Literature's Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization
Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children's literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.
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Literature's Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization
Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children's literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.
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Literature's Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization

Literature's Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization

Literature's Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization

Literature's Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization

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Overview

Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children's literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781472577191
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 02/21/2019
Series: Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Louise Joy is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, UK. She is co-editor of The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry (2015) and Poetry and Childhood (2010).

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: The Critical Child
1. Eighteenth-century poetry and the complexity of the child's mind
2. Laughter and the permission to critique

Part II: The Art of Idealisation
3. On seeing: Kate Greenaway's Under the Window
4. On crying: E. Nesbit's The Railway Children
5. On being (bored): Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows
6. On talking: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
7. On loving: Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine Series

Coda

Works Cited
Index

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