Getting Better: Children’s Literature Theory and the It Gets Better Project1

2020 ◽  
pp. 135-152
Author(s):  
Derritt Mason
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Queer Youth ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
A Site

This chapter considers Dan Savage and Terry Miller’s It Gets Better project, an anti-bullying YouTube campaign that launched in 2010 following a rash of queer youth suicides, and argues that this project is a site of convergence for children’s literature and adult fictions. Mason suggests that the circulation and adaptation of cultural texts like It Gets Better across and through multiple genres—what he refers to, after Kathryn Bond Stockton, as a text and/or genre’s “sideways growth”—challenge critics to widen their theoretical lenses for the study of young people’s texts and culture. The book version of It Gets Better engages in a repetitive anxious rehearsal of its own metanarrative of “getting better” and renders the project (im)possible, Mason argues, drawing on Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan. While It Gets Better fails politically, it succeeds nonetheless at generating critical cultural discourse about how adults address queer youth.

scholarly journals The Case of Children's Literature: Colonial or Anti-Colonial?

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 271-279
Author(s):  
Clare Bradford
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
Alphabet Books ◽  
A Site ◽  
Child Readers

Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of children's literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and children's books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose's rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children's literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children's texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.

scholarly journals Ambivalent texts, the borderline, and the sense of nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Michael Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Learning Materials ◽  
A Site

Taking Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” as emblematic of a text historically enjoyed by both children and adults, this article seeks to place the text in the area of what Kristeva defines as the borderline of language and subjectivity in order to theorize a site by which ambivalent texts emerge as such. The fact that children’s literature remains largely trapped in the literary didactic split in which these texts are understood as either learning materials or primers toward literacy, the article situates Carroll’s text in theories of language, subjectivity, and clinical discourse toward are more complex reading of a children’s text.

The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Literature

Poetics Today ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 794
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson ◽  
Jacqueline Rose
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Peter Pan

Children's Literature: Theory and Practice

ELH ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity A. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Literature Theory

scholarly journals Into the Wild Childhood: A Study of Wildness in Three 21st-Century Picturebooks

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Anna Mik
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Maurice Sendak

While the majority of the ‘wild’ children’s literature presents male human char­acters, in the 21st century, there is an increasing tendency to publish texts showing a different kind of wildness. In this article, the author analyses three picturebooks published in the 21st century that feature protagonists other than male and/or hu­man: a wild girl (Wild by Emily Hughes, 2012), a pet dog (Such a Good Boy by Mari­anna Coppo, 2020), and a wild tiger (Mr Tiger Goes Wild by Peter Brown, 2013). She investigates to what extent (if any) non-male and/or non-human wildness in these works differs from the most popular one in children’s literature. The author analyses the concept of wildness in the context of a famous children’s picturebook featuring a wild protagonist, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (1963), and other cultural texts using this motif.

Between Generations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Ford Smith
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Children’S Perspectives ◽  
Friedrich Froebel ◽  
The Many

Between Generations recuperates a tradition of adult-child collaboration in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British children’s literature and culture, charting the emergence of new models of authorship and a growing cultural imperative to recognize the young as active, creative agents. The book examines the intergenerational partnerships that generated pivotal texts from the Golden Age of children’s literature, from “The Pied Piper” to Peter Pan, and in doing so challenges popular critical narratives that read actual young people solely as social constructs or passive recipients of texts. The spectrum of adult-child partnerships included within this book’s chapters make clear that the boundary between fictive collaborations and lived partnerships was not firm but that, instead, imaginative and material practices were mutually constitutive. Adults’ partnerships with young auditors, writers, illustrators, reviewers, and co-conspirators reveal that the agentic, creative child was not only a figure but also an actor, vital to authorial practice. These collaborations were part of a larger investigation of the limits and possibilities of child agency taking place in a range of discourses and cultural venues, from education reform to psychology to librarianship. Throughout, the book considers the many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Friedrich Froebel, who question the assumed authority of adults, who write about children as both passive and subversive subjects, and who self-consciously negotiate, alongside real children, the ideological and ethical difficulties of listening to and representing children’s perspectives.

