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This book explores the myth of Persephone and Demeter as it informs the development of a long discourse about civilization, the development of children, child psychology, and fantasy literature. The pattern in the myth of girls who descend into underworlds and negotiate a partial return to the earth is a marked feature of girls’ literature, and the cycle also reflects the change of seasons and fertility/death. Tracing the parallel between the myth and girls’ literature enables an understanding of how female development is mourned but deemed necessary for the reproduction of culture. Blackford looks at the function of toys in children’s literature as a representation of the myth’s nar...
The author analyzes the way the girls discuss pleasure in becoming "the eye" of the reader, use film to decode the genres of literature, master forms such as fantasy and Gothic, describe the differences between reading and viewing films, and identify only with animal rather than human characters. Blackford intertwines the vivid voices of her girl respondents with her own story of moving beyond her feminist and multicultural assumptions of how children are shaped by the stories we tell in literature. This breakthrough text presents surprising findings about how girls appreciate literature and what they enjoy about reading.
Frances Hodgson Burnett published numerous works for an adult readership, but she is mainly remembered today for three novels written for children: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). This volume is dedicated to The Secret Garden. The articles address a wide range of issues, including the representation of the garden in Burnett's novel in the context of cultural history; the relationship between the concept of nature and female identity; the idea of therapeutic places; the notion of redemptive children in The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy; the concept of male identity; constructions of 'Otherness' and the redefinition of Englishness; film and anime versions of Burnett's classic; Noel Streatfeild's The Painted Garden as a rewriting of The Secret Garden; attitudes towards food in children's classics and Burnett's novel in the context of Edwardian girlhood fiction and the tradition of the female novel of development.
During the late Victorian period, Charles Darwin's theories took the world by storm, and the impact of evolution on research into the developing human mind was impossible to overlook. Thereafter the study of children and childhood became a means to theorize, imagine, and apply the concept of evolution in a broad range of cultural productions. Beginning with the watershed Victorian era, From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel examines the creative transformation these theories underwent as they filtered through the modern novel, especially those that examined the mind of the child. By examining the connection between authors and trends in child psychology, au...
How often does a novel earn its author both the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Harper Lee by George W. Bush in 2007, and a spot on a list of “100 best gay and lesbian novels”? Clearly, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning tale of race relations and coming of age in Depression-era Alabama, means many different things to many different people. In Mockingbird Passing, Holly Blackford invites the reader to view Lee’s beloved novel in parallel with works by other iconic American writers—from Emerson, Whitman, Stowe, and Twain to James, Wharton, McCullers, Capote, and others. In the process, she locates the book amid contesting literary traditions while simult...
In 100 Years of Anne with an "E" The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables, Holly Blackford has brought together an international community of scholars who situate L. M. Montgomery's novel in its original historical and literary context, discuss its timeless themes, and explore its aesthetic and cultural legacy across time and place.
Sisterhoods concentrates on portrayals of female relationships - communities, friends, lovers, sisters, daughters, mothers and enemies - and examines the positioning of the subject in different media for both male and female consumption.
This book investigates the reappearance of the 19th-century dream-child from the Golden Age of Children's Literature, both in the Harry Potter series and in other works that have reached unprecedented levels of popular success today. Discussing Harry Potter as a reincarnation of Lewis Carroll's Alice and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Billone goes on to examine the recent resurrection of Alice in Tim Burton's Alice, and of Peter Pan in Michael Jackson and in James Bond. Visiting trends that have emerged since the Harry Potter series ended, the book studies revisions of the dream-child in texts and films that have inspired mass fandom in the twenty-first century: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, E.L. Ja...
Through the mysteries and myths of Christmas and Easter, families balance the values of receiving and giving, of growth and sacrifice. Each aspect of the Santa myth, from his slide down a chimney to his big red suit, plays a part in a child's imagination. Through their offerings of milk and cookies and their letter writing, children bring their relationship to Santa into developing attitudes toward giving and receiving gifts. The Easter Bunny story, with its ritual egg hunt and baskets of brightly colored candy, is explored in terms of life and its possibility of growth. In these examples, Clark shows how children play an active role in constructing family rituals and cultural reality, since their willingness to make the stories their own helps to renew the traditions.
A look at what makes L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables an international classic.