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Full-Text Articles in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Is Children's Literature Really Meant For Children? Global Political Commentary In Children's Literature, Jenny Scott Jan 2023

Is Children's Literature Really Meant For Children? Global Political Commentary In Children's Literature, Jenny Scott

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the way children’s literature is a productive form for political commentary. I analyze how the genre of children’s literature allows authors the unexpected freedom to express the moral complexity of contemporary political problems. This form provides authors a space to comment upon complicated and sometimes controversial political discourse in a way they might not have the freedom to do otherwise writing explicitly for an adult audience. Amidst the argument that children’s literature as a form allows for authors to include political discourse, I also incorporate an examination of the audience of children’s literature to demonstrate the complexity …


Fantastical Worlds And The Act Of Reading In Peter And Wendy, The Chronicles Of Narnia, And Harry Potter, Grace Monroe Jan 2021

Fantastical Worlds And The Act Of Reading In Peter And Wendy, The Chronicles Of Narnia, And Harry Potter, Grace Monroe

Master’s Theses

My thesis explores the relationship between the child reader and the protagonist within fantasy children’s literature. By examining the experience of the protagonist in the text, I am complicating the notion of escapism in children’s literature and offering a new way to look at how children read. Using narrative theory and Freud’s fort-da, I detail how the events within a novel, the danger and catharsis within the plot, show how both the protagonist and the reader use narrative to better understand and cope with anxieties in their worlds. The novels and series that I discuss, Peter and Wendy (1911), …


Empire Of The Imagination: Imperialism And The Child Reader Of Victorian And Neo-Victorian Children's Literature, Megan Hicks Jan 2018

Empire Of The Imagination: Imperialism And The Child Reader Of Victorian And Neo-Victorian Children's Literature, Megan Hicks

Master’s Theses

My thesis explores the depiction of the British Empire in Victorian and Neo-Victorian children’s fiction. Though scholars may expect to find simplistic imperial triumphalism in texts written in the late Victorian period and incisive critiques of empire in contemporary texts, my work demonstrates that the ideology of empire is much more contradictory, unstable, and incohesive than one might assume. By looking at the instability of imperial ideology through the lens of children’s fiction, I examine the ways in which that ideology is contested in the text rather than a stable site of ideological transference from adult to child. Thus, my …


Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong Oct 2016

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 …