Muslim–Christian Relations and the Third Crusade: Medievalist Imaginings

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-191
Author(s):  
Clare Bradford
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Islam And Christianity

This article takes as its starting-point the responsiveness of children's literature to socio-political events, considering how contemporary anxieties about relationships between Muslim and Christian individuals and cultures inform three historical novels set in the period of the Third Crusade (1189–92): Karleen Bradford's Lionheart's Scribe (1999), K. M. Grant's Blood Red Horse (2004), and Elizabeth Laird's Crusade (2008). In these novels, encounters between young Christian and Muslim protagonists are represented through language and representational modes which owe a good deal to the habits of thought and expression which typify orientalist discourses in Western fiction. In effect, the novels produce two versions of medievalism: a Muslim medieval world which is irretrievably pre-modern, locked into rigid practices and beliefs against which individuals are powerless; and a Christian medieval world which offers individuals the possibility of progressing to an enhanced state of personal fulfilment. The article argues that the narratives of all three novels incorporate particularly telling moments when Christian protagonists return to England, regretfully leaving Muslim friends. The impossibility of enduring friendships between Muslims and Christians is based on the novels’ assumptions about the incommensurability of cultures and religions; specifically, that there exists an unbridgeable gulf between Islam and Christianity.

scholarly journals Recent Children's Literature In the Arab World

1970 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Lebanese American University
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Large Degree

Books written for children in the Arab World have undergone a good deal of change since the thirties and forties, when Kamel Kaylani produced his pioneer works which achieved a large degree of success at the time.

scholarly journals Along Came Greedy Cat: Exploring the “Ready to Read” instructional reading series 1963-1988 as New Zealand children’s literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kay Hancock
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Instructional Materials ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
School Journal ◽  
Instructional Reading

<p>Ready to Read is a graded instructional reading series that has been provided free-of-charge since 1963 by the New Zealand government for students in the first three years of school. It has therefore been a key part of the reading experiences of New Zealand children for over fifty years. There is a commonly held belief that there is a distinction between instructional reading materials (the materials that are used to help children learn to read) and children’s literature – that the manipulation of text involved in developing instructional materials necessarily detracts from their literary appeal. The Ready to Read instructional reading series, however, was developed with the dual aims of helping children learn to read and want to read.  The series also reflects the vision of the Department of Education of “New Zealand materials for New Zealand students.” The Ready to Read materials were (and are) written and illustrated by New Zealanders, and trialled in New Zealand schools before publication, meaning that teachers and children have input into the materials. The materials include contributions by some of New Zealand’s leading writers for children, including Margaret Mahy and Joy Cowley. They have a unique status in the history of New Zealand children’s books as being among the first picture books for young New Zealand readers, and the very first that acknowledged Māori children as part of the reading audience. Moreover, as a “home-grown” reading series, seeking to reflect the interests and experiences of New Zealand children, the materials provide a unique insight into New Zealand society and changes in social attitudes, in particular the emergence of biculturalism.  While there is a significant body of research into the New Zealand School Journal, little attention has been paid to the Ready to Read materials (which are for younger readers). Price (2004) has written a short history of the early years of the Ready to Read series and McLachlan (1996) has investigated the visual representation of Māori in Ready to Read and the School Journal. This research seeks to fill this significant gap. This thesis explores how and why the series developed as it did from 1963-1988. It investigates the cultural and educational contexts, the literary aspects of the materials, and the beliefs about children as readers that underpinned its development.  The “home-grown” nature of the Ready to Read materials, their literary qualities, their depiction of children’s lives, and the place of the series in the early reading experiences of New Zealand children make it indisputably a significant aspect of New Zealand children’s literature. It is hoped that this examination of the first twenty-five years of the Ready to Read series will be of interest to a wide audience, including educators, publishers, and researchers, and that it may serve as a starting point for further investigation. While this research is of immediate significance to a New Zealand audience, it also has international relevance in its description of an approach to the development of meaningful, engaging instructional texts for beginning readers that is unparalleled in the world.</p>

L'editoria scolastico-educativa e la ricerca storica

2009 ◽  
pp. 503-529
Author(s):  
Elisa Marazzi
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Book History ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Research Area ◽  
International Level ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

- The essay provides a survey of the recent studies on schoolbook publishing in France, a country where the interest in publishing history has favourably combined with the history of education, generating a fertile research area that has evolved over the last thirty years. Some research lines such as textbooks, children's literature, educational periodicals are identified and a review of the recent works on such topics is supplied. As the work by French researchers in the field of book history has been in some ways crucial at the international level, the author wishes to offer a starting point for a reflection on the current developments of the studies on the history of schoolbook publishing in Italy.

