This book offers a historical analysis of key classical translated works for children, such as writings by Hans Christian Andersen and Grimms’ tales. Translations dominate the earliest history of ...texts written for children in English, and stories translated from other languages have continued to shape its course to the present day. Lathey traces the role of the translator and the impact of translations on the history of English-language children’s literature from the ninth century onwards. Discussions of popular texts in each era reveal fluctuations in the reception of translated children’s texts, as well as instances of cultural mediation by translators and editors. Abridgement, adaptation, and alteration by translators have often been viewed in a negative light, yet a closer examination of historical translators’ prefaces reveals a far more varied picture than that of faceless conduits or wilful censors. From William Caxton’s dedication of his translated History of Jason to young Prince Edward in 1477 (‘to thentent/he may begynne to lerne read Englissh’), to Edgar Taylor’s justification of the first translation into English of Grimms’ tales as a means of promoting children’s imaginations in an age of reason, translators have recorded in prefaces and other writings their didactic, religious, aesthetic, financial, and even political purposes for translating children’s texts.
Gillian Lathey is Director of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Roehampton University London.
List of Figures Series Editor’s Foreword Acknowledgments Preface Introduction Part One 1: Didactic Translation: Religious Texts, Courtesy Books, Schoolbooks and Political Persuasion 2: Popular Fiction in Translation: The Child as Consumer of Romances and Fables in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods 3: Tales of the Marvellous 1690-1760: The Arabian Nights and the French Fairy Tale 4: Imagination, Reason and Mapping the World 1750-1820 5: Religious Stories and the Artful Fairy Tale in the Nineteenth Century 6: The Translating Woman: Assertive Professional or Invisible Storyteller 7: Summary of Part One: Translation Practices and the Child Audience Part Two Introduction 8: Into the Twentieth Century: Classics, the Folk Tale and Internationalism 1870-1940 9: Rewarding Translation for Children: Landmark Translations from 1940 and the Batchelder and Marsh Awards 10: Retranslation in the Twentieth And Twenty-First Centuries: For Children or Adults? 11: Translators’ Voices 12: From Anonymity to Global Marketing: The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature Notes Bibliography Index
Long seen by writers as a vital political force of the nation, children's literature has been an important means not only of mythologizing a certain racialized past but also, because of its intended ...audience, of promoting a specific racialized future. Stories about slavery for children have served as primers for racial socialization. This first comprehensive study of slavery in children's literature,Slavery in American Children's Literature, 1790-2010, also historicizes the ways generations of authors have drawn upon antebellum literature in their own re-creations of slavery. It examines well-known, canonical works alongside others that have ostensibly disappeared from contemporary cultural knowledge but have nonetheless both affected and reflected the American social consciousness in the creation of racialized images.
Beginning with abolitionist and proslavery views in antebellum children's literature, Connolly examines how successive generations reshaped the genres of the slave narrative, abolitionist texts, and plantation novels to reflect the changing contexts of racial politics in America. From Reconstruction and the end of the nineteenth century, to the early decades of the twentieth century, to the civil rights era, and into the twenty-first century, these antebellum genres have continued to find new life in children's literature-in, among other forms, neoplantation novels, biographies, pseudoabolitionist adventures, and neo-slave narratives.
As a literary history of how antebellum racial images have been re-created or revised for new generations,Slavery in American Children's Literatureultimately offers a record of the racial mythmaking of the United States from the nation's beginning to the present day.
This book proposes a fundamental reconception of the 19th-century attitude toward the child. The Romantic ideology of innocence spread more slowly than we think, it contends, and the people whom we ...assume were most committed to it—children’s authors and members of the infamous “cult of the child”—were actually deeply ambivalent. Writers such as Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and J. M. Barrie often resisted the growing cultural pressure to erect a strict barrier between child and adult, innocence and experience. Instead of urging young people to mold themselves to match a static ideal of artless simplicity, they frequently conceived of children as precociously literate, highly socialized beings who—though indisputably shaped by the strictures of civilized life—could nevertheless cope with such influences in creative ways. By entertaining the idea that contact with the adult world does not necessarily victimize children, these authors reacted against Dickensian plots which imply that youngsters who work and play alongside adults (including the so-called Artful Dodger) are not in fact inventive or ingenious enough to avoid a sad fate. To find the truly artful child characters from this era, the book maintains, we must turn to children’s literature, a genre that celebrates the canny resourcefulness of young protagonists without claiming that they enjoy unlimited power and autonomy.
Teachers’ selection of the literature they use in instruction frequently depends on how they interpret, in other words whether or not they accurately take in the authors’ perspectives. This point ...presents a particular challenge in the selection of international literature. International literature reflects a country’s and a region’s unique cultural values and practices and is usually not written for people outside the country of origin. Therefore, it is possible that readers in other countries may not understand/be aware of those values and misinterpret the stories. Since Asian and the Western countries, including the U.S., hold maximum sociocultural differences and the perceived cultural distance has remained significantly wide, reading and interpreting literature from Asia can present tremendous challenges to Americans. The book addresses the challenges teachers face when interpreting and teaching with international children’s literature from Asia. The book engages readers with comprehensive coverage on theories, concepts, pitfalls, and applications when endeavoring to use international children’s literature from Asia in classrooms. The book should be used to teach how interpretations/worldviews vary by cultures, and how power influences such interpretations/worldviews. Strategies and frameworks will be provided relating to how teachers can be more culturally conscious of their own biases and develop culturally authentic interpretations.
