Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Evolution Of The Child Character With Learning Differences, Mary Viera

Honors Program Theses and Projects

In this paper, I will analyze the various representations of learning disabilities in selected children’s literature from the early twentieth century to recent literature published in the last decade. In the typical American classroom specific learning disabilities account for about 20% of students. It is the largest classified group to receive services in special education, and also the broadest: “Learning disabilities are disorders that affect the ability to understand or use spoken or written language, do mathematical calculations, coordinate movements or direct attention” (NIH, 2022). I will use the term “learning differences” as it encompasses all children who learn differently …

Castles And Curses: An Analysis Of Speech Acts And Stereotype Threat In Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle, Jennifer Peña

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes significant moments and selected excerpts from Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, focusing on the protagonist Sophie’s character development and uses of magic through speech in relation to stereotype threat and speech act theory. This thesis connects recent scholarly conversations about stereotype threat to the metaphor of Sophie’s spoken magic as the means by which she establishes her own identity and reclaims power over her life. This thesis considers Jones’s reflections about connections between fantasy writing and reality, as well as the potential significance of those connections for children whose experiences are reflected in fantasy works …

More Than Midnight Feasts?: A Gastrocritical Reading Of Enid Blyton’S Malory Towers, St. Clare’S And The Naughtiest Girl In The School Series, Rebecca Broomfield

Dissertations

Food is fundamental to life. It is also fundamental to culture; through our production, manipulation and consumption of foodstuffs, the way in which we eat has amassed a range of rituals and rules. This suggests that food can be used to indicate more than mere biological need. Food and foodways are a common occurrence throughout literature, not least children’s literature. This thesis applies gastrocriticism as a paradigm to investigate the use of food and foodways in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, St. Clare’s and The Naughtiest Girl school series. Gastrocriticism is an emerging form of literary criticism that considers the complex …

Kids, Culture, And Queerness: The Progression Of Lgbtq+ Representation In Children's Media, Sarah Stevens

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Historically, popular media has functioned as a window into society’s ever evolving idea of normalcy. Children’s popular media, which contains elements of both entertainment and didacticism, is further burdened with the responsibility of influencing the perspectives of upcoming generations. This truth is particularly salient for the LGBTQ+ community, who have faced consistent misrepresentation or utter erasure from children’s media in the recent past. While there have been marked improvements in both the quality and quantity of queer representation in children’s media since 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges case, there is still a significant need to acknowledge intersectional queerness and queer gender …

Children’S Literature At Fifty: Pedagogy Under The Covers, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Like so many scholars of children’s literature, I came to children’s lit- erature through teaching. Trained as a Victorianist, I saw a gap in my department’s course offerings and somewhat naively offered to fill it with a children’s literature course, banking on my work on childhood in the Victorian novel and my pedagogical skills to carry me through. The Children’s Literature Association and Children’s Literature were my mentors during those years—as they continue to be—teaching me how to teach and think about children’s literature both as a genre and as a course of undergraduate study.

Francelia Butler’s entrée into the …

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Girlhood In The Creation, Content, And Consumption Of Victorian Children’S Literature, Betsy Barthelemy

English Honors Projects

The Golden Age of (British) Children’s Literature was famous not only for the proliferation of fiction it hosted, but also for how much of that work featured young heroine protagonists. Starting with the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and examining two other fantasy works compared with three realistic children's novels from this half-century period, this project elucidates the differences between these genres and examines how authors used the characteristics of each to empower their heroines. It argues that these fictitious heroines influenced real-world readers to create progressive futures by providing examples of rebellious girl characters finding happy endings.

Despite Controversy, #Ownvoices Is Here To Make A Difference, Shannon Steffens

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

When author Corinne Duyvis created the #OwnVoices hashtag on Twitter in 2015 as a way to recommend diverse books written by diverse authors, she could not have imagined it would spark a movement. Six years later, #OwnVoices is still being discussed in the world of fiction publishing and continues to push for increased diversity in books, authors, and the industry itself.

This paper explores the impacts the movement has had on the industry, both positive and negative. While critics argue the push for #OwnVoices books can limit and potentially harm authors, I have come to the conclusion through my research …

Emmie And The Enchanted Orchid: Portraying Positive Disability Representation In Children's Media, Adrianna Waters

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Disability representation in media and storytelling is often negative or inaccurate, with disability narratives equating disability to evil or lesser than abled bodies. The harmful representation is especially prevalent and dangerous in children’s media as the depiction of characters with disabilities may be children’s first introduction to disability, and thus the portrayal is likely to stay with them, especially as stories for adults continue to perpetuate the inaccurate representation of disabilities. “Emmie and the Enchanted Orchid”: Portraying Positive Disability Representation in Children’s Media seeks to examine the harmful portrayal of disabilities in children’s media while also recognizing how disability can …