scholarly journals Początki nowoczesnej japońskiej literatury dziecięcej

2021 ◽  
pp. 208-222
Author(s):  
Marcelina de Zoete-Leśniczak
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Main Mass ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Representative Work

The beginnings of contemporary Japanese children’s literature In Poland, despite the fact that Japanese literature is very thoroughly researched, described and translated, the section of literature dedicated to children (jidōbungaku), for years remained neglected and marginalized. As a result, it is an area completely undiscovered and unexplored. At the beginning of the article, the key role of education and its development in modernizing Japan is presented. Then, the literature of the first twenty years of the Meiji period (1868–1888) is outlined together with introduction of main mass-published magazines on children’s literature. Among them, it was the periodical “Shōnen sekai” that played an epochal role, so its activity and involvement in shaping the children’s literature of the Meiji period are discussed in detail. In the following chapters, the silhouette of Iwaya Sazanami is presented together with his representative work – a fairy tale (otogibanashi) entitled Koganemaru (boy’s name). This is because Koganemaru is considered the most important turning point in the difficult course of systematising children’s literature in modernizing Japan. This article, probably innovative, by examining the beginnings and the process of almost 40 years of emerging of Japanese children’s literature, will fill an important gap in the study of Japanese literature in Poland and maybe become an essential starting point for its development.

scholarly journals Applying Descriptivist Norms to Fantasy Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (29) ◽  
Author(s):  
Birsanu Roxana
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Preferred Orientation ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Textual Strategies ◽  
Literary System

This paper focuses on the presence in Romania ofJ.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit or There and Back Again as an illustrative example of fantasy, or, more precisely, high fantasy in the Romanian literary system. The translation of fantasy as a component of children’s literature requires compliance with a set of norms and conventions that reflect both the requirements of a particular target language and those connected with the specifics of this category of readers. Having G. Toury’s classification of norms as a starting point, the investigation will attempt to detect the norms that informed translators’ decisions, the extent to which these norms are an emanation of the time of translation production and whether the translators are consistent with the extratextual norms and their own textual strategies. From among Toury’s norms, particular attention will be given to the initial ones, with the goal of identifying the preferred orientation of the target texts either towards acceptability or towards adequacy. The investigation will rely mainly on structures and textual units extracted from the target productions, since the main objective is to unveil repeated patterns of translation behavior likely to suggest mechanisms of norm generation.

Considering Discourse with Children through Animations

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-57
Author(s):  
Seran Demiral
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Philosophy For Children ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Children And Young People ◽  
Children’S Perspectives ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Age Appropriate ◽  
Art Activities

Children’s literature and art activities are not only useful for creativity but also quite functional for education through new understanding in the contemporary perspectives about learning. For instance, philosophy for children is a wide-spread methodology to reveal children’s potentials by building a “community of inquiry” at classrooms. Children’s books and animations can provide a magnificent starting point for those philosophical discussions. However, in many societies, children and young people are still underestimated that the usual point of view about children’s literature used to include ‘softer’ topics, which is likewise to be ‘censored’ compared to literature in general. All products for children have usually function to cultivate new generations according to traditional discourse underlying in society. The essential purpose of this paper is to reveal possibilities to shape traditional discourse into an expanded perspective with children utilizing discussion and critical thinking. It is supposed to analyze the artworks for children in variable ways, by embodying discourse within. In between education and entertainment, cultural products also expected to be age-appropriate. Besides the relation between adult-children distinction and all cultural products, specifically produced ‘for’ children, how children see themselves is directly related to how they interpret cultural products. In this paper, two short animations, Alike, and Ian which were watched together with a group of children in a private secondary school in Istanbul, Turkey, will be analyzed through children’s perspectives, with their expressions.

scholarly journals Along Came Greedy Cat: Exploring the “Ready to Read” instructional reading series 1963-1988 as New Zealand children’s literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kay Hancock
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Instructional Materials ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
School Journal ◽  
Instructional Reading

