Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Beyond The Hobbit: J.R.R. Tolkien’S Other Works For Children, Janet Brennan Croft

Journal of Tolkien Research

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is best known to the world as the author of the classic fantasies The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In his professional life, he was a superb philologist, a skilled translator, the author of a seminal essay on Beowulf, and a contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary. But Tolkien was also a father who loved to make up stories for his four children, write them down, and in many cases, as we’ve seen in the exhibit at the Morgan, illustrate them himself. Tolkien was an enthusiastic amateur artist with a unique style, loved ...

Macabre Upbringings: A Look Into Identity In Mort By Terry Pratchett And The Graveyard Book By Neil Gaiman, Cody Thomas

Toyon Literary Magazine

Graduate Program Application: English Studies

Otherwise, N/A

Comics In Action: A Reflection Of The Dominant Narrative In World War Ii, Spencer Gutierrez

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

In this paper, I argue that the propagandized use of comic books during World War II promoted views among Americans which contributed to antipathy towards Americans of Japanese and German descent. More generally, the goal of the essay is to highlight the importance of comic books as a reflection of the times – they simultaneously influence and are influenced by society’s dominant ideas – and promote the further study of such material. I examine the text and art from three comic book covers dated from 1942-1943. An analysis of these selections suggests that comic books depicted Axis soldiers as savage and ...

The Holistic Power Of Young Adult Books, Donna Lynn Miller

The Montana English Journal

Young adult books like The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller carry a healing power when readers experience their pause and ponder moments. Because they impose reflection time, Pause and Ponder Moments reinforce reading as a deliberate and patient process. Imposing time to pause and think through points and concepts enables readers to truly grapple with content in meaningful ways. Pause and Ponder Moments also inspire attributional retraining and option awareness, an alternative to simply accepting the status quo. These moments carry promise for enriching how we read the world, how we respond to others, and how we live ...

Reputation And Rurality: Using A Montana-Authored Text To Talk About Agency And Language In The Secondary English Classroom, Catherine Dorian

The Montana English Journal

This article offers curriculum as well as rationale for teaching Debra Magpie Earling’s Montana-based novel, Perma Red. I begin with my own experience teaching the novel as it stumbled into my lap as and meandered its way into my rural classroom, where Earling’s language challenges students to deconstruct and further understand issues in agency pertaining to sexual assault and consent. Then, I explain methods and strategies I use to teach language and close-reading to my twelfth grade students while they read this novel, my aim being to make teaching this unit as accessible as possible for all Montana ...

Everything Is Relative: Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow (Aunt Fanny) And Sarah Leaming Barrow Holly (Aunt Fanny's Daughter), Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

For more than forty years Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow's name – or, rather, that of her pseudonym, "Aunt Fanny" – remained before the public. In the 1850s and 1860s, she published five quirkily-titled series combining humor, moral instruction, and social awareness. By the 1870s and 1880s, her name was associated with children's charities and with club activities and literary salons. When she died in 1894, one obituary characterized her both as an author whose children's books "delighted the grandfathers and grandmothers of the present day" and as "a social star, known to everybody as 'Aunt Fanny.'" Yet even though ...

"She Had Ceased To Offer Her Stories For Publication": Louise M. Thurston And The Unfinished Charley Roberts Series, Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

One of the unsolved mysteries of series fiction is that of Louise M. Thurston, a promising author who wrote part of a series about siblings for Lee & Shepard -- then, apparently, just stopped writing. Thurston's brief career covers the four years between 1868-1872 and intersects with two significant trends in 19th-century children's publishing, the growth of Sunday-school libraries and the practice of issuing children's books in series. Her career illustrates in microcosm the markets for beginning writers, and its early termination raises questions about some of the problems they might have encountered. Entwined with Louise's history is ...

African American English And Urban Literature: Creating Culturally Caring Classrooms, Erin E. Campbell, Joseph J. Nicol

#CritEdPol: Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies at Swarthmore College

Language and literacy are a means of delivering care through consideration of students’ home culture; however, a cultural mismatch between the predominantly white, female educator population and the diverse urban student population is reflected in language and literacy instruction. Urban curricula often fail to incorporate culturally relevant literature, in part due to a dearth of texts that reflect student experiences. Dialectal differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) and a history of racism have attached a reformatory stigma to AAE and its speakers. The authors assert that language and literacy instruction that validates children’s lived ...

The Best Children's Picture Books Of The Year In Spanish, Bank Street College Of Education. Children's Book Committee

The Center for Children's Literature

An annotated list of the best children's books in Spanish published or translated in 2018. In English and Spanish.

Spanish title: Los mejores libros infantiles in Español.

Probing The Promise Of Dual-Language Books, Lisa M. Domke

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Because dual-language books (DLBs) are written entirely in two languages, they have the potential to help readers develop multilingual literacy skills while acting as cultural and/or linguistic windows and mirrors. However, the ways in which publishers choose words when translating, format languages, and represent cultures have implications for readers in terms of identity, readability, and language learning. This content analysis of 69 U.S. Spanish–English dual-language picturebooks published from 2013–2016 investigated trends in DLBs’ cultural, linguistic, formatting, and readability factors. It also determined these trends’ relationships with publisher types, original publication language, and author and character ethnicity ...

