Full Description
Children's literature shapes what children learn about the world. It reflects social values, norms, and stereotypes. This book offers fresh insights into some of the key issues in fiction for children, from the representation of gender to embodied cognition and the translation of children's literature.
Connecting classic children's texts such as Alice in Wonderland with contemporary fiction including Murder Most Unladylike, the book innovatively brings together perspectives from corpus linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and human geography. It explores approaches to experiencing fiction, as well as methods for the study of literary texts. Childhood discourses are investigated through the materiality of texts, the spaces that literature takes up in libraries, the cultural history of fiction moulded through performances, as well as reading environments that shape childhood experiences, such as fashion and urban spaces.
Children's Literature and Childhood Discourses emphasizes the crucial link between fictional stories and real life.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction, Anna Cermáková (Lancaster University, UK) & Michaela Mahlberg (University of Birmingham, UK)
1. Sensitive Girls, Purposeful Boys, and Embodied Emplacement, Catherine Olver and Maria Nikolajeva (University of Cambridge, UK)
2. Can Children Read Irony? A Cautionary Tale, Peter Stockwell (University of Nottingham, UK)
3. The Rhetoric of Orphanhood, Marion Gymnich (University of Bonn, Germany)
4. Caroline Hewins and Making Space for Books for the Young in American Public Libraries, Rebekah Fitzsimmons (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
5. Children's Geographies and (Spatial) Literacy, Peter Kraftl (University of Birmingham, UK)
6. Revisioning Lewis Carroll's Alice and their Afterlives through Male Performance, Kiera Vaclavik (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
7. Exploring Representations of Girls and Boys in the Text Printed on Slogan T-Shirts, Marianne McKinley (UK)
8. Discovering What It Means to be Unladylike in Children's Fiction, Anna Cermakova (Lancaster University, UK) and Michaela Mahlberg (University of Birmingham, UK)
9. Gendered Reporting Verbs in the Italian Translation of Harry Potter, Lorenzo Mastropierro (Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Italy)
10. Hegemonic and Counter Discourses of Happiness, Wolfgang Teubert (University of Birmingham, UK)
Post scriptum: Reading Children's Books Aloud, Caroline Radcliffe, (University of Birmingham, UK)
Index
