National Identity in Irish Children's Literature
Author: Jean Burke
Publisher:
Published: 2001
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
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Children's Literature and National Identity
Author: Margaret Meek Spencer
Publisher: Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 154
ISBN-13: 9781858562049
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a collection of views on children's literature and national identity answering question such as: how do young readers see themselves and "others" in the texts they are encouraged to read or find on their own?; How are their sympathies recruited in tales of war and conflict? Where do their loyalties lie? How do they approach and interpret books in translation? How do writers in other European countries portray UK adults and how universal are fairy tales? Books for children and young adults are embedded in the culture and language of their origins. Although the multicultural nature of the UK is now more positively reflected in children's books , the Englishness of English books is still strong. The questions of national identity and children's literature are considered by European writers from their own perspectives, so highlighting what is often taken for granted about |"others" in relation to "ourselves" and vice versa.
Irish Children's Literature and Culture
Author: Keith O'Sullivan
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-03-17
Total Pages: 214
ISBN-13: 113682510X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat constitutes a ‘national literature’ is rarely straightforward, and it is especially complex when discussing writing for young people in an Irish context. Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as ‘Irish children’s literature’ (whatever the parameters) in comparison with Ireland’s contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. This volume looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with all the major forms and genres. Topics include the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, poetry, post-colonial discourse, identity and ethnicity, and globalization. Modern Irish children’s literature is also contextualized in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area. The contributors, who are leading experts in their fields, examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and also in relation to writing for adults, thereby inviting a consideration of how well writing for a young audience can compare with writing for an adult one. This groundbreaking work is essential reading for all interested in Irish literature, childhood, and children’s literature.
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
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing 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.
Katharine Tynan's Literature for Children and the Construction of Irish Identity
Author: Colette Eileen Epplé
Publisher:
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 136
ISBN-13: 9781109632385
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt the turn of the twentieth-century, Katharine Tynan was one of the most famous Irish writers, both for her association and correspondence with prominent Revival writers, especially William Butler Yeats, and as a prolific and acclaimed author in her own right. However, since her death in 1931, she has become relegated to the footnotes of Irish literary history. Such critical neglect is belied by her significance in life. Producing over a hundred books of fiction, poetry, history, autobiography, and children's literature, she advanced the characteristic Revival concern with Irish cultural identity among a very large audience both within Ireland and without. In the process, she achieved greater popular success than most of her contemporaries, becoming one of the most effective writers disseminating the values of the Literary Revival, an accomplishment diminished by the dearth of critical attention in the decades following her death. This dissertation clarifies Tynan's contribution to the creation of an Irish identity by specifically examining her corpus of children's literature, an area previously ignored even by those critics who have noticed her other works. Tynan adapted her children's literature from one genre to another to suit the needs and tastes of her young audience: in addition to children's poetry and adolescent romance novels, she wrote nonfiction texts of Irish history, religion, social etiquette, and travel guides. Examining selections of her children's literature shows how it reflects her concerns with Irish cultural identity. Her poetry given as "toy books," her novels presented as "reward books," her books of history taught in schools, her short narratives published in international travel series, and her views on behavior codified into books of conduct all worked to offer an alternative representation of Ireland from the colonial construct. Her works of fiction and nonfiction, interacting with each other, form an ideological whole. Ultimately, such cohesion embodies Tynan's construction of an ancient, noble Ireland imbued with, as she says, "virtues of hospitality and generosity."
Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity
Author: Maria Truglio
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-20
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 1351987550
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book bridges the fields of Children’s Literature and Italian Studies by examining how turn-of-the-century children’s books forged a unified national identity for the new Italian State. Through contextualized close readings of a wide range of texts, Truglio shows how the 19th-century concept of recapitulation, which held that ontogeny (the individual’s development) repeats phylogeny (the evolution of the species), underlies the strategies of this corpus. Italian fairy tales, novels, poems, and short stories imply that the personal development of the child corresponds to and hence naturalizes the modernizing development of the nation. In the context of Italy’s uneven and ambivalent modernization, these narrative trajectories are enabled by a developmental melancholia. Using a psychoanalytic lens, and in dialogue with recent Anglophone Children’s Literature criticism, this study proposes that national identity was constructed via a process of renouncing and incorporating paternal and maternal figures, rendered as compulsory steps into maturity and modernity. With chapters on the heroic figure of Garibaldi, the Orientalized depiction of the South, and the role of girls in formation narratives, this book discloses how melancholic itineraries produced gendered national subjects. This study engages both well-known Italian texts, such as Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio and De Amicis’ Heart, and books that have fallen into obscurity by authors such as Baccini, Treves, Gianelli, and Nuccio. Its approach and corpus shed light on questions being examined by Italianists, Children’s Literature scholars, and social and cultural historians with an interest in national identity formation.
