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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Children's literature, Indic (English)'
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Hollis, Victoria Caroline Bolton Jonathan W. "Ambassadors of community the history and complicity of the family community in Midnight's Children and the God of Small Things /." Auburn, Ala, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10415/1668.
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Mattson, Christina Phillips. "Children's Literature Grows Up." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467335.
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Children’s Literature Grows Up proposes that there is a revolution occurring in contemporary children’s fiction that challenges the divide that has long existed between literature for children and literature for adults. Children’s literature, though it has long been considered worthy of critical inquiry, has never enjoyed the same kind of extensive intellectual attention as adult literature because children’s literature has not been considered to be serious literature or “high art.” Children’s Literature Grows Up draws upon recent scholarship about the thematic transformations occurring in the category, but demonstrates that there is also an emerging aesthetic and stylistic sophistication in recent works for children that confirms the existence of children’s narratives that are equally complex, multifaceted, and worthy of the same kind of academic inquiry that is afforded to adult literature.
This project investigates the history of children’s literature in order to demonstrate the way that children’s literature and adult literature have, at different points in history, grown closer or farther apart, explores the reasons for this ebb and flow, and explains why contemporary children’s literature marks a reunification of the two categories. Employing J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels as a its primary example, Children’s Literature Grows Up demonstrates that this new kind of contemporary children’s fiction is a culmination of two traditions: the tradition of the readerly children’s book and the tradition of the writerly adult novel. With the fairy tales, mythologies, legends, and histories that contemporary writers weave into their texts, contemporary fictions for children incorporate previous defining characteristics of children’s fantasy literature and tap into our cultural memory; with their sophisticated style, complex narrative strategies, and focus on characterization, these new fictions display the realism and seriousness of purpose which have become the adult novel’s defining features.
Children’s Literature Grows Up thus concludes that contemporary children’s fiction’s power comes from the way in which it combines story and art by bringing together both the children’s literature tradition and the tradition of the adult novel, as well as the values to which they are allied. Contemporary writers for children therefore raise the stakes of their narratives and change the tradition by moving beyond the expected conventions of their category.Comparative Literature
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Chaudhuri, Rosinka. "Orientalist themes and English verse in nineteenth-century India." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:737ba2e1-99f4-4abb-ac87-4e344be4d15c.
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This thesis demonstrates how a specific tradition of English poetry written by Indians in the nineteenth-century borrowed its subject matter from Orientalist research into Indian antiquity, and its style and forms from the English poetic tradition. After an examination of the political, historical and social motivations that resulted in the birth of colonial poetry in India, the poets dealt with comprise Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31), the first Indian poet writing in English ; Kasiprasad Ghosh (1809-73), the first Bengali Hindu to write English verse; and Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-73), who converted to Christianity in the hope of reaching England and becoming a great 'English' poet. A subsequent chapter examines the Dutt Family Album (London, 1870) in the changing political context of the latter half of the century. In the Conclusion it is shown how the advent of Modernism in England, and the birth of an active nationalism in India, finally brought about the end of all aspects of what is here called 'Orientalist' verse. This area has not been dealt with comprehensively by critics; only one book, Lotika Basu's Indian Writers of English Verse (1933), exists on this subject to date. This thesis, besides filling the gaps that exist in the knowledge available in this area, also brings an additional insight to bear on the current debate on colonialism and literature. After Said's Orientalism (1978), a spate of theoretical work has been published on literary studies and colonial power in British India. Without restricting the argument to the constraints of the Saidian model, this study addresses the issues raised by these works, showing that a subtler reading is possible, through the medium of this poetry, of the interaction that took place in India between the production of literature and colonialism. In particular, this thesis demonstrates that although Orientalist poetry was in many ways derivative, it also evinces an active and developing response to the imposition of British culture upon India.
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Travis, Madelyn Judith. "Almost English : Jews and Jewishness in British children's literature." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/2231.
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This thesis examines constructions of Jews and Jewishness in British children’s literature from the eighteenth century to the present. It demonstrates that this literature has often sought to determine the place of Jews in Britain, and that this endeavour is linked to attempts to define the English sense of self. This discourse is often politicised, with representations influenced as much by current events and political movements as by educational objectives. The main focus of the thesis is on works published from World War II through 2010, with Chapter One providing a historical context for the later material and offering an overview of key motifs from the eighteenth century to World War II. Works by authors such as Maria Edgeworth, E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling are discussed alongside rare texts which have not been examined before. Chapters on gender, refugees, multiculturalism and heroes and villains reveal developments as well as continuities from earlier periods. The chapter on multiculturalism draws on unpublished interviews with authors including Adele Geras, the late Eva Ibbotson and Ann Jungman. The sometimes competing and conflicting representations in literature which has been influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the Empire, the Holocaust, cultural diversity and 9/11 demonstrate that there has been no teleological progression over the centuries from anti-Semitism to acceptance, or from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’. Instead, many of the recurring themes in these texts reveal an ongoing concern with establishing, maintaining or problematising the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. This tension is present in a substantial body of texts across age ranges, genres and time periods. It demonstrates that the position of Jews in Britain has been ambivalent, and that this ambivalence has persisted to a surprising degree in view of the dramatic socio-cultural changes which have taken place over two centuries.
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Padley, Jonathan. "(De)monstration : interpreting the monsters of English children's literature." Thesis, Swansea University, 2006. https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42979.
