Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood

Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood

Author: Heather Snell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1134498705

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The essays in this collection address the relationship between children and cultural memory in texts both for and about young people. The collection overall is concerned with how cultural memory is shaped, contested, forgotten, recovered, and (re)circulated, sometimes in opposition to dominant national narratives, and often for the benefit of young readers who are assumed not to possess any prior cultural memory. From the innovative development of school libraries in the 1920s to the role of utopianism in fixing cultural memory for teen readers, it provides a critical look into children and ideologies of childhood as they are represented in a broad spectrum of texts, including film, poetry, literature, and architecture from Canada, the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, India, and Spain. These cultural forms collaborate to shape ideas and values, in turn contributing to dominant discourses about national and global citizenship. The essays included in the collection imply that childhood is an oft-imagined idealist construction based in large part on participation, identity, and perception; childhood is invisible and tangible, exciting and intriguing, and at times elusive even as cultural and literary artifacts recreate it. Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood is a valuable resource for scholars of children’s literature and culture, readers interested in childhood and ideology, and those working in the fields of diaspora and postcolonial studies.


Contesting Childhood

Contesting Childhood

Author: Kate Douglas

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2010-01-21

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0813549159

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The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a surge in the publication and popularity of autobiographical writings about childhood. Linking literary and cultural studies, Contesting Childhood draws on a varied selection of works from a diverse range of authorsùfrom first-time to experienced writers. Kate Douglas explores Australian accounts of the Stolen Generation, contemporary American and British narratives of abuse, the bestselling memoirs of Andrea Ashworth, Augusten Burroughs, Robert Drewe, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer, and Lorna Sage, among many others. Drawing on trauma and memory studies and theories of authorship and readership, Contesting Childhood offers commentary on the triumphs, trials, and tribulations that have shaped this genre. Douglas examines the content of the narratives and the limits of their representations, as well as some of the ways in which autobiographies of youth have become politically important and influential. This study enables readers to discover how stories configure childhood within cultural memory and the public sphere.


Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage

Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage

Author: Kate Darian-Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0415529948

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Explores how the everyday experiences of children, and their imaginative and creative worlds, are collected, interpreted and displayed in museums and on monuments, and represented through objects and cultural lore.


Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood

Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood

Author: Taylor & Francis Group

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-13

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781032242958

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The essays in this collection address the relationship between children and cultural memory in texts both for and about young people. The collection overall is concerned with how cultural memory is shaped, contested, forgotten, recovered, and (re)circulated, sometimes in opposition to dominant national narratives, and often for the benefit of young readers who are assumed not to possess any prior cultural memory. From the innovative development of school libraries in the 1920s to the role of utopianism in fixing cultural memory for teen readers, it provides a critical look into children and ideologies of childhood as they are represented in a broad spectrum of texts, including film, poetry, literature, and architecture from Canada, the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, India, and Spain. These cultural forms collaborate to shape ideas and values, in turn contributing to dominant discourses about national and global citizenship. The essays included in the collection imply that childhood is an oft-imagined idealist construction based in large part on participation, identity, and perception; childhood is invisible and tangible, exciting and intriguing, and at times elusive even as cultural and literary artifacts recreate it. Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood is a valuable resource for scholars of children's literature and culture, readers interested in childhood and ideology, and those working in the fields of diaspora and postcolonial studies.


Researching Children's Popular Culture

Researching Children's Popular Culture

Author: Claudia Mitchell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-06-29

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1134553382

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The place of childhood in popular culture is one that invites new readings both on childhood itself, but also on approaches to studying childhood. Discussing different methods of researching children's popular culture, they argue that the interplay of the age of the players, the status of their popular culture, the transience of the objects, and indeed the ephemerality - and long lastingness - of childhood, all contribute to what could be regarded as a particularized space for childhood studies - and one that challenges many of the conventions of "doing research" involving children.


Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia

Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia

Author: Elisabeth Wesseling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 1317068467

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While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on individual memory. Rather, it is associated through contemporary convergence culture with the commodities of one's youth as they are recycled from one media platform to another. Essays in the volume's first section identify recurrent patterns in the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children's toys and media, providing context for section two's exploration of childhood nostalgia in memorial practices. In these essays, the contributors suggest that childhood toys and media play a role in the construction of s the imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that define nations and nationalism. Eschewing the dichotomy between restorative and reflexive nostalgia, the essays in section three address the ethics of nostalgia in terms of child agency and depictions of childhood. In a departure from the notion that childhood nostalgia is the exclusive prerogative of narrative fiction, section four looks for its traces in the child sciences. Pushing against nostalgia's persistent associations with wishful thinking, false memories, and distortion, this collection suggests nostalgia is never categorically good or bad in itself, but owes its benefits or defects to the ways in which it is brought to bear on the representation of children and childhood.


Memory in Mind and Culture

Memory in Mind and Culture

Author: Pascal Boyer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-06-08

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 052176078X

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This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organised around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collective memories? How does memory shape history? This volume presents a special perspective, emphasising the role of memory processes in the construction of self-identity, of shared cultural norms and concepts, and of historical awareness. Although the results are fairly new and the techniques suitably modern, the vision itself is of course related to the work of such precursors as Frederic Bartlett and Aleksandr Luria, who in very different ways represent the starting point of a serious psychology of human culture.


The Development of Memory in Infancy and Childhood

The Development of Memory in Infancy and Childhood

Author: Mary L. Courage

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2008-09-08

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1135419817

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Human memory is not only the repository of our past but the essence of who we are. As such, it is of enduring fascination. We marvel at its resilience in some situations and its fragility in others. The origin of this extraordinary cognitive capacity in infancy and childhood is the focus of vigorous research and debate as we seek to understand the record of our earliest beginnings. The first edition of this volume, The Development of Memory in Childhood, documented the state-of-the-art science of memory development a decade ago. This new edition, The Development of Memory in Infancy and Childhood, provides a thorough update and expansion of the previous text and offers reviews of new research on significant themes and ideas that have emerged since then. Topics include basic memory processes in infants and toddlers, the cognitive neuroscience of memory development, the cognitive and social factors that underlie our memory for implicit and explicit events, autobiographical memory and infantile amnesia, working memory, the role of strategies and knowledge in driving memory development, and the impact of stress and emotion on these basic processes. The book also includes applications of basic memory processes to a variety of real world settings from the courtroom to the classroom. Including contributions from many of the best researchers in the field, this classic yet contemporary volume will appeal to senior undergraduate and graduate students of developmental and cognitive psychology as well as to developmental psychologists who want a compendium of current reviews on key topics in memory development.


Christ Child

Christ Child

Author: Stephen J. Davis

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-05-13

Total Pages: 534

ISBN-13: 0300206607

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Little is known about the early childhood of Jesus Christ. But in the decades after his death, stories began circulating about his origins. One collection of such tales was the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, known in antiquity as the Paidika or “Childhood Deeds” of Jesus. In it, Jesus not only performs miracles while at play (such as turning clay birds into live sparrows) but also gets enmeshed in a series of interpersonal conflicts and curses to death children and teachers who rub him the wrong way. How would early readers have made sense of this young Jesus? In this highly innovative book, Stephen Davis draws on current theories about how human communities construe the past to answer this question. He explores how ancient readers would have used texts, images, places, and other key reference points from their own social world to understand the Christ child’s curious actions. He then shows how the figure of a young Jesus was later picked up and exploited in the context of medieval Jewish-Christian and Christian-Muslim encounters. Challenging many scholarly assumptions, Davis adds a crucial dimension to the story of how Christian history was created.


Irish Children’s Literature and the Poetics of Memory

Irish Children’s Literature and the Poetics of Memory

Author: Rebecca Long

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1350167266

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Focusing on the mythological narratives that influence Irish children's literature, this book examines the connections between landscape, time and identity, positing that myth and the language of myth offer authors and readers the opportunity to engage with Ireland's culture and heritage. It explores the recurring patterns of Irish mythological narratives that influence literature produced for children in Ireland between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. A selection of children's books published between 1892, when there was an escalation of the cultural pursuit of Irish independence and 2016, which marked the centenary of the Easter 1916 rebellion against English rule, are discussed with the aim of demonstrating the development of a pattern of retrieving, re-telling, remembering and re-imagining myths in Irish children's literature. In doing so, it examines the reciprocity that exists between imagination, memory, and childhood experiences in this body of work.