New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year and the ALA's Best Books for Young Adults. Bright Shadow, the sequel to Marked by Fire, was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Award Book. Awards and honors have continued. Both A Gathering of Flowers, an anthology of multiethnic and multiracial short stories, which Thomas edited in 1990, and Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea (1993), a collection of her poems, were among the titles recommended for children and young adults by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea also received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and was listed as a Notable Children's Book in the Social Studies by the National Council for Social Studies/Children's Book Council joint committee. Joyce Carol Thomas spoke to us by phone from her home in Berkeley, California, in September and December, 1995, and in June, 1996. This interview is a composite of these conversations. Interviewers: Would you share something of your growing up in Oklahoma? Have significant people, events, and places found their way into your writing? Thomas: I grew up in Ponca City, where my family lived on the black side of town. There was a park dividing the black side from the white side, and to get to the white side or downtown you had to walk through that park. For the first several years of my life I rarely went over to that part of town. So you see, this Oklahoma community was a very sheltered place for me. It doesn't surprise me at all that in my writing I am deeply concerned with what happens within a community and how these experiences form a person's vision of the world. The forces within the community interest me more than other circumstances and far more than forces from outside the community. …

The Resilient Child in Contemporary Children's Literature: Surviving Personal Violence

The Resilient Child in Contemporary Children's Literature:Surviving Personal Violence Eliza T. Dresang (bio) Violence—an intense, disruptive action, force, or circumstance—has many faces, takes many forms. The openness of the postmodern, increasingly connected electronic world encourages faces and forms of violent texts for youth virtually unknown in the past.1 In real life, young people encounter sexual abuse or other personal attack from within the family or community. Urban wars join those on remote battlefields.2 Violence, permeating daily existence, accompanies chronic poverty and homelessness. In the United States alone, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, more than 7.1 million children live in poverty. Alcohol and drug abuse make life unpredictable, uncontrollable, and irrational. In contemporary literature for youth, this violence appears in words and emerges in pictures. Books devoid of the idyllic settings and "everything turns out OK" endings that have permeated children's literature for decades demonstrate this radical change. Children are asked to contemplate and try to understand previously excluded segments of their own world or that of their peers. They find acknowledgment in this literature that they, too, may experience some of the dramatic and difficult situations that adults have pretended belong only to them. Perry Nodelman's description of the result of the traditional absence of sexuality in children's literature might stand, as well, for a description of the result of the absence of violence, poverty, and related topics: We produce a children's literature that is almost totally silent on the subject of sexuality, presumably in order to allow ourselves to believe that children truly are as innocent as we claim—that their lives are devoid of sexuality. In doing so, however, we make it difficult for children to speak to us about their sexual concerns: our silence on the subject clearly asserts that we have no wish to hear about it, that we think children with such concerns are abnormal. ("Other" 30) A small group of selected literary works, published by trade publishers in the United States between 1993 and 1996, provides the opportunity to examine texts that seem to break free from widely practiced, limiting conventions in literature for young children. In a departure from the more remote or fantastic violence of the past, each of these books realistically portrays violence as part of a child's immediate environment. These seven books—Davida Adedjouma and Gregory Christie's The Palm of My Heart: Poetry by African American Children (1996), Maya Angelou and Jean-Michel Basquiat's Life Doesn't Frighten Me (1993), Eve Bunting and David Diaz's Smoky Night (1994), Carolyn Coman's What Jamie Saw (1995), Nikki Giovanni and Chris Raschka's The Genie in the Jar (1996), Raschka's Elizabeth Imagined an Iceberg (1994), and Maurice Sendak's We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993)—are each sufficiently complicated to sustain discussion. All of these authors and illustrators have produced award-winning books for children. Among the seven are the 1994 Caldecott Award book, Smoky Night, a 1996 Newbery Honor book and 1996 National Book Award finalist, What Jamie Saw; and a 1997 Coretta Scott King Honor book, The Palm of My Heart. All but one, What Jamie Saw, are picture books in which both visual and verbal elements convey content. Five of the texts unfold in poetry or nursery rhyme. But these books relate to one another most directly through the young age of the implied audience, the thread of real or implied contemporary community or family violence,3 and the portrayal of a resilient child protagonist who successfully survives the violence. By resilience, I refer here not to invulnerability but rather to the ability to "bounce back" when encountering chaotic or potentially chaotic external circumstances.4 The personal violence—the intense, disruptive action, force, or circumstance—experienced by the contemporary literary children differs substantially from book to book. In Smoky Night community violence erupts in the form of an inner-city riot. We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy personifies the violence of poverty and homelessness by showing giant rats chasing parentless children. In The Genie in the Jar and The Palm of My...

The King's Honor and the King's Cardinal

The King's Honor and the King's Cardinal

The King's Honor &amp; the King's Cardinal: The War of the Polish Succession

The King's Honor &amp; the King's Cardinal: The War of the Polish Succession