Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism

by Arlene Plevin (Contribution by), Bob Henderson (Contribution by), Chuck Chamberlin (Contribution by), Kamala Platt (Contribution by), Karen Welberry (Contribution by)

Overview

The first book-length study of the relationship between children's literature and ecocriticism.

Today's young children are occupied with numerous activities taking place in settings that are isolated from nature or merely simulations of the earth's natural environment. As a result, unless they receive appropriate nature education, many children may never develop a familiarity with and positive attitudes toward the natural world that are so crucial to its preservation. Wild Things: Children's Culture, Ecocriticism examines the ways in which literature, media, and other cultural forms for young people address nature, place, and ecology.

Studies in children's culture and ecocriticism have been largely separate enterprises; Wild Things is the first book to conjoin the two fields. The book provides scholars and teachers with in-depth discussion of particular texts as well as larger historical patterns and theoretical paradigms. Essays focus on classic literary works such as Charlotte's Web and The Lorax as well as series fiction, nature magazines, environmental music and videos, the Muppets and other Jim Henson productions, and Disney's latest theme park, Animal Kingdom. Affording the reader a return to the wild places of childhood—both real and imagined—Wild Things is a first-class exploration of the dimensions used to teach children about ecological systems and the natural world that surrounds them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814330289
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2004
Series:	Landscapes of Childhood Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sidney I. Dobrin is associate professor of English and Director of Writing Programs at University of Florida.

Kenneth B. Kidd is Assistant Professor of English and associate director of the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at the University of Florida. He is the author of Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: Into the Wild	1
1.	"He Made Us Very Much Like the Flowers": Human/Nature in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Children's Literature	16
2.	"Foundation-Stones": Natural History for Children in St. Nicholas Magazine	31
3.	Somewhere outside the Forest: Ecological Ambivalence in Neverland from The Little White Bird to Hook	48
4.	The Wild and Wild Animal Characters in the Ecofeminist Novels of Beatrix Potter and Gene Stratton-Porter	71
5.	Arthur Ransome and the Conservation of the English Lakes	82
6.	E. B. White's Paean to Life: The Environmental Imagination of Charlotte's Web	101
7.	ecoLewis: Conservationism and Anticolonialism in The Chronicles of Narnia	115
8.	Playing Seriously with Dr. Seuss: A Pedagogical Response to The Lorax	128
9.	"The World around Them": The Changing Depiction of Nature in Owl Magazine	149
10.	Still Putting Out "Fires": Ranger Rick and Animal/Human Stewardship	168
11.	Environmental Justice Children's Literature: Depicting, Defending, and Celebrating Trees and Birds, Colors and People	183
12.	(Em)bracing Icy Mothers: Ideology, Identity, and Environment in Children's Fantasy	198
13.	Eco-edu-tainment: The Construction of the Child in Contemporary Environmental Children's Music	215
14.	"It's Not Easy Being Green": Jim Henson, the Muppets, and Ecological Literacy	232
15.	Cartoons and Contamination: How the Multinational Kids Help Captain Planet Save Gaia	254
16.	Disney of Orlando's Animal Kingdom	267
	Contributors	289
	Index	295

What People are Saying About This

Co-Editor of the Ecocriticism Reader - Cheryll Glotfelty

Children's literature is never innocent, for at serious play are ideologies, discourses, and politics vying to shape the future. This inaugural collection of ecocritical essays on children's literature and media fruitfully enlarges the purview of ecocriticism and, in places, challenges its very norms."

Editorial Reviews

Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocritism explores and analyzes those materials that contribute to the ongoing environmental education of children. The essays are well organized, grouped according to period and genre, and cover literature that ranges from the nineteenth century to the present. Because the essays in Wild Things are so engaging and diverse, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to pick up this book and not find something of interest. The collection is both thought-provoking and enjoyable, like the children's literature it explores. Not only does Wild Things stress the importance of early childhood environmental education, but it also suggests that the sympathy that we as a society are trying to instill in out children is in fact already there to some degree.

H-Net Reviews

Spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, from Peter Pan and Charlotte's Web to Disney World and Saturday morning television, Dobrin and Kidd's Wild Things is a cogent and useful examination of children's literature and culture in the contexts of ecocriticsm, ecology, and environmentalism. Its scope and substance will appeal to scholars and teachers at all levels as well as the general public."

Kansas State University - Anne K. Phillips

Children's literature is never innocent, for at serious play are ideologies, discourses, and politics vying to shape the future. This inaugural collection of ecocritical essays on children's literature and media fruitfully enlarges the purview of ecocriticism and, in places, challenges its very norms."

co-editor of The Ecocriticism Reader - Cheryll Glotfelty