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This thesis is intended to document and explain the peculiarly high incidence of monsters in English children's literature, where monsters are understood in the term's full etymological sense as things which demonstrate through disturbance. In this context, monsters are frequently young people themselves; the youthful protagonists of children's literature. Their demonstrative operation typically functions not only as an overt or covert tool by which to educate children's literature's implied child audience, but also as a wider indicator - demonstrator - of adult appreciations of and arguments over children and how children should be permitted to grow. In this latter role especially, children are rendered truly monstrous as alienated and problematic tokens in adult cultural arguments. They can fast become such efficient demonstrators of adult crises that their very presence engenders all the notions of unacceptability with which monsters are characteristically associated. The chronological range of this thesis' study is the eighteenth-century to the present. From this period, the following children's authors, children's books, and series of children's books have been examined in detail: • Thomas Day: Sandford and Merton • Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose for Children • Sarah Trimmer: Fabulous Histories • Mary Martha Sherwood: The Fairchild Family • Charles Kingsley: The Water-Babies • Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass • George MacDonald: At the Back of the North Wind • J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Peter Pan, and Peter and Wendy • C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Last Battle) • J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter {The Philosopher's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, and The Half-Blood Prince). The theoretical notions of monsters and monstrosity that are used to discuss these texts draw principally on the writings on the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the uncanny by Sigmund Freud, and the fantastic by Tzvetan Todorov.
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Van, Vuuren Kathrine. "A study of indigenous children's literature in South Africa." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21491.
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Bibliography: pages 151-159.Whilst an accepted area of investigation in most other English speaking countries, indigenous children's literature is a relatively new area of academic study in South Africa. Traditionally, South Africa children's literature has been targeted for a white middle class audience. In addition, most of the fiction for children that was available in South Africa, with the exception of fiction in Afrikaans, tended to be imported children's literature, which meant that there was little by way of indigenous children's literature being produced. However, since the mid-1970s there has been a considerable increase in the local production of children's literature, much of which in the last five years has been intended for a wider and more comprehensive audience and market. This study considers various issues relevant to the field of children's literature in South Africa, through both traditional means of research as well as through a series of interviews with people involved in the field itself The focus of this dissertation is a sociological study of the process whereby children's literature is disseminated in South Africa. International theories of children's literature are briefly considered in sq far as they relate to indigenous children's literature. Of particular interest to this study are current thoughts about racial and gender stereotypes in children's literature, as well as the recently developed theory of 'antibias' children's literature. The manner in which people's attitudes to and about children's literature are shaped is explored in detail. Traditional methods of publishing and distributing children's literature, as well as the current and uniquely South African award system are considered. The need to broaden the scope of current publishing methods is highlighted and the ways in which publishers foresee themselves doing this is considered. The limitations of current methods of distribution are highlighted, and some more innovative approaches, some of which are currently being used in other parts of Southern Africa, are suggested. The gap between the 'black' and the 'white' markets are considered, and possible methods of overcoming this divide are considered. The indigenous award system is considered in relation to international award systems, and criticisms of the South African award system are discussed. The issue of whether or not children should read indigenous children's literature is considered. The debate about this issue centres around a belief in the importance of children having something with which to identify when they read, as opposed to a belief in the culturally and ideologically isolating effects of providing children with mainly indigenous children's literature to read. Finally, the current belief in children's literature as a means of bridging gaps in South African society is considered through a study of three socially aware genres- namely, folktales, historical fiction and socially aware youth fiction. By way of conclusion, some of the issues raised in the body of this study are highlighted and discussed.
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com, ricepot@gmail, and Cynthia Mei-Li Chew. ""It's stupid being a girl!" The Tomboy character in Selected Childrens Series Fiction." Murdoch University, 2009. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20090430.203438.
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The tomboy is a female character that has featured prominently in many popular works of children's literature. Typically, the tomboy is a prepubescent or teenaged girl who is frustrated by the expectations and limitations placed upon her because she is female. She is reluctant to conform to feminine standards of appearance and behaviour.
This thesis examines the representation and evolution of the tomboy character in two distinct categories of children's series fiction, 'books in a series' and 'series books'[1], focusing on narratological elements such as plot, characterisation and series structure, as well as their publishing context, exploring issues of authorial intent, editorial decisions and, in certain cases, the official revision of texts. 'Books in a series' are usually presented as bildungsroman that is, stories, or in this case, series, of development. In these narratives, time progresses and the characters age; tomboyishness is depicted as a temporary phase which is grown out of when a girl matures, and learns to accept and perform femininity. In contrast, 'series books' are centred on adventure and/or mystery stories, rather than on the process of growing up the characters' ages are typically frozen, and tomboyishness is a distinguishing character attribute which remains for the course of the series.
In studying children's literature, it is important to acknowledge that the audience of children's literature includes adults as well as children it is after all, adults who determine and control the production, distribution and legitimisation of texts for children. Originally, children's literature was written specifically for the religious, moral, behavioural and social instruction of children, rather than for their entertainment. Although appearing less overtly didactic in recent times, the production of childrens literature has continued to be driven by the adult concern for ideological appropriateness, and the desire to responsibly educate its young readers. This concern and desire are fuelled by the underlying and persistent belief that children are like sponges and will absorb whatever they are exposed to[2], including representations of gender difference and gender performance. The ways in which the tomboy character has evolved in the children's series are a direct reflection of the shifts in societys ideas about gender, the gendered education of children, and the adult conception of what is ideologically appropriate for the childrens text.
The tomboy character in children's literature has been an important cultural marker of both our evolving and constant values. It is clear that over time gender roles have changed significantly, allowing girls in series fiction to be sleuths, rescuers, warriors and adventurers, but through all of this change, the representation of the tomboy has always reflected adults' conception of what is ideologically appropriate and normal and therefore desirable, in the representation of masculinity and femininity, gender and sexuality in childrens literature a normality and system of gender based on a steadfast heterosexual hegemony.
[1] Inness, Sherrie A., ed. Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls' Series. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997, p.2.
[2] Sternheimer, Karen. It's Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture's Influence on Children. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003, p.181.
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Todorova, Marija. "Images of the Western Balkans in English translations of contemporary children's literature." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2015. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/190.
