scholarly journals The Evolvement of the Israeli Grandmother – As Reflected in Children’s Book Illustrations

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Nitsa Dori

Gender and ageism as mirrored in illustrations of grandmothers in Hebrew children’s books (1930-2020), shed light on the Israeli reality, which shows the world’s portrayal of grandmothers as sometimes empowering and sometimes discriminatory. This article draws from the fields of the visual arts, gender studies, sociology, and culture, and emphasizes the power of illustration in children’s literature as an activistic tool for changing social and familial awareness among young receivers. The grandmother (and, recently, also the grandfather) is a popular character in children’s literature. The article will present models which shape the consciousness of children’s book illustrators regarding old age with the aid of many visual examples. This article will enable deeper understanding of the gender-based messages and effects of visual interpretation. This study can serve as a tool for educators and parents, to help children develop critical, independent, and value-based thinking. The article concludes that in today’s books, grandmothers appear more connected to advanced technology than ever. The illustrators of today’s children’s books connect with the model of the new grandmother and draw her wearing jeans and without wrinkles. In parallel, we also see traditionally-portrayed grandmothers in certain illustrations in recent books, from a post-feminist, rather than stereotypical, approach.

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Joosen

Compared to the attention that children's literature scholars have paid to the construction of childhood in children's literature and the role of adults as authors, mediators and readers of children's books, few researchers have made a systematic study of adults as characters in children's books. This article analyses the construction of adulthood in a selection of texts by the Dutch author and Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner Guus Kuijer and connects them with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent concept of ‘childism’ – a form of prejudice targeted against children. Whereas Kuijer published a severe critique of adulthood in Het geminachte kind [The despised child] (1980), in his literary works he explores a variety of positions that adults can take towards children, with varying degrees of childist features. Such a systematic and comparative analysis of the way grown-ups are characterised in children's texts helps to shed light on a didactic potential that materialises in different adult subject positions. After all, not only literary and artistic aspects of children's literature may be aimed at the adult reader (as well as the child), but also the didactic aspect of children's books can cross over between different age groups.


Bibliosphere ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
E. V. Engalycheva

The article is devoted to the history of Siberian regional children's book publishing. The author has collected theoretic-practical opinions of historians, bibliologists, publishers and booksellers, librarians and bibliographers, psychologists and sociologists, which purpose is to generalize and reveal regularities of books' flow for children. V. G. Belinsky, L. N. Tolstoy, F. G. Tol’, N. V. Chekhov developed the first concepts of children's book. N. K. Krupskaya, V. A. Sukhomlinsky studied the «core» of the children book repertoire. V. G. Sopikov, B. S. Bondarsky reviewed children's literature of the 19th century in their bibliographic works. The author allocated some organizational components using formal-logical, comparative-historical and structural-typological methods. The first block is related to studying such definitions as «children's book», «children's literature», «editions for children», «a circle of childhood reading», «the repertoire of children's books», their typological signs. The presented concepts are investigated according to tasks, which children's editions solve. S. G. Antonova and S. A. Karaichentseva touched issues of children's literature typology in their publications. The second block of literature reveals the children's book development in Russia in various periods of its formation. I. E. Barenbaum, A. A. Grechikhin, A. A. Belovitskaya studied general fundamentals of the book's history, while A. Ivich, L. Kohn, I. Lupanova considered the history of children’s books. The third block is devoted to printing and art features of the children's book design, activity of universal and specialized publishing houses to distribute literature for children. The fourth block explains such category as «reader - library», considers techniques of work with children's book, offers methodical recommendations for teachers and tutors. Readers’ activity is examined as well. The author analyzes interests, factors, incentives and aims influencing childhood reading. Dissertation researches disclose the regional specifics of children's book publishing in 1980-2013, confirm the considered subject relevance. The historical, comparative, formal and logical analysis carried out by the author will be useful both the specialists in publishing and editorial affairs, researchers studying the history and development of the children's book, historians, and teachers in the educational process of such courses as «Publishing and Editing», «Children's Literature», «Book Science». The author concludes that the children's book has been studied in different periods of its development in the context of numerous aspects, directions and components, which makes it possible to reveal the special patterns of its existence.


