Children's Literature Research Articles

Colección Figuritas: Monteiro Lobato em texto, cores e movimentos na Argentina

This article aims to contribute to the study about Monteiro Lobato's children's work in Argentina, from the detailing of the materiality of his publications in the Códex, publishing house in which the author brought light to Colección Monteiro Lobato, as part of the Colección Figuritas, in 1948. To carry out the discussion on the materiality of the text, in addition to consulting primary sources, we bring the reflections of Chartier (1996), Lajolo (2004) and Cavalheiro (1962), among other authors, understanding the importance of Lobato as an author of children's literature in Argentina.

Friendly Ghosts, Horrifying Reality: Female Infanticide in Ranjit Lal's Faces in the Water

Friendly Ghosts, Horrifying Reality:Female Infanticide in Ranjit Lal's Faces in the Water Sietse Hagen (bio) Despite horror being often deemed inappropriate for children, it can be an important genre in portraying the terrors of the real world to young readers. Horror, Jessica McCort argues, "offers young readers...a dreamscape that parallels their reality, sometimes making it easier to cope with the monsters they must face in the real world" (22). Within children's literature, horror allows young readers to face and experience the negative elements of reality through the grotesque in an entertaining fashion. An example of this is Ranjit Lal's Faces in the Water, an Indian children's novel addressing female infanticide through protagonist Gurmi's encounter with the ghosts of his sisters who were killed at birth. The ghosts can be seen as a reference to the 1994 introduction of an Indian government program, the "Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which made it illegal to determine the sex of a foetus unless it was necessary for urgent medical reasons" (Vaze). Despite this act, female infanticide and feticide remain a serious concern in Indian society. Comparing India's male/female ratio to the worldwide natural ratio, around sixty million women are assumed missing in India (Hundal). Allie Dichiara informs us that, in India, "[t]he concept of daughters as 'more expensive' has been normalised throughout history." Lal's novel addresses this issue directly when Surinder Aunty tells Gurmi that girls "are quite useless and then you have to get them married and all that nakhra and expense.... And who will look after us when we're old? Our fine, sturdy sons of course!" (88). The Diwanchands, Gurmi's family, commit female infanticide for economical reasons. Through the Diwanchands, Lal shows that when feticide becomes unavailable, this leads to female infanticide, signaling that the issue of child murder due to sex bias remains an issue in India despite the 1994 act. Titas Bose and Ahona Das describe that "[t]he framework of horror which is at times a mirror, and at other [sic] a foil to the mortal society, is susceptible to be used as a tool for social satire." Thus, the horror genre creates a space for social critique due to its connection to reality and its ability to fictionalize the most frightening aspects of it. Although female infanticide is horrifying and deemed inappropriate for children, Lal manages to make the topic approachable for young readers by subverting horror tropes. Anurima Chanda describes that in Lal's novel, "[i]nstead [End Page 78] of repulsion, [the ghosts] evoke friendship. Instead of fear, they evoke laughter. In a strange way, they allow children to sneak a peek into the society's decomposing centre without really experiencing the full horrors of the situation" (162). Through this subversion of horror tropes, Lal manages to make the terrors of reality age-appropriate for young readers, which he also does with the happy ending of this novel. Happy endings in scary contexts "can function to help young readers...cope with frightening things in reality, translating those things into a fantasy world where fear is rendered manageable" (McCort 14). Therefore, by subverting horror tropes and adding a happy ending, Lal manages to make the topic of female infanticide accessible to child readers. The ghosts in the novel play a significant role as they lead Gurmi to break away from the normalization of sex bias. At the start of the novel, he demonstrates a negative view of girls by saying that he has no sisters, adding: "[G]od forbid—never!" (Lal 3). Gurmi demonstrates the earliest stages of internalized misogyny, while the adults are examples of the most extreme kind as they participate in female infanticide. Only when the sisters show Gurmi what could have been through the well, cleverly playing with the trope of the wishing well, Gurmi changes his mind and comes to the realization of how wicked reality is. By subverting the common interpretation of ghosts and making them friendly and humorous, the narrative allows Gurmi to realize the horrors of societally ingrained sex preference and form his own opinion about it. Faces in the Water brings...

Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature by Laura Soderberg (review)

Reviewed by: Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature by Laura Soderberg Ellen Butler Donovan (bio) Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature, by Laura Soderberg. U of Massachusetts P, 2021. Vicious Infants is not a book that discusses children's literature. However, scholars who take a childhood studies approach will find that this book enriches our understanding of how childhood was viewed and used in the early nineteenth century in the US. In four dense chapters, Soderberg pairs literary and extra-literary texts to examine childhoods that were viewed as threatening to social stability, that is, texts that depict children in ways that reveal social and political anxieties. While this idea is not new or radical, challenging the assumption that all childhoods were White, protected, and pastoral continues to be necessary. In the first chapter, "Bound Children: Sidestepping the Social Contract in Apprenticeship Literature," Soderberg reads William Apess's autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), and Harriet Wilson's semi-autobiographical novel, Our Nig (1859), through apprenticeship contracts. Soderberg traces the history of legal minority back to William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in order to highlight the status of the child as unable to control one's body and therefore unable to enter into contracts, with the exception of indenture, in which the future adult retrospectively agrees to the terms of the contract (a kind of prolepsis). Soderberg suggests that this same prolepsis is characteristic of the bildungsroman, using this similarity to juxtapose the literary texts and the apprenticeship documents. The ostensible goal of both the bildungsroman genre and apprenticeship documents is to move individuals from dependence (public dependence in Soderberg's examples of apprenticeship indenture and in the situations Apess and Wilson depict) to independent, socially assimilable adults. Yet Soderberg highlights the ways in which indenture both in the apprenticeship documents and the narratives by Apess and Wilson prevented independence, forcing the eventual adults to remain dependent on public welfare. In the cases of Apess and Wilson, the indenture that both protagonists experience does not result in the conventional ending of a bildungsroman—an independent self fully integrated into society. Instead, due to their racial identities, both protagonists exist outside the social organization. The second chapter, "The Incorrigible Child: Juvenile Delinquency and the Fearful Rise of the Child Self," examines records from the New York House of Refuge (essentially juvenile prison) and child-rearing [End Page 192] advice from domestic manuals by Amos Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Heman Humphrey, and John A. Gere. Soderberg again traces back the use of the phrase "incorrigible child" to Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and further posits that in antebellum America, the term became an assertion "beyond interrogation by any other parties" (51). She concludes, "Under this model, criminalized children defy scrutiny because their bodies have been marked as unreadable" (51). Soderberg's argument in support of this conclusion illustrates a weakness that pervades the work: though Soderberg references specific sources, her discussion is too cursory to be convincing. More useful, though unsurprising, is her observation that inscrutability was most often ascribed to immigrant children and urban child laborers in factories who were beyond the reach of parental oversight. Of most interest in this discussion is the analysis of the distinction between a child's interiority and exteriority. Drawing on the domestic manuals, Soderberg shows that corporal discipline, when necessary, was designed to shape the child's interiority. However, the profiles of inmates in the House of Refuge repeatedly describe the interiority of "incorrigible" children as "inscrutable," consequently out of reach of any disciplinary influence and therefore dangerous. In the third chapter, "Prodigious Births: Black Infancy, Antebellum Medicine, and the Racialization of Heredity," Soderberg juxtaposes Sir Jonah Barrington's "Skinning a Black Child" (1827) and Henry Clay Lewis's "Stealing a Baby" (1843), comic stories that circulated widely within medical discourse and which sought to separate White paternity from Black bodies, with Susan Paul's The Memoir of James Jackson, the Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months (1835), thought to be the first biography by an African American...

Mustafa Ruhi Shirin as a new stage in Turkish children's literature

Mustafa Ruhi Shirin as a new stage in Turkish children's literature

Trump and Children's Literature

Donald Trump has overlapped with children's culture since the early 1990s, yet since his presidency, his appearance has become ubiquitous in children's literature. To survey Trump's controversial presence throughout such literature is to witness the ways contemporary publishers grapple with American presidential history, indoctrination, politics, and even supply and demand.

Edward van de Vendel: Author–Netherlands

Abstract: "There is a kind of addictive primal pleasure in writing and telling stories. I am addicted to children's literature. After all those books, I still don't understand how someone writes something down, or draws something, and then suddenly it's there: a book. That's magical. I can't really analyze what I'm doing. In the end I feel that there is a fire burning inside me and that I must be near it. It might have something to do with a childlike delight in the magic of writing. The wonder of it."

