Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Little Cricket On The Hearth: The Quiet Feminism Of _Little Women_, Caroline Anderson Klein

Honors Theses

Since the advent of the cult of domesticity, the stakes for female characters in domestic literature have been notoriously high. There was no room for flaws, rebellious decisions, and certainly no room for mistakes—whether of the woman’s own accord, or simply as collateral damage of a male character’s immorality. In this shallowly Calvinist domain, women were never more than one broken guardrail away from social ruin or death. In writing Little Women, Louisa May Alcott breaks these molds through unflinching kindness to her female characters from childhood to adulthood, even unto death. Alcott achieves this quietly feminist feat by …

History, Methods, And Psychology Of Illustrations In Children's Literature, Kelsi Coleman

Honors Theses

This honors thesis includes two parts. The first is a paper written on the history of illustration in children's literature, the ways in which illustrations are created, and the psychological reasoning and effect of illustration in children's literature. The second part is a book created for children to inspire an interest in illustration and give basic information about different kinds of illustration.

Representation Matters: African American Female Readers’ Perceptions Of Young Adult Literature, Asia Harden

Honors Theses

In 2019, only 6% of U.S. children’s books published were written by black authors. This portion of the publishing industry, and particularly the category of young adult literature (YA) has room for improvement when it comes to African American representation. To identify how this lack of representation affects readers, this study was broken into two parts which resulted in obtaining the African American female YA author perspective, as well as African American female readers. J. Elle and Kristina Forest were interviewed in the first portion of the study, and three focus groups were conducted in the second study with 13 …

Little Girl In The Country: A Children's Book, Holly Mcginnis

Honors Theses

A Work of Children’s Literature to Address Realities of Childhood in the Southern United States

This thesis investigated the intersection of life’s realities and children’s literature. Representation is an oft-talked-about area of children’s literature. It is coming to light that many groups are underrepresented in writings for children, and recent works are attempting to broaden the types and backgrounds of characters to represent the diversity of readers and authors. This thesis is the author’s attempt to accurately represent the types of students she encountered in student teaching experiences in the Oxford-area. Using inspiration from her own childhood and knowledge of …

The Field: A Study In Illustration, Kacy Alaina Earnest Spears

Honors Theses

Senior year of college, I enrolled in Issues of Communication, a class focused on pinpointing the issues of racism and the long-term effects of microaggressions, defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as "a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously of unintentionally expresses a prejudice attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority}" ("microaggressions"}. One of our guest speakers, Dean Bryan McKinney of the Hickingbotham School of Business, came to present "The Field," a short story written by his father, JV McKinney, about living in the 1950's segregated Arkansas Delta. Dean McKinney played a recording of …

Do You Believe? Peter Pan And The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz As Historical Artifacts, Tamara Stone

Honors Theses

Scholars often analyze J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz biographically through the author, didactically, or as pure entertainment. While those interpretations provide insight, children's literature like Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz can also be analyzed as political and social commentary. Although children’s literature is often discounted as a lesser genre of literature, analyzing children’s works offers later generations a view into contemporary societal mores because the generally straightforward plotline allows for subtly incorporated commentary by the author. One can read Peter Pan as “simply a children’s story,” or note the …

Death In Children's Literature: A User's Guide, Jennifer M. Collier

Honors Theses

My love for children's books led me to begin exploring the subject of death within the literature. While searching for children's books that dealt with death as a primary of secondary theme, I realized how useful a guide to these books would be to parents, physicians, teachers and anyone working with a child facing some kind of death. It is hard for us to explain to children about death because it is hard to understand and accept, and we do not want to upset the children. Children's books that deal with death provide a means for opening the lines of …