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Since the late 1990s there has been an increasing interest in the representation of Balkan culture in the literary works of authors writing in English. Scholars (Bakić-Hayden 1995, Todorova 1997, Goldsworthy 1998, Norris 1999, Hammond 2010) have shown how literary representations of the Balkans have reflected and reinforced its stereotypical construction as Europe’s “dark and untamed Other. However, the contribution of translated literature in the representation of these images has rarely been considered, and in particular that of children’s literature has been seriously neglected. Thus, this study of images of the Western Balkans in translated children’s literature published in the period of 1990 2013, adds a hitherto uncharted literary terrain to the Balkanist discourses and helps shed a new and more complete light on the literary representations of the Balkans, and the Western Balkans more precisely. Children’s literature has been selected for the scope of this study due to its potential to transform and change deeply rooted stereotypes. The study approaches translations as framing and representation sites that contest or promote stereotypes in the global literary market. English has been selected as a target language due to its global position as а mediating language for the promotion of international literature, and with that also carrying stereotypes and transmitting them efficiently. This study looks at the images embedded in the texts, both source and target, and their representation in translation, including the translator’s interventions, but even more at the level of paratexts, and especially in the use of illustrations. It also examines adaptations accompanying the presentation of the translated book into the target society, such as documentaries, music scores and theatre performances. The discussion also considers how a book is selected for translation, and how different production participants contribute in the whole process of translation, including their motivations and goals, as well as their location. Using the methodology of imagology (Leerssen, 2007), and multimodal visual analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2006), five case studies are elaborated, covering books from five different countries in the Western Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro) and from five different types within children’s literature (non-fiction, anthology, novel, picturebook, and an e-book). The five case studies confirm the complexity of the topic at hand. Although there are no firm patterns in the production of English translations of contemporary children’s literature from the Western Balkans we can point out several observations. While the translations of the text, in most cases, closely follow the source text, with only slight interventions by some of the translators, the translated books differ quite significantly in their paratexts, especially illustrations and adaptations accompanying the book for the target culture. In terms of the representation of violence, as one of the predominant stereotypical characteristics of the Western Balkans, images vary from direct representation of violence to full erasure of violent acts. The discussion on presenting violence is analysed from two distinct points of view, the two traits of auto- and hetero- images as identifies in the case studies. In cases of self-representation, the case studies show a network of production participants in which the source author can be seen as the driving force in the process, usually recruiting friends and supporters to perform other tasks in the process translators, illustrators, publishers, etc. The auto-images take the form of ‘nesting’ Balkanisms, balancing (non)violent masculinities, or centring on love and humaneness. On the other hand, networks led by translators/editors located in the target culture will more often be motivated by commercial factors, along with representation of the source culture, thus either emphasizing the preconceived stereotypes of dominant violence in the Western Balkans, or turning towards globalizing the images of violence.
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Burr, Sandra. "Science and imagination in Anglo-American children's books, 1760--1855." W&M ScholarWorks, 2005. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623463.
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Didactic, scientifically oriented children's literature crisscrossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finding wide popularity in Great Britain and the United States; yet the genre has since suffered from a reputation for being dull and pedantic and has been neglected by scholars. Challenging this scholarly devaluation, "Science and Imagination in Anglo-American Children's Books, 1760--1855" argues that didactic, scientifically oriented children's books play upon and encourage the use of the imagination. Three significant Anglo-American children's authors---Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and Nathaniel Hawthorne---infuse their writings with the wonders of science and the clear message that an active imagination is a necessary component of a moral upbringing. Indeed, these authors' books, most particularly Sandford and Merton (1783--1789), Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825), and A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852), are more than mere lessons: they are didactic fantasies intended to spark creativity within their readers.;These didactic fantasies are best understood in the context of the emerging industrial revolution and the height of the Atlantic slave trade. These phenomena, combined with the entrenchment of classicism in Anglo-American culture and the lesser-known transatlantic botany craze, shaped the ways in which Day, Edgeworth, and Hawthorne crafted their children's stories. Certainly dramatic changes on both sides of the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced the differences in the texts. More important to this study, however, are the vital connections among these stories. Each author draws heavily upon Rousseau's ubiquitous child-rearing treatise Emile and upon her or his literary predecessor to create children's books that encourage exploring nature through scientific experimentation and imaginative enterprise.;Yet these writers do not encourage the imagination run amok. Rather, they see the need for morally grounded scientific endeavor, for which they rely primarily on classicism and on gender ideology. Incorporating tales of the ancient world to inculcate the ideal of a virtuous, disinterested, and learned citizen responsible to the larger body politic, the three children's authors---but most notably and explicitly Hawthorne---tie a romanticized, classical past to the emerging industrial world.
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Kuo, Mei-Tsun (Fion). "A Systemic-Functional and Ethnomethodological Investigation of Children's Literature in an EFL Classroom Context." Thesis, Griffith University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10072/365410.
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English is the only compulsory foreign language taught in the public education system in Taiwan. In 2001, the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the Taiwan government put the Grade 1-9 Curriculum in place. This curriculum stipulated that English be implemented in Grades 5-6 and that students in elementary school Grade 3 commenced learning English at the beginning of the 2005 academic year. Based on the general guidelines of the Language Arts within the Grade 1-9 Curriculum, schools and teachers were permitted to select their own textbooks from a select censored collection. This collection included a variety of children’s literature. Since then, the implementation of children’s literature within the regular Language Arts curriculum has grown. In particular, children’s picturebooks have been increasingly acknowledged and implemented in primary language teaching classrooms. This research study is centrally concerned with the way in which the language used in a Western children’s picturebook operates in an EFL classroom in order to achieve particular goal, be it pedagogical, social and/or cultural. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Ethnomethodology, this research study employs the analytic methods derived from these two methodological perspectives to investigate the nature of teaching practice in an EFL classroom context. One intermediate class of Grand Future Private English School located in Tainan City, Taiwan was selected as the research setting. The participants included the ten primary school students in the nominated class and their two English-teaching teachers, one Chinese English-teaching teacher and one Foreign English-teaching teacher. Yasmin’s Ducks, written in English, was the text taught in the research setting (McGraw-Hill, 2005).Thesis (Professional Doctorate)
Doctor of Education (EdD)
School of Education and Professional Studies
Arts, Education and Law
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Borhan, Burcu. "Gendered narratives in Victorian literature identity formation in empire-focused children's literature /." Fairfax, VA : George Mason University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1920/3246.