Christian and Universal Values in Children's Literary Works

Ovo istraživanje donosi sintezu iskazanih vrijednosti tekstova hrvatskih osnovnoškolaca u literarnim radovima poezije, proze i igrokaza na natječaju za književno i likovno stvaralaštvo učenika osnovnih škola u Republici Hrvatskoj pod nazivom Susreti hrvatskoga dječjega duhovnoga stvaralaštva »Stjepan Kranjčić« skraćeno nazvan »Dječji Kranjčić«. Analizirane su vrijednosti u prvih deset zbornika najuspjelijih radova natječaja (2012. – 2021.). Provedena je kvantitativna i kvalitativna analiza podataka. Za potrebe kvantitativne analize vrijednosti rabljen je protokol koji je sadržavao sedam klasificiranih kategorija vrijednosti i njihove potkategorije. U postupku obrade podatka kvantitativnom analizom rabile su se statističke procedure određivanja frekvencija i postotaka, utvrđen je broj objavljenih dječjih književnih radova u svih deset zbornika prema godini objavljivanja, kao i zastupljenost kršćanskih i univerzalnih vrijednosti u dječjem literarnom radu te učestalost pojedinih vrijednosti u potkategorijama. Kvalitativnom analizom sadržaja dječjega književnog stvaralaštva identificirane su vrijednosti koje se promoviraju u trima navedenim književnim rodovima. Na uzorku od 599 objavljenih radova (poezija 270, proza 275, drama – igrokaz 54), zaključuje se da su osnovnoškolci najviše iskazali duhovne vrijednosti poput pobožnosti i svetosti te istinske vjere, što potvrđuje istraživačku hipotezu, dok su na drugom mjestu preferirane univerzalne vrijednosti: ljubav, obitelj, domovina, dobrota. Istraživanje upućuje na odličan primjer suradnje škole i udruge, koje djelujući zajedno mogu imati iznimnu ulogu u razvoju pozitivnih vrijednosti u odgoju hrvatske mladeži.

War and Displacement in Children's Literature

War and Displacement in Children's Literature

Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden Age by Paige Gray

Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden Age by Paige Gray

Consumable Reading and Children's Literature by Ilgim Veryeri Alaca (review)

Consumable Reading and Children's Literature by Ilgim Veryeri Alaca (review)

Вербалізація спонукальної модальності в прозових творах для дітей: семантика і прагматика

Introduction. Children's literature is a special type of literature that combines aesthetic, didactic, and educational functions. The language of works for children is as closely related as possible to the implementation of these functions, which are aimed at the formation of a complete, independent, empathic personality. Imperative sentences play an important role at all stages of the development of a child's language competence. Purpose. The article aims to investigate the peculiarities of the verbalization of the imperative modality in prose for children, to determine which (non)specialized syntactic means for expressing the imperative modality are emphasized in prose works for children, the conditions of their actualization, which modifiers of the semantic-syntactic structure are used. Methods. Descriptive and interpretive methods were used to achieve the goal, and partly quantitative methods were used. Results. The Ukrainian language has developed a set of specialized and non-specialized means of verbalizing the imperative modality. The current importance of this or that syntactic means of verbalization of motivational modality in prose language for children depends on the age of the child. The most used one in the language of prose for children is the semantic-syntactic structure with a verbal predicate expressed in the imperative form. Prose works for children also use imperative nominative, vocative sentences and imperative sentences with a non-verbalized predicate of the adverbial and object type, but numerically, their use is infrequent. Besides, the use of simple imperative sentences with homogeneous members and the use of composite imperative sentences are also infrequent. Sporadic use of complex sentences or with different types of linking help to gradually develop the child's cognitive and evaluative abilities. Personal pronominal noun, modifiers (filler words, particles, addressing personally, exclamations) in imperative sentences strengthen / weaken its variant meaning, add additional shades of meaning to the main meaning of the statement or a separate component. The results of the research will be useful for editors of prose works for preschoolers and children of primary school age. Conclusion. In the language of prose for children, only specialized means of verbalization of the imperative modality are used, among which the semantic-syntactic structure with a verbalized predicate expressed in the imperative form is the most used. Imperative nominative, vocative sentences and imperative sentences with non-verbalized predicate of adverbial and object type, simple imperative sentences with homogeneous members, composite imperative sentences are sporadically used. We see the prospects for further scientific research in the following: to investigate the verbalization of the imperative modality on a wider empirical material, to trace the dynamics of the actualization of specialized and non-specialized means of verbalization of the imperative modality in prose works for children of different ages and in spontaneous children's speech, to propose a classification of children's expressions of the imperative modality.

