Toothless Pedagogy? Problematizing Paternalism in Children's Literature and Childhood Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-197
Author(s):  
Marah Gubar
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Childhood Studies

Follow the Child, Follow the Books – Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to a Child-Centred History of Danish Children's Literature 1790–1850

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-212
Author(s):  
Charlotte Appel ◽  
Nina Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Book History ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Book Market ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Point Of Departure

In this article we present the cross-disciplinary methodology of a project on Danish children's literature 1790–1850 that has the child as the point of departure. The project focuses on three contexts in which children and adults interact with books: the home, the school and the book market. Theoretical inspirations have been drawn from book history, children's literature studies and childhood studies, including the concept of agency. A major database maps Danish books aimed at children 1750–1850, making it possible to trace the popularity of titles through reprints and new editions and to follow specific actors (authors, illustrators, printers and so on). Ego-documents by children – for example, letters written by Ida Thiele (1830–1862) – are analysed as sources of information on children's own experiences with books, their use of different media and their interaction with peers, relatives and teachers in relation to reading and books. Finally, we demonstrate how significant changes in form, content and the materiality of books for children can be captured, when following specific books such as E. Munthe's books on history and geography around the communication circuit. The article concludes that a combination of different cross-disciplinary methodologies is essential in a history of children's literature with children at its centre.

Queer Theory's Child and Children's Literature Studies

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 182-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Poststructuralist Theory ◽  
Children’S Fiction ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ◽  
Children's Fiction

In 2002 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson published an essay entitled “what is queer theory doing with the child?,” addressing work in the 1990s by Michael Moon and the late, great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the “protogay” child. Something inappropriate, even scandalous, was their answer, as one might surmise from the accusatory shape of the question. In their reading, Moon and Sedgwick essentialize rather than interrogate the protogay child, such that said child becomes “an anti-theoretical moment, resistant to analysis, itself the figure deployed as resistance” (36). For Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson, queer theory is insufficiently alert to the lessons of poststructuralist theory and especially to the ongoing interrogation of “child” and “childhood.” Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson specialize in childhood studies, and Lesnik-Oberstein is a well-known scholar of children's literature. Her 1994 Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child extends and takes inspiration from Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984), which ushered into children's literature studies a powerful and lasting skepticism about “childhood” and “children's literature.”

Introduction: Children's Literature Otherwise

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Philosophy For Children

Opening with quick readings of A Child’s Guide to Freud (1963) and Communism for Kids (2014), the introduction outlines the topics and concerns of the book and provides a discussion of how theory and philosophy are treated in this context and have been conceptualized more generally. It introduces philosophy for children or P4C and explains what “theory for beginners” means. Also described is the philosophical turn in children’s literature studies, a turn this book both analyzes and encourages. The last section reviews theoretical and critical work on childhood and addresses concerns that theorists and philosophers too often and easily speak for children rather than listen to them. The introduction also makes a case for “wonder” and emphasizes the book’s alignment with childhood studies.

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