2020 ◽  
pp. 82-99
Author(s):  
Nina L. Panina ◽  

The aim of this article is to analyse the transition period in the history of illustrating children’s educational books on the material of Russian-language publications. It is the period in which the function of an intermedial representation gradually develops from emblematic to encyclopedic and narrative-figurative images. This process is related to the literary history of children’s books and their genre transformations. In the last third of the 18th century, children’s literature in Russia was formed as an independent direction with its special goals, and the basis for further search for specific methods of children’s book design, including educational ones, was laid. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the children’s book had a typical European visual design and continued the trends inherited from the 18th century: translations, borrowings, and revised texts in publications often copied illustrations rather than made new ones. A new stage came at the end of the 1820s, when Russia was actively developing independent children’s literature, and professional authors and criticism appeared. It was the time of the pedagogical experiments of Vasily Zhukovsky. This article does not claim to analyse Zhukovsky’s pedagogical activity comprehensively, but this activity is significant for the subject-matter of the study. In his pedagogy, Zhukovsky went to a new level when searching for intermedial ways of transmission of the universal coherence of phenomena, the systemic representation of knowledge about the world, and the ideas of the world as a system. The search, though much slower, was also observed in contemporary children’s books. The integration of cognitive and didactic functions in the Russian-language children’s book of the 18th century resulted in a mix of different principles of illustration in one publication. These principles are: (1) emblematic: the title, image, and text form a three-part structure; (2) encyclopedic: the sheet contains separate numbered images of the same type of objects excluded from the visual context; (3) narrative: the plot, expressive and figurative, including caricature, illustrations are readily used in an educational book due to their persuasiveness. Each of these principles has its own ways of displaying coherence. An encyclopedic illustration shows an object in a series of similar ones, in an enumeration, shows the structure of the object. An emblem gives its symbolic and allegorical interpretation. A narrative illustration shows its functions and its involvement in causal relations, depicting the environment of events and objects. The children’s book of the studied period tends to integrate all these ways. While the emblem as an independent intermedial genre degrades, certain elements of the emblematic tradition are actively borrowed by new forms of publications. The emblem gives the European book of modern times the most important intermedial tools for displaying universal coherence, the world as a system. The change of the epochs leads to an inevitable blurring of the meaning of the emblematic sign. The transitive nature of the analysed period is expressed in the search for a new intermedial form of coherence, similar to the lost emblematic bimediality of the text and illustration in terms of effectiveness. In the search for such a form, encyclopedic publications that claimed to be all-encompassing use the emblematic and narrative principles of illustration. In turn, the narrative illustration, driven by a similar desire for inclusiveness, consistency, and universality, absorbs the emblematic and encyclopedic principles.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanne Pearce

Greetings Everyone! There are only a few news items for the fall issue: International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Announces  List of 100 Children’s Books in Arabic "Here is a selection of 100 children’s books in Arabic published in various countries of the Arab world. This selection reflects the dynamism of a sector that has truly taken off in the past twenty years, with the publication of a wide range of titles whose quality is often recognised by international awards."Finalists Announced for the 2017 Canadian Children’s Book Centre AwardsThe CCBC has announced the finalists in for their annual book awards. This includes the $30,000 TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. See the CCBC website for a full list of finalists."So you want to get Published?" SeminarThe Canadian Children's Book Centre is hosting a seminar for aspiring children's book authors on November 4, 2017 at 10:00 AM at the Northern District Library in Toronto, ON.  Details are found on the CCBC website.Vancouver Children's Literature Roundtable (VCLR) The VCLR, announced the 2017 Information Book Award Shortlist. The shortlist can be found on the VCLR webiste. The winner will be announced in November 2017.Wishing you bright fall days!Hanne Pearce - Communications Editor


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Africa Hands

The year 2014 was a watershed one for bringing awareness to the issue of diversity in children’s literature. The late author Walter Dean Myers wrote a stirring opinion piece for the New York Times about the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s (CCBC) report revealing that of the thirty-two-hundred children’s books published in 2013, only ninety-three were about black people.