Mirrors Of Our Own: Multiracial Representation In Children’S Picture Books, Kiana Foster-Mauro

Honors Scholar Theses

The United States multiracial population is a fast-growing portion of our population. As the multiracial population grows, so does the need for multiracial representation within books. This study analyzed the representation of multiracial individuals in children’s picture books for ages newborn-8. I identified 75 board and picture books published in the United States between the years 2009 and 2019 that feature mixed race characters. The identified texts were analyzed in a critical content analysis using a framework based upon Critical Race Theory. Through this framework, I examined how multiracial characters in the texts are portrayed, the power dynamics, and what …

Decolonizing Children's Literature: Diversity & Representation In Six Scholarly Journals, Camryn Carwll, Kathleen Fricke, Shannon Montgomery, Shannon Solley, Samantha Walsh, Gabrielle Halko

English Student Work

Research on children's publishing shows that children's literature remains an overwhelmingly White, cisgender, heterosexual, and abled field. The same can be said about the scholarship of children's literature, but little research has been done to measure representation and diversity within the discipline. Our collaborative research team (five undergraduate research assistants and one faculty member) analyzes data from six children's literature journals over a 10-year period; using criteria from Lee & Low's Diversity Baseline Survey and the Cooperative Children's Book Center at UW-Madison, we measure how much of the published scholarship in recent children's literature journals can be considered "diverse." Finally, …

Tomboys Are Girls, Too!: A Study Of Sibling Relationships In Caddie Woodlawn, Julia G. Kicinski

English Seminar Capstone Research Papers

Readers can understand the sibling relationships present in Carol Ryrie Brink’s novel, Caddie Woodlawn, by studying the main character’s tomboy personality. Many scholars read this character through a feminist lens, treating her solely as a fictional character. However, this paper approaches the character from a nonfictional perspective to study how Caddie as a tomboy relates to her strong relationship with her brothers. This paper takes the definition of “tomboy” into account, as well as the psychology behind the development of both strong and weak sibling relationships, to determine whether Caddie’s tomboyism developed because of her strong relationship with her …

Family Influences And Intersections: Adelaide F. Samuels Bassett And Susan Blagge Caldwell Samuels Marcy (Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels), Deidre Johnson

English Faculty Publications

A number of women who created children's series came from writing families – generally, mothers and daughters (like the two Elizabeth Stuart Phelpses) or sisters (like Julia A. Mathews and Joanna Hone Mathews). Adelaide F. Samuels and Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels offer a somewhat different example of this category in that they were sisters-in-law rather than biological relatives. Both women wrote professionally for only a short period: Susan Samuels is also among those authors who produced only one series before abandoning the genre. (Adelaide penned two and a standalone sequel.)

Talent, Tensions, And Tragedy: The Life And Writings Of Sarah E. Chester Logie, Deidre Johnson

English Faculty Publications

Demographically, Sarah E. Chester (who also wrote as Sallie Chester) shares several traits with other women who created girls' series. A minister's daughter, she lived in the Northeastern United States and had several family members who also wrote for publication. Like several of her counterparts with close associations to the clergy, she worked primarily with religious presses. And, like many married series authors, she found the shape of her life affected by her husband's actions and decisions – in her case, quite drastically. Although her fiction has distinctly religious elements, a number of Chester's stories are more notable for the …

Swift’S Satire And Joyless Adaptations: An Examination Of Problematic Children’S Editions Of Gulliver’S Travels, Katherine M. Kline

Longwood Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Seeing The Human Face: Refugee And Asylum Seeker Narratives And An Ethics Of Care In Recent Australian Picture Books, Debra Dudek

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

While working on the final stages of this essay, I went to a local children’s bookstore to look for a retelling of The Tempest to assist the eleven-year-old in my life with a drama audition. The audition required him to memorize the monologue in which Trinculo finds Caliban on the beach and asks, “What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive?” (2.2.24–25). The owner of the shop—who knows my field of research and advises me when new books arrive that she thinks would interest me—asked whether I had seen the latest Armin Greder book, The Mediterranean, …

“That Terrible Bugaboo”: The Role Of Music In Poetry For Children, Michael Heyman

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Adventures With Animals Big And Small, Emily Allen, Marcus Blandford, Shannon Brennan, Brennen Keen, Amanda Timm, Tara Penry, Sarah Obendorf

English Literature Student Projects and Publications

The purpose of this project is to produce a short collection of out-of-print children’s stories that would be suitable for first grade level readers. Stories selected for the collection fit the theme of being seasonally themed and include animals as main protagonists. Under the guidance of Dr. Tara Penry, the class searched children’s magazines from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to find stories that would be relevant and interesting to today’s elementary schoolers.

Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

This article considers how recent narratives about Vietnamese refugees engage with the Vietnam War’s visual archive, particularly iconic photographs from the war and ensuing “boat people” crisis, and contribute to present-day discourses on American militarism and immigration. The article focuses on two texts, a National Public Radio special series about a US naval ship (2010) and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again (2011), which recounts a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage. By refiguring famous photojournalistic images from the war, the radio series advances a familiar rescue-and-gratitude narrative in which the US military operates as a care apparatus, exemplifying a cultural …

Victorian Counter-Worlds And The Uncanny: The Fantasy Illustrations Of Walter Crane And Arthur Rackham, Amzie A. Dunekacke

UCARE Research Products

I will prepare an in-depth examination of the different, often opposing ways illustrators Walter Crane and Arthur Rackham portray elements of fantasy in their fairy tale illustrations. Fantasy in fairy tales became very popular during the “Golden Age of Illustration” in Britain, which lasted from the mid nineteenth century until the First World War. Fantasy served as a form of escapism from the rigidity of Victorian society and the increasingly industrialized culture. In my examination, I will focus on how Crane and Rackham’s separate styles use or abandon elements of fantasy such as the horrific and grotesque, anthropomorphism of animals …

Exploring The Collection Of Swedish-American Children’S Literature, Katie Hanson

Swenson Center Faculty Research Stipend Reports

For five days I examined resources related to children’s literature held in the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center collection. Initially, I proposed that I would examine anything having to do with children's literature. I ended up looking at lots of immigration stories as well as the holdings in the children's collection.

“Do Not Ask Me To Remain The Same”: Charles Darwin In Lizzie Bright And The Buckminster Boy, Rachael D. Tague

English Seminar Capstone Research Papers

In Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, Gary D. Schmidt uses Darwin to allow his young protagonist to question the mindless acceptance of organized religion and to force his readers to engage difficult conversations, come to their own conclusions, and apply truth to their lives. Darwin provides answers and adventure, delivers Turner from his prison-like label, draws him closer to his father, his friends, and nature, while at the same time disconnecting him from the self-righteous town, its corrupt church, and its unjust God. Phippsburg was a prison; Darwin is freedom.

"Think Happy Thoughts": Peter Pan As A Tragic Hero, Sarah M. Connelly

Student Publications

Using Aristotle's definition of the "tragic hero," this work will explore J.M. Barrie's novel, Peter and Wendy, and how Peter is a tragic figure. In this paper I argue that Peter Pan is not only a tragic hero whose human frailty— in Peter’s case, his fear of growing old— causes him to make the terrible mistake of rejecting his own development of humanity and the opportunity for redemption through maternal love, but that Barrie uses Peter to emphasize that, contrary to the Romantic conception of childhood, children need the guidance of parents in order to live a fulfilling life.

Mothers And Their Children: Harry Potter And Melanie Klein, Kristina Mur

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the mother-child relationship in the Harry Potter novels by using Melanie Klein’s object-relation based theory. I argue the mothers and their relationship with their offspring represent fragments of a whole complicated psyche. The characters are not analyzed as individuals, but instead as pieces, sometimes multiple pieces, of a whole psyche. When these characters and novels are taken together, a whole, multi-faceted person comes into view. Rowling depicts both good and bad mothers, and children who characterize different positions according to Klein. These positions are the paranoid-schizoid position with Harry Potter and the depressive position with Sirius Black …

The Rise Of The Moral Tale: Children's Literature, The Novel, And The Governess, Patrick C. Fleming

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“The Delight Of Our Earlier Days”: Character, Narrative, And The Village School, Patrick C. Fleming

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What's New On Jane's Bookshelf?, Jane Leeth

Articles

When I’m not teaching, I’m scouring bookstores and websites for interesting new releases in children’s and young adult literature. My dogs don’t even bark anymore when the UPS man shows up at the front door with a box of books; he’s sort of become part of our family.

I’ve listed here a handful of books that recently piqued my interest—whether I was intrigued by the topic, the aesthetic post-modern appearance, and/or what I can do with the text in the classroom.

The Golden Age, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, And Roderick Mcgillis, Eds., The Gothic In Children’S Literature (2008) And Jarlath Killeen, The History Of The Gothic (2009), Patrick C. Fleming

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

E. B. White’S Environmental Web, Lynn Overholt Wake

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

E. B. White called Walden his favorite book and found in it “an invitation to life’s dance.” To read White ecocritically is to accept a similar invitation to broaden our environmental imagination. Although one or two of his essays are often anthologized as nature writing, critics have not read White environmentally. While emphasizing White’s three books for children, this dissertation reads across genre lines to examine his lifelong work. Drawing on Laurence Buell’s prismatic term, the study explores how White’s engagement with the natural world contributes to the renewal of our collective environmental imagination. Examining White’s affinity for animals, evident …

Picture Book Update, 2005-2006, Gregory A. Martin, Julie D. Deardorff

Library Faculty Presentations

No abstract provided.