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Thesis (M.A,)--George Mason University, 2008.Vita: p. 101. Thesis director: Amelia Rutledge. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Aug. 27, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100). Also issued in print.
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Al-Mahadin, Lama K. "The text & the image : translating children's literature from English into Arabic." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/27012.
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Studies dealing with the translation of children's literature from English into Arabic are almost non-existent in both the West and the Arab world. This is despite the fact that most Arabic children's stories are mainly translation from foreign languages in which English as a source language has pride of place. Such a situation may be attributed to the fact that children's literature in the Arab world is regarded as subsidiary to adult literature and, thus, is not sufficiently discussed in literary, linguistic and/or translation studies. The thesis presents textual analyses of translation of children's literature from English into Arabic. To facilitate analyses, a framework will be developed, making use of a number of insights, including some recent text-linguistic approaches and the literary polysystem theory. An attempt is made to establish a connection between the various components of a children's story, including illustrations, and the textual choices of the translator. A number of stories translated from English into Arabic will be analysed both at the macro- and micro- levels of the text. Most of the stories used in this research are aimed at children between the age group of 4-8 years old. A range of issues will be discussed in the thesis. These include the influence of Arabic diglossia on translation children's literature (register); the way writers in Arabic and English construct their messages according to their intended audience and the influence of that on the target language reader (pragmatics); and the continuous interaction between the textual material and illustrations in both the source and target language texts (text-type, genre, discourse and illustrations).
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Alston, Ann. "Playing happy families : aspects of family in English children's literature, 1818-2003." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.434005.
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Chanda, Geetanjali. "Indian women in the house of fiction : place, gender, and identity in post-independence Indo-English novels by women /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19736617.
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Anhalt, Cynthia Oropesa 1965. "First grade bilingual children's Spanish and English oral story retellings." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278207.
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This study addressed four questions about bilingual first graders' Spanish and English retellings. First, how do their retellings change over the period of one school year? Second, how do their own Spanish and English retellings of the same story compare and contrast? Third, do English retellings influence Spanish retellings? Fourth, do Spanish retellings influence English retellings? The retellings were scored using a holistic measure. Nine bilingual first grade students were placed in two experimental groups based on teacher observation. The groups were comprised of a heterogenous mix of students and were similar to each other. The first graders' Spanish and English retellings improved over the school year. Their Spanish retellings consistently scored higher than their English retellings. The findings did not indicate an influence of Spanish retellings on English retellings. There was no influence of English retellings on Spanish retellings, except in one domain of the measure used.
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Williams, Sandra June. "An analysis of the readings of cultural indicators embedded in children's literature texts." Thesis, Coventry University, 1998. http://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/e4118f36-c711-b0ef-03d9-c63be4781495/1.
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The thesis identifies cultural indicators of Englishness through an analysis of readings of children's literature texts. These were taught on a children's literature course to Czech student-teachers at the Pedagogical Faculty, Brno in the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1995. The aim has been to identify cultural indicators of Englishness embedded in the texts and to reveal myths of national identity. This has been achieved by using a cross-cultural perspective whereby the Czech readings have been used to identify taken-for-granted aspects of English culture. The outcome has been to provide a paradigm for the exploration of culture in and through children's literature texts and to argue that children's literature should be incorporated into the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language and cultural studies for non-native speakers of English. In addition the methodological implications for the teaching of children's literature texts in the EFL classroom are discussed. The theoretical position which underpins the work is phenomenological in that it is an investigation of meanings. The readings by the Czech students and then the researcher were considered from two theoretical positions. An ethnographic perspective has been employed using the work of Geerz and Cohen to investigate the readings of three cohorts of Czech students who are outsiders to English culture. The reactions of the Czech students to the texts significantly reveal the legacy of the totalitarian system which began to end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Literary theory has been applied by the researcher to investigate the texts from an insider's perspective. Reader response theories involving the notion of the implied reader (Iser) and horizons of expectations (Jauss) are adopted to reveal and interrogate a culture's notions of childhood. It is established in the thesis that hitherto a sociological perspective has been taken with children's literature texts in the investigation of ideology with reference to class, race and gender. These have been oppositional readings which locate English children's literature as a site for the socialisation of children into the norms, values and beliefs of dominant society. It is argued in this thesis that by a careful investigation of the texts from a literary perspective and using the cross-cultural information gained, another view might be taken which is that English children's literature texts are less than normalising.
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Chew, Cynthia Mei-Li. ""It's stupid being a girl!" : the tomboy character in selected children's series fiction /." Murdoch University Digital Theses Program, 2008. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20090430.203438.
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Bobo, Kirsti A. "Representations of Anglo-Saxon England in Children's Literature." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2004. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/228.
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This thesis surveys the children's literary accounts of Anglo-Saxon history and literature that have been written since the mid-nineteenth century. Authors of different ages emphasize different aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture as societal need for and interpretation of the past change. In studying these changes, I show not only why children's authors would choose to depict the Saxons in their writing, but why medievalists would want to study the resulting literature.