<p>Ready to Read is a graded instructional reading series that has been provided free-of-charge since 1963 by the New Zealand government for students in the first three years of school. It has therefore been a key part of the reading experiences of New Zealand children for over fifty years. There is a commonly held belief that there is a distinction between instructional reading materials (the materials that are used to help children learn to read) and children’s literature – that the manipulation of text involved in developing instructional materials necessarily detracts from their literary appeal. The Ready to Read instructional reading series, however, was developed with the dual aims of helping children learn to read and want to read.  The series also reflects the vision of the Department of Education of “New Zealand materials for New Zealand students.” The Ready to Read materials were (and are) written and illustrated by New Zealanders, and trialled in New Zealand schools before publication, meaning that teachers and children have input into the materials. The materials include contributions by some of New Zealand’s leading writers for children, including Margaret Mahy and Joy Cowley. They have a unique status in the history of New Zealand children’s books as being among the first picture books for young New Zealand readers, and the very first that acknowledged Māori children as part of the reading audience. Moreover, as a “home-grown” reading series, seeking to reflect the interests and experiences of New Zealand children, the materials provide a unique insight into New Zealand society and changes in social attitudes, in particular the emergence of biculturalism.  While there is a significant body of research into the New Zealand School Journal, little attention has been paid to the Ready to Read materials (which are for younger readers). Price (2004) has written a short history of the early years of the Ready to Read series and McLachlan (1996) has investigated the visual representation of Māori in Ready to Read and the School Journal. This research seeks to fill this significant gap. This thesis explores how and why the series developed as it did from 1963-1988. It investigates the cultural and educational contexts, the literary aspects of the materials, and the beliefs about children as readers that underpinned its development.  The “home-grown” nature of the Ready to Read materials, their literary qualities, their depiction of children’s lives, and the place of the series in the early reading experiences of New Zealand children make it indisputably a significant aspect of New Zealand children’s literature. It is hoped that this examination of the first twenty-five years of the Ready to Read series will be of interest to a wide audience, including educators, publishers, and researchers, and that it may serve as a starting point for further investigation. While this research is of immediate significance to a New Zealand audience, it also has international relevance in its description of an approach to the development of meaningful, engaging instructional texts for beginning readers that is unparalleled in the world.</p>

scholarly journals Humour in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: The Work of Gilles Bachelet

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Muela Bermejo
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Mixed Model ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Construction Type

AbstractThe work of the French illustrator and writer Gilles Bachelet has been recognised through numerous awards, but he is not yet sufficiently well known in the critical community. In this article, the multilevel humour that constructs his work is studied, both from an iconic and a textual perspective, as well as the situational humour and the humour of characters that emerge through metafiction, self-referentiality and heteroreferentiality. For this purpose, the theories of humour in children’s literature and the classifications of types of humour offered by different researchers are used as a starting point, and a mixed model of analysis applicable to Bachelet’s work as a whole is proposed. In addition, the analysis of each of the picturebooks is based on the most recent studies on the components of the current picturebook, such as its narrative construction, type of reading, characteristics and organisation of text and image. In this way, the postmodern features of Gilles Bachelet's works, which make him a crossover author, are revealed.

scholarly journals The Aeneid with Rabbits: Children's Fantasy as Modern Epic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hannah Parry
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Philip Pullman ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
Look Ahead ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Children's Stories ◽  
Cultural Functions

<p>Despite their apparent dissimilarity, children's literature and the epic tradition are often intertwined. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the frequent retelling and repackaging of epics such as Beowulf and the Odyssey as children's books. If there is potential for epic to become children's stories, however, there is also potential for children's stories to become epic, and a number of important works of children's fantasy have been discussed as epics in their own right.  In this thesis, I examine the extent to which writers of children's fantasy can be viewed as working in an epic tradition, drawing on and adapting epic texts for the modern age as Virgil and Milton did for their own times. Looking specifically at key works of British fantasy written post-WWI, I argue that children's literature and epic serve similar social and cultural functions, including the ability to mythologise communal experience and explore codes of heroism that are absorbed by their intended audience. Rosemary Sutcliff's retellings of epic texts for children suggest the ways in which epic can be reworked to create new heroic codes that are a combination of their source material, the values of their new cultural context, and the author's own personal worldview. This potential is further explored through Richard Adams's Watership Down, an animal story that functions in part as a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid with rabbits. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit uses the tension between epic and children's fairy-tale to examine the codes at the heart of Norse and Anglo-Saxon epic, and suggest an alternative that nonetheless allows for the glory of an epic worldview. Both T.H. White and Sutcliff engage with the Arthurian myth and the Matter of Britain in ways that use children's literature as a starting point for national epic. Finally, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman each make use of Milton's Paradise Lost (and, in Pullman's case, of Lewis's earlier work) to produce very different fantasies that each look ahead to the end of epic.  Cumulatively, these books illustrate the manner in which children's texts provide a home for the epic in a postmodern age in which many critics suggest the epic in its pure form can no longer survive. The rise of scientific empiricism, combined with national disillusionment following WWI, has been argued to have left epic's traditional worldview of myth, religion and the supernatural impossible to be used without irony. Children's fantasy, ostensibly addressed to “an audience that is still innocent” (Gillian Adams 109), allows authors to eschew irony in favour of story-telling, and explore ideas such as courage, honour and transcendence that lie at the heart of epic.</p>

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