Epic Adolescence: Contemporary Adolescence In Philip Pullman’S His Dark Materials, Chloe Felterman

Master's Theses

To find the truth of a societal construct or phenomena, it can help to look at the world of fiction and fantasy. Though this idea may seem ironic or counter-intuitive, one will find that fictional literature can reveal the working order of its respective society. Philip Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, uses and manipulates the traditional constructs of the genre to reflect and re-imagine the concepts of adolescence of the late-20^th and early-21^st centuries. Eleven-year-old protagonist Lyra Belacqua and subsequently her cohort, Will Perry, reveal the complications and difficulties modern American and British adolescents experience ...

The Audience Of Siblings, Genevieve Weaver

The Kabod

Literature has the unique ability to create an environment where one can address specific issues and hard questions in a comfortable way and at a relevant level. Children’s literature specifically plays a valuable role at a crucial time in the development of children and through this is privy to being used to explore the issues that most children deal with. In reference to the importance of children’s literature acting as a mirror for children, Sims Bishop stated that “literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection, we can see our own lives ...

Cultural And Narrative Shifts Of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature In Hawthorne's Wonder Book For Girls And Boys, Kristen Clark Brandt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century ...

Book Review: Of Deeper Magic: The Theology Behind The Writings Of C.S. Lewis. By Donald T. Williams., Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

Deeper Magic: The Theology Behind the Writings of C.S. Lewis is both exciting and engaging in its exploration of Christian thought in general and Christian themes in particular, found in the fictional and nonfictional works of C.S. Lewis. This book would sit comfortably on the shelf with other first-rate Evangelical Christian interpretations of the works of individual Inklings, such as Ralph Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth or the works of Matthew Dickerson including his Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C.S. Lewis. Like the authors ...

Desire In The Bildungsroman: Construction And Pursuit Of An Ideal Self Through The Ideal Other, Ethan Watson

Honors Theses

The Bildungsroman, or “novel of education,” has remained popular since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. I examine this novel, as well as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Walter Moers’s Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures, focusing specifically on the relationships between the three male protagonists and the women that they encounter throughout their lives. Using the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, literary critic René Girard, and feminist philosopher Judith Butler, I draw parallels between and contribute to the scholarly conversation of all three works (or in the case of Moers's recent fantasy, Rumo, begin the critical conversation). All three protagonists mirror the women that they encounter, creating visions of ideal selves that they strive to become. The characters’ progress and relationships, though different, all exemplify Lacan’s Mirror Stage theory, as well as the theories of desire in Girard and Butler; the latter two theories take Lacan’s ideas further and contribute to my comparison of characteristics in these three coming of age novels. I argue that, no matter the length of their journey or the final results of their relationships, successfully completing the Mirror Stage leads the protagonists to become their ideal selves

A Critical Inquiry Approach To Teaching Young Adult Literature, Steffany Comfort Maher

Dissertations

This dissertation presents a critical inquiry approach to teaching young adult literature in English language arts classrooms. Critical inquiry is derived from critical theory and critical pedagogy approaches, as well as pragmatic philosophies of inquiry. The author shows from convincing examples that a critical inquiry approach to teaching empowers students to ask meaningful questions about both what they are reading and the world they live in.

Chapter One: Methods of Teaching Young Adult Literature: Past, Present, and Future is an introduction to critical inquiry and the teaching of young adult literature. Chapter Two: Critical Inquiry in Teaching Young Adult Literature ...

Treehouses: Civilizing The Wildness Of Men And Nature, Courtney Mckinney

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

In this paper, I explore how treehouses operate symbolically in tandem with culture. Through an analysis of British and American print culture, I argue that the treehouse building project became bound to boyhood at the turn of the twentieth century as the naturalist movement spread and youth organizations embraced treehouses as part of their vision for the development of boys. Parents and youth leaders intend for treehouse projects to build self-reliance, independence, imagination, and courage in their boys. Congruously, this activity associated with a child’s personal growth takes place in an actual growing organism. I analyze how treehouses juxtapose ...

The Unexpected Alliance, Chase Clark, Roman Penney, Olivia Matlock, Jacob Davis, Carter Kilpatrick

United States Race and Childhood Fiction

An Unexpected Alliance, which is set in the United States during WWII. The main character of our book is an adventurous seven-year-old girl named Betty whose father is fighting in the war. To help her father win the war, Betty sets off one day to go ‘scrapping’ for metal. Along the way, she meets an African American boy named Stanley who is also out ‘scrapping’ to help his brother who is away at war. Despite their societal differences, the unlikely duo combines their resources to not only find scrap metal to help their loved ones, they also develop a friendship ...

Sky's Limit, Cheyenne Pearson, Caleb Dockery, Kristen Elliot, Lucas Gallon, Houston Nichols

United States Race and Childhood Fiction

Sky’s Limit is about a 5-year-old biracial girl named Sky, growing up during the Civil Rights period. As she reaches the age of understanding, Sky begins to wonder why her mom cannot join her and her dad on their adventures. One day, her dad takes her to the ice cream shop and Sky realizes that no one else looks like her, nor do the other moms look like her mom. She eventually questions her dad about why her mom can never get ice cream with them. Her dad then reaches for her hand and begins to describe the racial ...

What Are Slaves?, Sarah Yarbrough, Sami Solberg

United States Race and Childhood Fiction

What Are Slaves? is about an eight-year-old, biracial boy named Danny who visits a historical antebellum era plantation with his mother. While observing the now present day museum, a picture of slave children working in a field catches Danny’s eye. Curious and having never learned about slaves, Danny inquires to his mother about what the children his age are doing. Danny’s mother gives him an explanation of what slaves are and how they ended up in their situation. Going from one photo exhibit to another, Danny asks his mother for reasons regarding the slaves’ appearance, workload, and education ...