My second chapter looks at children's historical fiction and nonfiction, charting the trends which appear in the literature written between 1850 and the present day. I survey the changes made in authors' representations of Anglo-Saxon England as children's publication trends have changed. I show how these changes are closely related to the changes made in popular conceptions of the past. My third chapter discusses the way in which children's retellings of Beowulf have placed the poem into a less culturally-dependent, more universal setting as they have separated the tale from its linguistic and cultural heritage. Children's authors have gradually removed the poem's poetic and linguistic devices and other cultural elements from their retellings, instead favoring a more courtly medieval setting, or even a generic universal one.
Children's literature is an important indicator of the societal values contemporary with its publication. Authors and publishers often write the literature to reflect their own ideologies and agendas more openly in children's literature than in other literature. As I show in this thesis, the attitudes toward Anglo-Saxon England which pervade children's literature of any age make it a particularly useful tool to those scholars interested in the study of popular reception of the Middle Ages.
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Ham, Linda. "Reason in the rhyme: The translation of sound and rhythm in children's books." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/27850.
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Because child readers are still in the process of fully acquiring their language, children's books and their translations are closely linked to orality and the oral culture. Strong sound, rhyme and rhythm, which are habitual features of children's literature, also figure as important agents in the acquisition of language. Therefore, these linguistic principles might indicate a pedagogical skopos in the translation of children's literature, that of aiding in child language acquisition.
Theory on sound translation and commentaries from translators of children's literature provide arguments for the importance of retaining sound and rhythm in translation. Analyses of three French-Canadian children's books translated into English provide practical observations of how sound and rhythm are translated in actual texts.
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Palsdottir, Anna Heida. "History, landscape and national identity : a comparative study of contemporary English and Icelandic literature for children." Thesis, Coventry University, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.247964.
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Wong, Lai Fan. "Stories by...portfolio consisting of dissertation and creative work." Thesis, University of Macau, 2010. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2456353.
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Sargent, Marilyn Jane. "Indian English: Is it "bad" or "baboo" or is it Indianized so that it is able to deal with the unique subject matter of India?" CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1990. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/563.
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Rosen, Michael. "A materialist and intertextual examination of the process of writing a work of children's literature." Thesis, London Metropolitan University, 1997. http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/2589/.
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This thesis comes under the terms of Clause 3.2 in the booklet Research Degrees, Regulations and Notes for Guidance for the University of North London where it is stated that 'A candidate may undertake a programme of research in which the candidate's own creative work forms, as a point of origin or reference, a significant part of the intellectual enquiry.' This work, 'shall have been undertaken as part of the registered research programme.' Furthermore, it is stated that the 'creative work shall be ... set in its relevant theoretical, historical, critical or design context.' (University of North London 1996: 6) The creative work consists of 65 poems intended for an audience of children and the critical work of the thesis is a process of research into the sources and origins of those poems. It is therefore an enquiry that seeks to uncover how a highly specific mode of literature comes to be written. It is my contention that descriptions of such a process are unsatisfactory unless they incorporate and combine the following four elements: i) an examination of how the particular self under consideration (me) was formed in a specific socioeconomic, and cultural moment; ii) an examination of how, within that moment, that self engaged with the texts made available in the institutions it occupied; iii) an explanation of how the writing involved a synthesis of experiences - of life, texts and audiences; iv) an explanation of how a writer reads his or her own writing. The first two of these elements comprise the 'historical ... context' noted above and the second two offer aspects of a 'theoretical ... context'.
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Griffin, Brittany Renee. "Tales of Empire: Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature." Scholar Commons, 2012. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4057.
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Children's literature often does not hold the same weight in the studies of a culture as its big brother, the novel. However, as children's literature is written by adults, to convey information which is important for a child to learn in order to be a functioning member of that society, it can be analyzed in the same way novels are, to provide insight into the broad sweeping issues that concerned the adults of that era. Nineteenth-century British children's literature in particular reveals the deep-seated preoccupation the British Empire had with its eastern colonies, and shows how England's relationship to those colonies, particularly India, changed throughout the period. Beginning with the writing of Christina Rossetti's The Goblin Market in 1859, touching upon the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll in 1865 and 1871, and finishing with Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden published in 1911, I show how these three works of children's fiction mirror the changing attitudes of Britain in regard to her eastern colonies. The orientalism found in these stories is a nuanced orientalism that reflects the pressures of the moment and the changing tide of public opinion.
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Chattopadhyay, Sayan. "Foreign selves : Indian self-fashioning as European and twentieth-century Indian English literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648897.
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Craig, Ian S. "Children's classics translated from English under Franco : the censorship of the William books and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1997. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1711.
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The thesis documents the censorship histories of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Richmal Crompton's William books under Franco, and analyses these censorship histories in terms of the changing character of the regime. Previously unconsulted primary sources are used, such as censors' reports and translation proofs held in the Archivo General de la Administración del Estado at Alcalá de Henares. The censors' reports demonstrate that children's literature and translated literature were treated as special cases by the regime, and that censorship was particularly harsh in both areas. These findings demonstrate the crucial importance of attitudes to childhood and foreignness in the Francoist ideological scheme. The censorship histories of Tom Sawyer and the William books reveal some surprising facts. The William books began to be persecuted by the censors in late 1942, precisely the moment when the regime was seeking a rapprochement with the Allied powers as the course of the War turned in the latter's favour. This prohibition cannot be understood without exploring the factors which differentiate children's literature from adult literature in the context of Francoism. The books' peculiarly English character also had a vital bearing on how they were censored. The history of Tom Sawyer in Spain demonstrates the effect of literary status on censorship practice. Early in the regime, the censors generally considered Tom Sawyer to be a work for adults. From the mid-1950s, however, children's literature was inscribed as a special category in censorship legislation, and the censors began to view editions of the work as specifically intended for children. Tom Sawyer thus encountered censorship problems in the later years of the regime, supposedly more liberal than the earlier period. Again, these problems would be inexplicable without examining the evolution of the publishing industry and Francoist attitudes to literature and the child. The thesis also provides a detailed analysis of the type of suppressions imposed on the books studied, under the following headings: religion; love, sexuality and gender; authority and politics, nation and race; crime, terror and violence.