Author(s):  
Shelley Hales ◽  
Nic Earle

Dinosaurs Don’t Die, claimed the title of Ann Coates’ 1970 children’s book. Coates’ prose, and the charming illustrations by John Vernon Lord which accompanied it, wondered what would happen if the antediluvian monsters from the Crystal Palace came back to life. In fact, the prehistoric creatures had already refused to die: first resurrected by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Richard Owen in the early 1850s they had survived the 1936 fire to become Sydenham’s only remaining display. The monsters have lived on, both on a set of South East London islands, but also in many children’s books from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. In this article I track how the Crystal Palace monsters fit into the evolution of more general representations of extinct creatures in children’s books and exhibitions over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


Author(s):  
Valeriia Pitenina

The 19th century is called the “golden age” of a children’s book. At this time, a variety of children’s literature appeared, first of all in Britain. The model of a decorated book are the books of Kelmscott Press. However, it was precisely at this time that a series of children’s books with a modest design at affordable prices, such as the so-called “one-penny” series “Books for the Bairns”, emerged. Ideologist and permanent editor of Books for the Bairns William T. Stead was a well-known journalist, founder and editor-in-chief of periodicals, public figure, child rights defender and a fighter against child prostitution. In 1912 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but scandalous reports, imprisonment, and his interest in spiritualism made W. Stead’s im- age controversial. The concept of the series, created by Sted, is based on a combination of an adapted simplified literary translation and a detailed step-by-step visual story that accompanies the text. The chief illustrator and visual co-author of W. Sted was the Irish artist B. Le Fanu (Brinsley Le Fanu, 1854–1929). For B. Le Fanu, the illustration of the series was the biggest art project. At his time, B. Le Fanu was known for the illustrations to the works of his father — Sheridan Le Fanu, one of the founders of the Irish mystical novel. They have the characteristic features of the Victorian era. Making illustrations for children’s books, B. Le Fanu does not lose their fantastic nature, but combines them with a realistic drawing. Each cover of the series represents one of the main characters of the book. A simple but vivid picture, one or two characters on the cover, a landscape or interior outlined by several elements — that’s what the covers by B. Le Fanu were like. None of them are decorated with patterns or ornamental details. The artist consistently implemented the concept of simplicity and clarity suggested by W. Sted, but not primitiveness. The best volumes in the series are his illustrations of L. Carroll’s “Alice’s in Wonderland” and M. Servantes’s novel “The Adventures of Don Quixote”. The “Books for the Bairns” series, although not exquisitely designed and illustrated, has become a model for children’s literature publishers for half a century and inspired the appearance of similar series of cheap children’s books in Western Europe and also Russia and Ukraine.


2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Ramesh Nair

Children's literature serves as a powerful medium through which children construct messages about their roles In society and gender Identity is often central to this construction. Although possessing mental schemas about gender differences is helpful when children organize their ideas of the world around them, problems occur when children are exposed to a constant barrage of uncompromising, gender-schematic sources that lead to stereotyping which in turn represses the full development of the child. This paper focuses on how gender is represented in a selection of Malaysian children's books published in the English language. Relying on the type of content analysis employed by previous feminist social science researchers, I explore this selection of Malaysian children's books for young children and highlight some areas of concern with regard to the construction of maleness and femaleness in these texts. The results reveal Imbalances at various levels Including the distribution of main, supporting and minor characters along gendered lines and the positioning of male and female characters In the visual Illustrations. The stereotyping of these characters In terms of their behavioural traits will be discussed with the aim of drawing attention to the need for us to take concerted measures to provide our children with books that will help them realize their potential to the fullest.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maj Asplund Carlsson ◽  
Johannes Lunneblad

Title: Where “the wild things” are: An author of children’s books on a visit to the suburbsAbstract:Few studies have been carried out on children’s literature from a post-colonial perspective. In this article, we look closer at four picture books recently published in Sweden with the purpose of giving children from urban areas patterns of identification. The aim of our study is to see how the ‘suburb’ is articulated as a multi-accented sign. Three themes are elaborated in our analysis, i.e. loneliness and alienation, drug abuse and misery as well as small business occurrence. We also discuss the consequences for children in early years of an encounter with a distorted or alienated view of suburban culture.


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