The Application of Domestication and Foreignization in English-Chinese Translations of Children's Literature: A Case Study of the Secret Garden

The Application of Domestication and Foreignization in English-Chinese Translations of Children's Literature: A Case Study of the Secret Garden

Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children's Literature and Culture ed. by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys (review)

Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children's Literature and Culture ed. by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys (review)

Little Women at 150 ed. by Daniel Shealy (review)

Reviewed by: Little Women at 150 ed. by Daniel Shealy Laureen Tedesco (bio) Little Women at 150, edited by Daniel Shealy. UP of Mississippi, 2022. (Series: Children's Literature Association Series) Little Women at 150 is a delightful exploration of the enduring legacy of Louisa May Alcott's best-known work, offering more of the biographically grounded, textually attentive scholarship that has brought Alcott's work into university classrooms, scholarly editions, and interdisciplinary journals. This collection of eight essays and a meticulously researched introduction commemorates Little Women's sesquicentennial in 2018: "Little Women at 150, while championing Alcott's success, helps to reveal the layered complexity and significance of one of the United States' most well-known novels" (Shealy 16). The collection features eight new essays by ground-breaking Alcott scholars who, in addition to analyzing Alcott's life and works in critical articles and books, have produced critical editions, written biographies, edited the author's letters and journals, collected her anonymous and pseudonymous "thrillers," and republished contemporary reviews and reminiscences: "Utilizing various critical approaches, the essays are not focused on a particular topic or theme. Instead, they are richly eclectic, revealing the complexity and sophistication of Alcott's most famous work" (11). The essay collection begins and ends with reflections on Alcott's literary achievements: editor Daniel Shealy's carefully constructed case for Little Women's enduring significance and Gregory Eiselein's well-reasoned closing essay asserting Alcott's merits as a major author worthy of an ongoing place in literary canons, single-author courses at universities, and continuing recognition and study as a writer whose entire body of work offers much to admire. Shealy's introduction charts in compelling detail the immediate and long-term success of the novel Alcott so reluctantly started. Shealy draws on his own and other contributors' decades of work with primary sources to chronicle the book's publication history, early reviews, and eventual status as "classic" by the early twentieth century (8). Shealy identifies what Beverly Lyon Clark has called "[t]he afterlife of Little Women" "as its story became a part of the culture of the United States and new generations discovered their own version of the March sisters" through Broadway, musical, film, and TV adaptations of the book (9). Shealy frames the story of the novel's remarkable fan base—including cultural icons "Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J.K. Rowling" [End Page 205] (8)—with the author's own astonishment at its success. "Not only," he observes, "did she seem to view 'juvenile' fiction as inferior, but she also initially resisted writing the novel that continues to endure after 150 years since its initial publication" (5). He also traces the growth in scholarly approaches to the novel as serious literature, beginning with feminist approaches in the mid-twentieth century, to demonstrate that Alcott scholarship now represents a strong, multidisciplinary body of academic inquiry, textual editing, critical evaluations, biographical investigation, and pedagogical approaches, with a range of theoretical underpinnings. In the book's closing essay, Eiselein adds further detail to Shealy's already impressive introductory survey of Alcott studies, highlighting the groundbreaking work that feminist scholars did in the 1980s and 1990s to justify admission of Little Women into "paracanons" of beloved texts (182). Subsequent decades of feminist and other theoretically informed work—much of it by contributors to this volume—gave Alcott's reputation the heft it now enjoys. Eiselein measures Alcott's reputation, scholarly treatment, enduring reputation and influence on literature history, canonicity, and "sizable and varied body of writing," as well as literary judgments regarding her works' artistic excellence and aesthetic importance (184). Eiselein concludes, Alcott's work matters. And it is a testimony to her ambitious imagination, her creative energy, and her talent that her work continues to resonate with and shed light on our contemporary situation. Teaching Little Women as a significant literary masterpiece and teaching Alcott herself as a major author in the classroom but also treating her as a major author in our critical work, both academically and broadly public, make that point clearly and powerfully. (200) While the essays' critical approaches, topics, and themes vary, they reveal intriguing intersections...