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O'Reilly, Elizabeth. "The child and the adult in contemporary children's literature : Roald Dahl, Anne Fine, Diana Wynne Jones, J. K. Rowling." Thesis, University of Hull, 2007. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:5647.
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The thesis explores the work of the above four contemporary children's writers, in relation to post-1960s Western society. I concentrate primarily on depictions of children, adults and relationships between the two, and the way in which these depictions engage with changing social attitudes. I also place the novels in their literary-historical context, examining whether or not they continue the literary traditions of their predecessors in children's literature, or whether their central focus is on contemporary social engagement. I also consider whether literary traditions (particularly fairytale discourse) are re-worked and reinvented in accordance with contemporary social issues. In Western society, the post-1960s era has brought widespread social changes, which include the democratisation of childhood - 'children's rights' is now a well-used term, both legally and in everyday life. Despite this, however, today's society seems to be experiencing unprecedented confusion and uncertainty in its attitudes towards children, particularly with regard to child-liberation and various reactions against it. Nonetheless, the post-1960s era has witnessed an intense interest in childhood - the many debates and disagreements are evidence of this. Throughout the thesis, I examine the way in which Dahl, Fine, Jones and Rowling engage with (or react against) these contemporary childhood issues. Chapter one outlines the social context and provides information on the most prominent issues: children's rights; parenting advice and educational issues (both of which focus predominantly on liberalism versus strict control); children as a burden or a pleasure; freedom versus guidance; the death of childhood versus the prolonging of dependency; children as innocent angels or destructive demons. Chapters two to six go on to explore these issues in the literary texts: chapter two concentrates on family relationships; chapter three examines individual adult characters, while chapters four and five focus in detail on the portrayal of child characters, including their relationships with adults and the development of their potential. Chapter six investigates the depiction of magic, and the way in which it can be viewed as a form of psychological power for children (and so can feature in realist as well as fantasy texts). The thesis as a whole, therefore, examines the novels' relationship with both literary and social discourse, predominantly with regard to the adult-child relationship.
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Holt, Jill. "Children's Writing in New Zealand Newspapers, 1930s and 1980s." Thesis, University of Auckland, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/2315.
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This thesis is an investigation of writing by New Zealand children in the Children's Pages of five New Zealand newspapers: the New Zealand Herald, Christchurch Press and Otago Daily Times in the 1930s and 1980s, the Dominion in the 1930s; and the Wellington Evening Post in the 1980s. Its purpose is to show how children reflected their world, interacted with editors, and interpreted the adult world in published writing, and to examine continuities and changes between the 1930s and 1980s. It seeks evidence of gender variations in writing. and explores the circumstances in which the social role of writing was established by young writers. It considers the ways in which children (especially girls) consciously and unconsciously used public writing to create a public place for themselves. It compares major themes chosen by children, their topic and genre preferences in writing, and the gender and age differences evident in these preferences. The thesis is organised into three Parts, with an Introduction discussing the scholarly background to the issues it explores, and its methodology. Part One contains two chapters examining the format and tone of each Children's Page. And the role and influence of their Editors. Part Two (also of two chapters) investigates the origins and motivations of the young contributors, with a special focus on the Otago Daily Times as a community newspaper. Part Three. of four chapters, explores the children's writing itself, in separate chapters on younger and older children, and a chapter on the most popular genre, poetry. The conclusion suggests further areas of research, and points to the implications of the findings of the thesis for social history in New Zealand and for classroom practice. The thesis contains a Bibliography and an Appendix with a selection of writings by Janet Frame and her family to the Otago Daily Times Children's Page in the 1930s.Note: Whole document restricted at the request of the author, but available by individual request, use the feedback form to request access.
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Field, Hannah C. "Toying with the book : children's literature, novelty formats, and the material book, 1810-1914." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:02077b56-4e3e-4bf3-92b0-6c59fce771df.
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This thesis examines the book in the nineteenth century by way of an unusual corpus: movable and novelty books for children, drawn from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. It argues that these items, which have been either ignored or actively dismissed by scholars of children’s literature, are of two-fold significance for the history of the book: they encourage a sense of the book as a constitutively (rather than an incidentally) material object, and they demand an understanding of reading as not just a mental activity, but a physical one as well. Each of the first five chapters of the thesis centres on a different format. The opening chapter discusses the Regency-era paper doll books produced by Samuel and Joseph Fuller, exposing the tension between form and content in these works. The second chapter looks at Victorian panorama books for children, showing how the panorama format affects space, time, and the structure of any text accompanying the image. The third chapter reads the pop-up book’s key tension—the tension between surface and depth in the pursuit of an illusion of three dimensions—in terms of flat, theatrical, and stereoscopic picture-making, three other nineteenth-century pictorial modes in which an illusion of three-dimensionality is important. The fourth chapter traces self-reflexive accounts of printing, publishing, and the material book in dissolving-view books produced by the German publisher and printer Ernest Nister at the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth chapter positions the late nineteenth-century mechanical books designed and illustrated by Lothar Meggendorfer in terms of two material analogies, the puppet and the mechanical toy or automaton. The final chapter synthesizes evidence as to how the movable book could and should be read from across formats, foregrounding in particular the ways in which the movable embodies reading.
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Jacko, June Marie. "The Teaching of Children's Poetry: An Exploration of Instructional Practices in University Courses of Children's Literature, English, Language Arts, and Reading Education." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2004. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4697/.
