Children's Literature

Children’s Literature Between the Covers Professor Kimberley Reynolds Newcastle University Recorded Books™ is a trademark of Recorded Books, LLC. All rights reserved. Children’s Literature Between the Covers Professor Kimberley Reynolds Executive Editor Donna F. Carnahan RECORDING Producer - Ian McCulloch COURSE GUIDE Editor - James Gallagher Design - Edward White Lecture content ©2011 by Kimberley Reynolds Course guide ©2011 by Recorded Books, LLC 72011 by Recorded Books, LLC Cover image: © Shutterstock.com #UT179 ISBN: 978-1-4640-1045-3 All beliefs and opinions expressed in this audio/video program and accompanying course guide are those of the author and not of Recorded Books, LLC, or its employees. Course Syllabus Children’s Literature Between the Covers About Your Professor/Introduction.........................................................................4 Lecture 1 Puritan Beginnings and Legacies: Paragons, Prophets, and Perdition..................................................................................6 Lecture 2 Inventing the Fictional Child ........................................................11 Lecture 3 The Child in Nature .....................................................................16 Lecture 4 New Worlds in Childhood I: The World of Imagination .................21 Lecture 5 New Worlds in Childhood II: The Nursery and the School ............27 Lecture 6 The Child in the City: Respectable Urchins...................................33 Lecture 7 Childhood and Modernity: The Early Twentieth Century...............39 Lecture 8 Fantastic Childhoods I: Encounters with the Self...........................44 Lecture 9 Fantastic Childhoods II: Children Save the World..........................50 Lecture 10 The Changing Child in the Changing Family.................................56 Lecture 11 Coming of Age: Fiction for Teens..................................................62 Lecture 12 Lost Children ...............................................................................68 Lecture 13 Child Hating and Dystopian Fiction...............................................73 Lecture 14 You Can BE Harry Potter: The Child and the Electronic Narrative................................................................78 Children’s Books Cited in Lectures.......................................................................84 Course Materials .................................................................................................90 Recorded Books ...................................................................................................96 3 About Your Professor Kimberley Reynolds Kimberley Reynolds is Professor of Children’s Literature at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. She has BA degrees from both C.W. Post College in Long Island and Sussex University in the United Kingdom, where she was also awarded her master’s and Ph.D in nineteenth-century literature. Photo courtesy of Kimberley Reynolds Professor Reynolds has specialized in children’s literature studies since the 1980s and helped to establish the discipline as an academic subject in the United Kingdom and internationally, particularly through her work for the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (as well as serving on the board she served two terms as president). She has also served on the trustees’ committee of the Victoria and Albert’s Museum of Childhood in London for more than a decade, and she was a founding mem- ber of the steering committees for both the United Kingdom Children’s Laureate and Seven Stories: The Centre for Children’s Books. Professor Reynolds has lectured extensively in the United Kingdom and internationally and published several significant monographs as well as contributing to journals and edited collections. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) was awarded the Book Award by the Children’s Literature Association in 2009. It considers the contribution children’s literature has made to cultural thought and looks at the impact of new technologies on Palgrave Macmillan writing and illustration for children. Her current research 7 focuses on progressive and left-wing children’s literature published in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century and its relationship with the modernist movement. Introduction As long as there have been children there have been stories for children and strategies for using stories both to teach and to entertain the young. The fact that every kind of story ever produced for or read by children is encom- passed by the term “children’s literature” makes this the largest single area of literary study. When you consider that this includes story forms such as folk and fairy tales and nursery rhymes that have their roots in preliterate epochs, those developing in tandem with today’s new technologies, includ- ing electronic texts, fan fiction, and computer games, and everything in between, something of the magnitude of the discipline begins to emerge. 4 There are also children’s versions of every genre, medium, and format, and writing for children often includes illustrations and novelty features such as cut outs, pop-ups, and movable devices such as flaps, pull-tabs, and volvelles (rotating disks) that enable scenes to be transformed. It is, in other words, a vast and varied area of study. How is it studied? Where “adult” literature is usually broken into specialist areas such as individual periods, genres, critical approaches, and authors, children’s literature courses and histories are usually expected to give a sense of the origins and development of the field, paying attention to all of these aspects as well as issues specific to the history of childhood and children as readers. This is demanding, because it requires wide-ranging knowledge of literary traditions and techniques, critical approaches, and historical contexts. But it is also exciting, not least because so few areas of children’s literature have been studied in any depth, meaning that even those new to the field have the opportunity to contribute to debates and scholarship. An additional reward of studying children’s literature is that it illuminates aspects of ourselves, our children, and the cultures we inhabit. Because we were all once children and the children we were continue to exist within us, encountering as an adult books or other materials read as a child often provides insights into the children we were. This knowledge is not just of personal interest; stories are key sources of the images, vocabularies, attitudes, structures, and explanations we need to contemplate experience, and they are used to teach values, manners, attitudes, and ideologies as well as information. Studying examples of writing for children from different periods makes it possible to compare ideas about and aspirations for children, education, and society through time. Identifying change and continuity in cultural attitudes is one of the orga- nizing principles for the fourteen topics that make up this course. Each uses a particular topic or theme to track significant developments in children’s literature. Together the topics also cover the many different kinds of materials published for children, from picture books and poems through Young Adult (YA) novels and online fictions. To gain the most from the course you will want to read a good number of these primary texts as well as the secondary reading recommended at the start of each set of course materials. Because the course covers a wide historical span and many different aspects of publishing there is no one critical work that can serve as a textbook. You may, however, find it helpful to purchase a general refer- ence work such as Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Pritchard’s The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (1984) or The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, edited by Victor Watson (2001). Free digital versions of many of the older primary materials can be found online. Although some of the secondary reading is out of print, it is all readily available secondhand through online suppliers, and most libraries will be able to order copies for you as well. 5 Lecture 1 Puritan Beginnings and Legacies: Paragons, Prophets, and Perdition The Suggested Readings for this lecture are Patricia Demers’s From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children’s Literature to 1850, chapters 2 and 3, and Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, chapter 4. There is much debate about what children’s literature is and when it began. Outside of academia, a commonsense under- standing of children’s literature prevails: children’s literature is literature created to be read by children. The problems begin when you start to ask questions such as “Which children?” and “When?” and “What about books that were not written for children but were read by them?” or “Where does that leave books that were once read by children but are now only read by adults, usually as part of academic courses?” These are all important questions that will be explored at different points in the lectures, but ultimately this course takes a prag- matic approach to defining children’s literature. The books and materials discussed all feature in histories of children’s literature because even if they were not originally intended for children, at some point they were read by and published for children. Being published is the second criterion for a work to be considered

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