Problems of Perception the Image of the Nenets People in the Northern Text of Russian Literature for Children

Problems of Perception the Image of the Nenets People in the Northern Text of Russian Literature for Children

Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens, 1991–2017. By Andrea Lanoux, Kelly Herold, and Olga Bukhina. Russian History and Culture, vol. 23. Paderborn, Germany: Brill Schöningh, an imprint of Brill, 2022. xxiv, 256 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $130.00, hard bound.

Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens, 1991–2017. By Andrea Lanoux, Kelly Herold, and Olga Bukhina. Russian History and Culture, vol. 23. Paderborn, Germany: Brill Schöningh, an imprint of Brill, 2022. xxiv, 256 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $130.00, hard bound.

Influenze digitali sull’albo illustrato: metamorfosi artistiche e sfide di “iper-lettura”

The influence of electronic and digital codes on children's literature represents one of the most interesting aspects of the artistic and literary productions of the last decades. Signs of the profound and irrevocable change that has taken place in children’s literature and in the ecosystem to be read of the electronic age are particular picturebooks, which reflect how even the printed book has drawn from the multilinear structures of the digital and from the expressive codes of the screens. In the context of this cultural mutation, the present contribution explores two illustrated books representative of the media technology mutation and integration, which, on the one hand, maintain the stability of reading on a traditional printed book, on the other, they contain the challenges of a "hyper-reading" experience.

어머니와 유아교육 교수자가 엮어낸 그림책 육아 모임의 실현 과정 및 변화

Objectives The purpose of this study was to explore the realization process and change of picture books parenting meeting weaved by mothers of young children and a professor of the Dept. of early childhood education.
 Methods The study participants were three mothers who participated in the picture book parenting meeting and a professor of the Dept. of early childhood education who was in charge of parent education and children's literature education for more than 10 years at a university. Data were analyzed for researcher's observation, individual and group interviews, discussion during picture books parenting meeting.
 Results According to the results of the study, First, it appeared as establishing a foundation for cooperation and implementing between mothers and a professor of the Dept. of early childhood education : 1) starting from worries and expectations, 2) meeting, and establishing a positive relationship, 3) weaving together based on sharing and practice, 4) feeling a sense of accomplishment, and the expectation of another beginning. Second, it appeared as the change in the experience of picture books parenting weaved by the study participants was shown to be a change through the mother's experience of picture books parenting and a change through the professor's support for picture books parenting.
 Conclusions It is hoped that this case weaved by mothers and a professor who have shared interest and concerns about picture books parenting will be a little help to the educational lives of parents and educators who have similar concerns and expectations.

Children 's literature between the rhythmic structure and the semantic structure A poem of farewell to "poet Nasser Lohishi" model-

The present study deals with some rhythmic aspects and their significance for children literature. This has been approached within a framework entitled: “Children literature between the rhythmic and semantic structure: case study of farewell song for the poet "Nacer Louhichi". The study has touched upon the different rhythmic structures such as phonemic, metric and rhetoric, and their relationship with semantics. Within this perspective, these structures were deemed as subsystems included within the text which is considered as a holistic system. Afterwards, the research attempted to find a thread that links the various rhythmic structures with the general meaning of the text, and reveal the functionality of these structures to fit children’s intellectual and bodily capabilities as well as their psychological and social predispositions.

CHILDREN IN IQBAL’S POETRY

Children are the future of any nation, so parents, teachers, and writers are responsible for their better education, proper care, and proper care, so they must be familiar with the psychology of children Literature helps to nurture the new generation. The unique place that children's literature has in the world today is only the result of the efforts of writers and poets.
 The importance of children's etiquette cannot be denied. Literature not only instills in children feelings of joy and happiness but also enlightens them with the light of life and high values ​​and gives children high ambitions to face the difficulties that may arise in life to come. Allama Iqbal has a special feature in the creation of children's literature. He was not only a great poet but he was also a good prose writer. He has also written excellent poems for children. Iqbal has certainly given some moral lessons through these poems but he does not teach ethics directly. There is a poetic motive in the poems. They do not allow their poems to be simple and simple as to make them feel uninteresting. This article tries to find out what Iqbal wrote for children in our social life. What are the effects?