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There are no studies which focus on the instructional practices employed in the teaching of children's poetry at the university level. This project aimed to describe the instructional practices utilized in the teaching of children's poetry at universities across the United States. Limited to the practices of the university professors and adjunct instructors who were members of the Children's Literature Assembly (CLA) of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) at the time of this study, this investigation attempted to ascertain the general perceptions of poetry held by these university professors and adjunct instructors, their in-class instructional practices, and the types of poetry assignments given. Additionally, this study revealed both the poets typically highlighted and the goals held by professors and instructors in courses of children's literature, English, language arts, library science, and reading education. A mixed-methods design provided the framework for the descriptive data gleaned from the Poetry Use Survey. Quantitative data analysis yielded descriptive statistical data (means, standard deviations, ranges, percentages). Qualitative data analysis (manual and computer-assisted techniques) yielded categories and frequencies of response. Major findings included respondents': (a) belief that the teaching of poetry was important, (b) general disagreement for single, "correct" interpretations of poetry and general agreement in support of multiple interpretations, (c) general disagreement whether current curricular demands have prevented or impaired their teaching of poetry, (e) high frequency of reading poetry out loud in class, (f) emphasis on inclusion of award-winning poets in assignments, (g) instructional emphasis on variety and breadth in the selection of poets highlighted in a particular course, (h) goals for inclusion of poetry centered on pedagogical issues (e.g., frequent use, appreciation of craft; writing models; thematic uses) in language arts and across content areas.
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Mitchell, Katie. "Growing up in Wonderland an analysis of Lacanian subject formation within the secondary worlds of children's fantasy ; an honors project /." [Jefferson City, Tenn. : Carson-Newman College], 2009. http://library.cn.edu/HonorsPDFs_2009/Mitchell_Katie.pdf.
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Belsky, Stella. "The Effects of Using Children's Literature with Adolescents in the English As a Foreign Language Classroom." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2006. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5481/.
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This study provides quantitative and qualitative data about the effects of using children's literature with adolescents in a language classroom and the role of children's literature in students' second/foreign language development, including listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. The study presents qualitative data about the role of children's literature in developing more positive attitudes toward reading in the second/foreign language and toward reading in general. With literature being a model of a culture, presenting linguistic benefits for language learners, teaching communication, and being a motivator in language learning, this study presents empirical data that show that inclusion of children's literature in adolescents' second/foreign language classroom promotes appreciation and enjoyment of literature, enhances the development of language skills, stimulates more advanced learning, and promotes students' personal growth.
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Cecire, Maria Sachiko. "The Oxford School of children's fantasy literature : medieval afterlives and the production of culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:782b7491-c1fd-473f-9118-6890156013fc.
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This thesis names the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature as arising from the educational milieu of the University of Oxford’s English School during the mid-twentieth century. It argues that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis lay the foundations for the children’s fantasy genre by introducing an English curriculum at Oxford in 1931 (first examined 1933) that required extensive study in medieval literature, and by modelling the use of medieval source material in their own popular children’s fantasy works. The Oxford School’s creative use of its sources produces medieval ‘afterlives,’ lending the Middle Ages new relevance in popular culture. This research directly compares medieval literature to children’s fantasy works by Tolkien, Lewis, and four other Oxford-educated children’s fantasy authors in order to reveal the genre’s debt to actual medieval texts and to the Oxford English syllabus in particular. The four authors are Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philip Pullman. This thesis situates the tendencies of medievalised children’s fantasy in relation to Lewis and Tolkien’s personal and scholarly convictions about the patriotic, moral, and aesthetic qualities of medieval literature and folklore. Building on the theories of Michel de Certeau, this thesis demonstrates how Oxford School fantasy produces new mythologies for England and argues that, as children’s literature, these works have an implicit didactic function that echoes that of the English School curriculum. This thesis traces the attempts of some Oxford School authors to navigate or explode generic conventions by drawing upon new source material, and contends that the structures and hierarchies that underpin the genre reassert themselves even in texts that set out to refute them. It suggests that such returns to the norm can produce pleasure and invite diverse reading, growing out of the intertextual associations of each new rewriting.
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Chang, Mi-Kyoung. "A Critical Content Analysis of Korean-to-English and English-to-Korean Translated Picture Books." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/301535.
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This study explores cultural representations and cultural adaptations made by translators in translated children's picture books. This study has two focuses. In the first part of this study, which is a critical content analysis, I examine the cultural representations depicted in Korean-to-English and English-to-Korean translated picture books, using cultural studies as a theoretical framework. In the second part of this study, I compare original and translated editions of Caldecott and popular Korean picture books to find out how the translators adapt cultural, ideological, and linguistic conflicts in the process of translation, using translation as a dialogic process. For the first part of this study, I found four categories related to the cultural representations: (1) a sense of belonging and societal membership; (2) constructing and challenging gender stereotypes; (3) constructing images of childhood; and (4) dominant visual images of South Korea/the United States. These findings indicate that the insider authors of Korean culture try to show authentic images of South Korea, using contemporary fiction stories. The Korean translated books also deal with various images of American culture authentically from historical fiction to contemporary fiction. However, a small number of books do not show broad cultural representations of both cultures. In the second focus of this study on cultural adaptations, the analysis directly compared original and translated editions of the same texts. The themes of cultural familiarity, adaptations regarding illustrations, completely different translations, omissions, additions, and changes of titles or book jackets were identified. These findings indicate that most American and Korean translators purposely made cultural adaptations in the process of translation in order to help target readers to have better understanding of these international books. Additionally, they did not change essential authentic features, such as the characters' names and geographic names. I also found mistranslations between the original and translated editions of books. These changes could have occured because the translators lacked knowledge of both cultures or of the deep structures of the stories. The implication section provides recommendations to publishers, translators, educators, parents, teacher educators, and researchers and suggestions for further research.