"Illuminates the importance of fear and suffering in shaping African American and Jewish children's literature. . . . Gives a cogent understanding of how each community's difficult historical ...narratives coupled with their religious and social lives have helped to prepare children to engage an American civic life that has been hostile at times to their ethnic groups." - Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania This compelling work examines classic and contemporary Jewish and African American children's literature. Through close readings of selected titles published since 1945, Jodi Eichler-Levine analyzes what is at stake in portraying religious history for young people, particularly when the histories in question are traumatic ones. In the wake of the Holocaust and lynchings, of the Middle Passage and flight from Eastern Europe's pogroms, children's literature provides diverse and complicated responses to the challenge of representing difficult collective pasts. In reading the work of various prominent authors, including Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levine changes our understanding of North American religions. If children are the idealized recipients of the past, what does it mean to tell tales of suffering to children? Suffer the Little Children asks readers to alter their worldviews about children's literature as an innocent enterprise, revisiting the genre in a darker and more unsettled light.Jodi Eichler-Levineis Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her work has appeared inAmerican Quarterly, Shofar, and Postscripts.
After centuries of ignoring the child, some philosophy now considers the child an ideal practitioner as well as subject. This is evident especially in the Philosophy for Children, or P4C, movement. ...Offering a novel take on this phenomenon, Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner.
Since its inception in the 1970s, P4C has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work as part of its commitment to keeping philosophy fresh and relevant. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children’s classics, especially Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature in significant ways. After examining the P4C movement, author Kenneth B. Kidd turns his critical eye to theory for beginners as exemplified in the form of the multitude of illustrated guides. If philosophy is for children and theory is for beginners, he argues, then children’s literature might also be described as a literature for minors, and perhaps even a minor literature as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari. Examining everything from the work of the rise of French Theory in the United States to the crucial pedagogies offered in children’s picture books, from Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to studies of queer childhood, Kidd deftly reveals the way in which children may learn from philosophy and vice versa.
Postcolonial Polysystems: The Production and Reception of Translated Children's Literature in South Africa is an original and provocative contribution to the field of children's literature research ...and translation studies. It draws on a variety of methodologies to provide a perspective, both product- and process-oriented, on the ways in which translation contributes to the production of children's literature in South Africa, with a special interest in language and power, as well as post- and neocolonial hybridity. The book explores the forces that affect the use of translation in producing children's literature in various languages in South Africa, and shows how some of these forces precipitate in the selection, production and reception of translated children's books in Afrikaans and English. It breaks new ground in its interrogation of aspects of translation theory within the multilingual and postcolonial context of South Africa, as well as in its innovative experimental investigation of the reception of domesticating and foreignising strategies in translated picture books.
Nonfiction books for children-from biographies and historical accounts of communities and events to works on science and social justice-have traditionally been most highly valued by educators and ...parents for their factual accuracy. This approach, however, misses an opportunity for young readers to participate in the generation and testing of information.
InA Literature of Questions, Joe Sutliff Sanders offers an innovative theoretical approach to children's nonfiction that goes beyond an assessment of a work's veracity to develop a book's equivocation as a basis for interpretation. Addressing how such works are either vulnerable or resistant to critical engagement, Sanders pays special attention to the attributes that nonfiction shares with other forms of literature, including voice and character, and those that play a special role in the genre, such as peritexts and photography.
The first book-length work to theorize children's nonfiction as nonfiction from a literary perspective,A Literature of Questionscarefully explains how the genre speaks in unique ways to its young readers and how it invites them to the project of understanding. At the same time, it clearly lays out a series of techniques for analysis, which it then applies and nuances through extensive close readings and case studies of books published over the past half century, including recent award-winning books such as Tanya Lee Stone'sAlmost Astronauts: Thirteen Women Who Dared to DreamandWe Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseballby Kadir Nelson. By looking at a text's willingness or reluctance to let children interrogate its information and ideological context, Sanders reveals how nonfiction can make young readers part of the project of learning rather than passive recipients of information.
In the 1920s, with the end of the revolution, the Soviet government began investing resources and energy into creating a new type of book for the first generation of young Soviet readers. In a sense, ...these early books for children were the ABCs of Soviet modernity; creatively illustrated and intricately designed, they were manuals and primers that helped the young reader enter the field of politics through literature. Children’s books provided the basic vocabulary and grammar for understanding new, post-revolutionary realities, but they also taught young readers how to perceive modern events and communist practices.
Relying on a process of dual-media rendering, illustrated books presented propaganda as a simple, repeatable narrative or verse, while also casting it in easily recognizable graphic images. A vehicle of ideology, object of affection, and product of labour all in one, the illustrated book for the young Soviet reader emerged as an important cultural phenomenon. Communist in its content, it was often avant-gardist in its form.
Spotlighting three thematic threads – communist goals, pedagogy, and propaganda – The Pedagogy of Images traces the formation of a mass-modern readership through the creation of the communist-inflected visual and narrative conventions that these early readers were meant to appropriate.