scholarly journals NILAI MORAL DALAM TOKOH CERITA BUAYA LEARISA KAYELI: KAJIAN SASTRA ANAK [Moral Value in Character of Learisa Kayeli's Crocodile Story: A Study of Children's Literature]

TOTOBUANG ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-329
Author(s):  
DUDUNG ABDULAH
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Sixth Graders ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Scientific Journals ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
The One ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
Descriptive Method

This study aims to discover the moral value in character of Learisa Kayeli's Crocodile story written and developed by Asrif. Literary studies talking about children's literature through Maluku folklore are still not found in scientific journals. Therefore, the theory used in this study is the children’s literature theory of Burhan Nurgiyantoro. The research method used descriptive method of content analysis. This study describes the qualifications and disclosure of the character from the story as an introduction in interpreting the moral values. This story was chosen because (1) it has never been examined using children's literature theory; (2) the important characters are played by animal characters and result in more readers’ imagination compared to stories with human characters; (3) this story is intended for children especially for the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders; (4) it has a complete storyline; and (5) it is printed Maluku folklore written in Indonesian and went through digitalization process. This study concludes that there are seven moral values conveyed by the author in character of Learisa Kayeli's Crocodile story, namely: (1) do not be afraid to defend the truth or to quell tyranny even though life is at stake in order to create a harmonious and peaceful life; (2) appreciate the one who has contributed in (saving) your life in order to establish eternal brotherhood until the end of life; (3) do not disturb the peace of other people's lives so that your lives remain fortune; (4) never give up in trying to do something so that your dreams can be achieved; (5) make good friends with others so that you may be accepted by anyone and anywhere including in any new environment; (6) be patient in solving any obstacles in life so you can cherish other people; and (7) be wise to the surrounding environment in order to create a healthy natural balance so that it can provide benefits for mankind. Kajian ini bertujuan menelusuri nilai moral dalam tokoh cerita rakyat Maluku berjudul Buaya Learisa Kayeli yang ditulis dan dikembangkan oleh Asrif. Kajian sastra yang mengangkat tentang sastra anak melalui cerita rakyat Maluku masih belum ditemukan dalam karya ilmiah. Teori yang digunakan dalam kajian ini adalah teori sastra anak. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah metode deskriptif analisis. Kajian ini mendeskripsikan kualifikasi dan pengungkapan watak tokoh cerita sebagai pengantar dalam menafsirkan nilai moral yang terkandung di dalamnya. Cerita ini dipilih karena (1) belum pernah dikaji melalui  kajian sastra anak; (2) para tokoh penting diperankan oleh karakter binatang sehingga nilai fantasinya lebih tinggi daripada cerita dengan tokoh manusia; (3) cerita ini diperuntukkan bagi anak-anak terutama kelas 4, 5, dan 6; (4) memiliki cerita yang utuh; dan (5) merupakan cerita rakyat Maluku yang sudah dibukukan dan sudah berbahasa Indonesia bahkan sudah mengalami proses digitalisasi. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahwa ada tujuh nilai moral yang disampaikan pengarang dalam tokoh cerita Buaya Learisa Kayeli, yaitu (1) janganlah takut membela kebenaran/menumpas kezaliman meskipun nyawa menjadi taruhannya supaya tercipta kehidupan yang harmonis dan tenteram; (2) hargailah orang yang telah berjasa dalam (menyelamatkan) hidupmu supaya terjalin persaudaraan yang abadi sampai akhir hayat; (3) janganlah suka mengganggu ketenangan hidup orang lain supaya tidak bernasib buruk di kemudian hari; (4) jangan pernah menyerah dalam berusaha supaya impianmu bisa tercapai; (5) berperangailah dengan baik terhadap orang lain supaya kamu bisa diterima oleh siapa pun dan di mana pun termasuk di lingkungan baru sekali pun; (6) bersabarlah dalam menghadapi rintangan kehidupan supaya buah dari kesabaran itu bisa bermanfaat bagi orang lain; dan (7) bersikap bijaklah terhadap lingkungan sekitar supaya tercipta keseimbangan alam yang sehat sehingga bisa memberikan keuntungan bagi umat manusia.

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