Discourses of Home and Homeland in Irish Children’s Fiction 1990-2012
Author: Ciara Ní Bhroin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2021-05-22
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 3030733955
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children’s fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and of unprecedented growth in Irish children’s literature. Close readings of selected texts by five award-winning authors are linked to social, intellectual and political changes in the period covered and draw on postcolonial, feminist, cultural and children’s literature theory, highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of home and the value of children’s literature as a lens through which to view culture and society as well as an imaginative space where young people can engage with complex ideas relevant to their lives and the world in which they live. Examining the works of O. R. Melling, Kate Thompson, Eoin Colfer, Siobhán Parkinson and Siobhan Dowd, Ciara Ní Bhroin argues that Irish children’s literature changed at this time from being a vehicle that largely promoted hegemonic ideologies of home in post-independence Ireland to a site of resistance to complacent notions of home in Celtic Tiger Ireland.
Girlhood and the Politics of Place
Author: Claudia Mitchell
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 1785330179
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExamining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.
Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature
Author: Kara K. Keeling
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-03-20
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 1135893004
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCritical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature is the first scholarly volume on the topic, connecting children's literature to the burgeoning discipline of food studies. Following the lead of historians like Mark Kurlansky, Jeffrey Pilcher and Massimo Montanari, who use food as a fundamental node for understanding history, the essays in this volume present food as a multivalent signifier in children’s literature, and make a strong argument for its central place in literature and literary theory. Written by some of the most respected scholars in the field, the essays between these covers tackle texts from the nineteenth century (Rudyard Kipling’s Kim) to the contemporary (Dave Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series), the U.S. multicultural (Asian-American) to the international (Ireland, Brazil, Mexico). Spanning genres such as picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children’s cookbooks, contributors utilize a variety of approaches, including archival research, cultural studies, formalism, gender studies, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, race studies, structuralism, and theology. Innovative and wide-ranging, Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature provides us with a critical opportunity to puzzle out the significance of food in children’s literature.
What Do We Tell the Children? Critical Essays on Children’s Literature
Author: Ciara Ní Bhroin
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2012-03-15
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 1443838691
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis peer-reviewed collection of critical essays on children’s literature addresses contemporary debates regarding what constitutes “suitable” texts for young audiences. The volume examines what adult writers “tell” their child readers with particular focus on the following areas: the representation of sexuality, gender and the body; the treatment of death and trauma; concepts of race, prejudice and national identity; and the use of children’s literature as a tool for socializing, acculturating, politicizing and educating children. The focus of the collection is on Irish and international fiction addressed at readers from mid-childhood to young adulthood. One section of the book examines what child readers were told in the past while another section examines young readers’ capacity for self-invention through the participatory culture of the twenty-first century. Topics explored include the controversial issue of teenage prostitution and the commodification of the male body in contemporary young adult fiction, the allure of celebrity and the impact of today’s surveillance culture on young people, the representation of the Holocaust for young readers, and representations of Muslim characters and culture in a post-9/11 mediascape. This collection, which offers insights into a range of literary constructions and representations of childhood, will be a valuable resource for students and scholars working in children’s literature, youth culture and childhood studies. Contributors: Jane Suzanne Carroll, Norma Clarke, Shehrazade Emmambokus, Michele Gill, Marnie Hay, Eimear Hegarty, Nora Maguire, Kerry Mallan, Anne Markey, Kimberley Reynolds, Beth Rodgers, Kay Sambell. This is the fifth publication of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature (ISSCL). It follows the Society’s publication of Studies in Children’s Literature 1500–2000 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), Treasure Islands: Studies in Children’s Literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), Divided Worlds: Studies in Children’s Literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007) and Young Irelands: Studies in Children’s Literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011).
