The Presence of the Past in Children's Literature

by Ann Lucas

Overview

Time is one of the most prominent themes in the relatively young genre of children's literature, for the young, like adults, want to know about the past. This book explores how children's writers have treated the theme and concept of time. The volume starts with the application of literary theory and additionally analyzes examples of the juvenile historical novel. In doing so, it also examines changing fashions in criticism and publishing and the pressure they exert on writers. It then considers literary adaptations of myths and archetypes, constructions of history in children's literature, colonial and postcolonial children's fiction, and the treatment of the past in the postmodern era. The book looks at literature from around the world, and the expert contributors are from diverse countries and backgrounds.

While the book looks primarily at literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, it considers a broad range of historical material treated in works from that period. Included are discussions of such topics as Joan of Arc in children's literature, the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, colonial and postcolonial children's literature, the Holocaust, and the supernatural. International in scope, the volume examines history and collective memory in Portuguese children's fiction, Australian history in picture books, Norwegian children's literature, and literary treatments of the great Irish famine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313324833
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/30/2003
Series:	Contributions to the Study of World Literature , #120
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

ANN LAWSON LUCAS is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Past in the Present of Children's Literature by Ann Lawson Lucas
Presenting the Past—Writers, Books, Critics: Theoretical Approaches
Fiction versus History: History's Ghosts by Danielle Thaler
From Literary Text to Literary Field: Boys' Fiction in Norway between the Two World Wars: a Re-reading by Rolf Romøren
Historical Friction: Shifting Ideas of Objective Reality in History and Fiction by Deborah Stevenson
Myths Modernized: Adapting Archetypes from Fact and Fiction
In and Out of History: Jeanne d'Arc by Maurice Boutet de Monvel by Isabelle Nières-Chevrel
Re-inventing the Maid: Images of Joan of Arc in French and English Children's Literature by Penny Brown
History and Collective Memory in Contemporary Portuguese Literature for the Young by Francesca Blockeel
The Descendants of Robinson Crusoe in North American Children's Literature by Tina L. Hanlon
Adventures in History
Constructions of History in Victorian and Edwardian Children's Books by Thomas Kullmann
'Tis a Hundred Years Since: G. A. Henty's With Clive in India (1884) and Philip Pullman's The Tin Princess (1994) by Dennis Butts
Colonial, Postcolonial
Doctor Dolittle and the Empire: Hugh Lofting's Response to British Colonialism by David Steege
Picturing Australian History: Visual Texts in Nonfiction for Children by Clare Bradford
Narrative Tensions: Telling Slavery, Showing Violence by Paula T. Connolly
Narrative Challenges: The Great Irish Famine in Recent Stories for Children by Celia Keenan
War, Postwar
On the Use of Books for Children in Creating the German National Myth by Zohar Shavit
Reverberations of the Anne Frank Diaries in Contemporary German and British Children's Literature by Susan Tebbutt
War Boys: The Autobiographical Representation of History in Text and Image in Michael Foreman's War Boy and Tomi Ungerer's Die Gedanken sind frei (1993) by Gillian Lathey
Modern, Postmodern: Questions of Time and Place
"House and Garden": The Time-Slip Story in the Aftermath of the Second World War by Linda Hall
The Past Re-Imagined: History and Literary Creation in British Children's Novels after World War Two by Adrienne E. Gavin
England's Dark Ages? The North-East in Robert Westall's The Wind Eye and Andrew Taylor's The Coal House by Pamela Knights
Masculine, Feminism—and the History of Fantasy
Re-Presenting a History of the Future: Dan Dare and Eagle by Tony Watkins
The "Masculine Mystique" Revisioned in The Earthsea Quartet by Yoshida Junko
Witch-figures in Recent Children's Fiction: The Subarltern and the Subversive by John Stephens
The Future for Children's Literature
The Duty of Internet Internationalism: Roald Dahls of the World, Unite! by Jean Perrot
Selected Bibliography
Index