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Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Children's and Young Adult Literature
“She Was No Taller Than Your Thumb. So She Was Called Thumbelina”: Gender, Disability, And Visual Forms In Hans Christian Andersen’S “Thumbelina” (1835), Hannah J. Helm
Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies
This article explores representations of femininity and disability in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “Thumbelina” (1835) and select examples of his paper art. In this article, I argue that, on one level, the fairy tale and Andersen’s own paper cuttings uphold feminine and ableist norms. However, on another level, these literary and visual forms simultaneously work to destabilise social prejudices and challenge bodily normativity. I explore how characters and themes associated with the fairy tale and paper art can be (re)read in strength-based ways. In the story, Thumbelina experiences the world through her smallness, and key themes including accessibility, physical …
Representation Matters: Disability And Its Narratives, Sophia M. Shelley
Representation Matters: Disability And Its Narratives, Sophia M. Shelley
Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts
The representation of disabilities is complex and its dissemination through media is prevalent in social construction. In this paper, I will be using identity-first language which places the disability before the person as the descriptor. Through analyzing A Curse so Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer, this paper investigates what kinds of representation are found in young adult literature and how that representation affects the influence and use of disabilities in the genre. This will be done using narrative frameworks and Julia Kristeva’s social paradigm. Disabled characters frequently suffer from narratives that go against progress in disability discourse and lack …