LITERATURE AND THE CHILD, 9th Edition, offers thorough, concise coverage of the formats and genres of children�s literature and principles for the use of children�s literature in the classroom. Beautifully written and illustrated discussions illuminate specific aspects of each format or genre, supported by information on the latest quality works appropriate for children in nursery school through middle school. A stunning design includes interior illustrations by Lauren Stringer, an award-winning children�s book author and illustrator. Each genre chapter contains criteria for evaluating literary quality, equipping you with a resource to guide text selection in the classroom. Practical, research-based information about teaching appears throughout, including ideas you can apply to your own classroom and an emphasis on the importance of selecting complex texts. This book will help you better understand how to select texts that best serve your curriculum goals and the needs and interests of your students.

Since this book's debut, LITERATURE AND THE CHILD has become a popular choice in the children's literature market. The book covers the two major topical areas of children's literature -- genres of children's literature (e.g., picture books, folklore, etc.) and the use of children's literature in the classroom. The book is beautifully written and illustrated to reflect the tone and feel of children's books. The authors pay careful attention to diversity and provide research-based information about teaching. Extensive booklists are provided for the student to use as an ongoing resource as well as teaching ideas that can be applied in future instruction. Significantly enhanced technology offerings on CD-ROM include an all-new video component featuring in-depth interviews with leading children's book authors and illustrators, an improved title search engine, and an online Tool Bank feature. Additionally, this book includes a four-month subscription to InfoTrac College Edition, and each chapter includes suggested articles from the prestigious HORNBOOK journal, as well as further suggestions for in-class discussion and outside writing assignments.

The Romantic myth of childhood as a transhistorical holy time of innocence and spirituality, uncorrupted by the adult world, has been subjected in recent years to increasingly serious interrogation. Was there ever really a time when mythic ideals were simple, pure, and uncomplicated? The contributors to this book contend—although in widely differing ways and not always approvingly—that our culture is indeed still pervaded, in this postmodern moment of the very late twentieth century, by the Romantic conception of childhood which first emerged two hundred years ago. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, western Europe experienced another fin de siècle characterized by overwhelming material and institutional change and instability. By historicizing the specific political, social, and economic conflicts at work within the notion of Romantic childhood, the essayists in Literature and the Child show us how little these forces have changed over time and how enriching and empowering they can still be for children and their parents. In the first section, “Romanticism Continued and Contested,” Alan Richardson and Mitzi Myers question the origins and ends of Romantic childhood. In “Romantic Ironies, Postmodern Texts,” Dieter Petzold, Richard Flynn, and James McGavran argue that postmodern texts for both children and adults perpetuate the Romantic complexities of childhood. Next, in “The Commerce of Children's Books,” Anne Lundin and Paula Connolly study the production and marketing of children's classics. Finally, in “Romantic Ideas in Cultural Confrontations,” William Scheick and Teya Rosenberg investigate interactions of Romantic myths with those of other cultural systems.

This book traces the historical roots of Western culture's stories of childhood in which the child is subjugated to the adult. Going back 400 years, it looks again at Hamlet, fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and Walt Disney cartoons. Inventing the Child is a highly entertaining, humorous, and at times acerbic account of what it means to be a child (and a parent) in America at the dawn of the new millennium. John Zornado explores the history and development of the concept of childhood, starting with the works of Calvin, Freud, and Rousseau and culminating with the modern "consumer" childhood of Dr. Spock and television. The volume discusses major media depictions of childhood and examines the ways in which parents use different forms of media to swaddle, educate, and entertain their children. Zornado argues that the stories we tell our children contain the ideologies of the dominant culture--which, more often than not, promote "happiness" at all costs, materialism as the way to happiness, and above all, obedience to the dominant order.

In this lively discussion Kim Reynolds looks at what children's literature is, why it is interesting, how it contributes to culture, and how it is studied as literature. Providing examples from across history and various types of children's literature, she introduces the key debates, developments, and people involved.

Graveyards or wonderlands have more often than firesides and nurseries been the element in which we encounter the child in English literature, and Robert Pattison begins his narrative by asking why literary children are seldom associated with parents and family, but instead repeatedly occur as solitary figures against a background of social and philosophic melancholy. In a skillful fusion of theology, social history, and literature, Pattison isolates and analyzes the repeated conjunction of the literary figure of the child with two fundamental ideas of Western culture--the fall of man and the concept of Original Sin. His study of child figures used in English literature and their antecedents in classical literature and early Christian writing documents the symbiotic development of an idea and an image. Pattison encounters a wide range of literary offspring, among whom are Marvell's little girls, Gray's young Etonians, Blake's children of innocence and experience, the youthful narrators of Dickens and Gosse, the children of George Eliot and Henry James, and the young protagonists in the children's literature of James Janeway, Christina Rossetti, and Lewis Carroll.