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Chew, Laureen. "Chinese American images in selected children's fiction for kindergarten through sixth grade." Scholarly Commons, 1986. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/2131.
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The purpose of this study is to investigate Chinese American images in selected children's fiction to determine whether or not data support the position of the Council on Interracial Books for Children, that the works of fiction studied tend to stereotype Chinese Americans.
After reading the selected fifteen works of fiction, a criterion checklist was devised by the investigator to examine the behavior and lifestyle of Chinese Americans depicted in a variety of circumstances. validity of the criterion checklist was established by a panel of experts in the area of Chinese American studies. Inter-rater reliability was determined by two readers who utilized the criterion checklist to analyze the content of one lower elementary grade and one upper elementary grade work of fiction. Finally, the criterion checklist was used to analyze the fifteen works of fiction and draw conclusions related to the purpose of this study.
The findings in this study do support the conclusions of the Council on Interracial Books for Children that this group of fiction portrays Chinese Americans in a one dimensional, stereotypic manner. In the checklist items related to environment, food, utensils, physical attributes, cultural celebrations, occupations, and recreation, Chinese Americans were portrayed as adhering to Chinese-specific characteristics. However, in cross-cultural and behavioral items, Chinese Americans were portrayed as desiring Western-specific characteristics. This tendency was especially prevalent in upper elementary grade fiction. A more integrative or multi-dimensional view of Chinese Americans appreciating, and able to function well in, both cultural contexts is disconcertingly absent.
Based on the findings of this study, the following recommendations are made:
1. That teachers, librarians, and other school personnel who use this collection of books, supplement them with materials containing contemporary and realistic information about Chinese Americans.
2. That future writers of children's fiction dealing with Chinese Americans portray them in a multidimensional manner.
3. That curriculum writers of textbooks use a similar criterion checklist to offset the one-dimensionality of Chinese American images in existing children's literature.
4. That future writers of children's fiction on Chinese Americans utilize a criterion checklist such as the one in this study to assist them in developing multi-dimensional characters.
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Sassaman, Tyler. "One Hundred Books: A journey through a century of John Newbery Award books." Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2019. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses/516.
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"On a quest to read all of the existing Newbery award-winning books (est. 1921), a reading specialist examines the history of the books and the award itself. Considered the “most distinguished contribution to children’s literature,” the John Newbery gold medal, awarded by the American Library Association, is a high-water mark for upper elementary-aged children across the United States. The author’s two decades of teaching experience provide the analytical perspective and memoir-style investigation. Interviews with a book buyer for the Scholastic publisher, children’s librarians, former Newbery committee members, and a visit to the famed Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature, frame the author’s adventure as he reads all the winners."--Provided by the author.
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Kirkpatrick, Leah Marie. "Hidden kisses, walled gardens, and angel-kinder : a study of the Victorian and Edwardian conceptions of motherhood and childhood in Little Women, The Secret Garden, and Peter Pan /." Full-text of dissertation on the Internet (1.17 MB), 2009. http://www.lib.jmu.edu/general/etd/2009/Masters/Kirkpatrick_Leah/kirkpalm_masters_11-19-2009_01.pdf.
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Yorke, Stephanie. "Disability, normalcy, and the failures of the nation : a reading of selected fiction by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:50a3e631-419f-490a-9995-f0fa511e5688.
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This thesis is a study of representations of disability in a selection of Anglophone Indian literature written between 1981 and 2006. In this thesis, I argue that, in fiction by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga, disability often takes on positive symbolic value as it represents the potential for the postcolonial polis to survive and thrive, but that the ultimate death or medical normalisation of disabled characters in many of these narratives is tied to a loss of political optimism. While these texts in many instances disturb norms surrounding able-bodiedness and disability, they often ultimately narrate a pessimistic conformity to scripts of normalization, and in so doing, map the unjust triumph of a prescriptive national or international politics onto a prescriptive politics of the body. As disability is eliminated, so is the potential for resistance to latent colonial or hegemonic forms. On the other hand, those fictions that narrate a sustainable disabled presence suggest the potential for the community or nation to emerge from oppressive social structures unscathed. I focus on applying literary disability scholarship to Indian novels which demand scrutiny through a disability studies lens, given their dependence upon the disabled body as a metaphoric object and the continuities in their disability representation and the representation of history. While the focus of my work is upon the nuances of disability representation as it is used to parallel the rise (and sometimes fall) of political optimism in these examples of Anglophone Indian literature, I also read toward an understanding of how the postcolonial perspective of these fictions may inflect and complicate disability representations, and investigate Western notions of normalcy as they are represented as intruding upon this literature and as disciplining the body in these texts. This disciplining is further explored through an ancillary reading of how medical apparatus and infrastructure, such as hospitals, ambulances, and especially doctors, are represented in this group of novels, as it is often in conjunction with the medical establishment that disabled characters are subjected to (neo) colonial violence. In the first chapter, which takes the form of a critical introduction, I discuss the terms of my argument within the development of disability studies, and position myself within the debates and concerns of literary disability studies in particular. I consider the antecedents and development of what is now called the cultural model of disability, and discuss how literary disability scholarship, which began its development with a focus on Western texts and contexts, has begun to extend its range of inquiry to become global in scope. I consider examples of the interplay of contemporary Indian history with biopolitical ideals and the paradigm of normalcy as it has been articulated by Lennard Davis and his intellectual predecessors including Canguillheim and Foucault. In the second chapter, which is entitled "The Medical and the Monstrous: Disability in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Moor's Last Sigh," I consider how the disabled body is created as an object of competition in an ideological agon between a violent, globalized modernity and a sometimes-idealized fictive past. While Rushdie often represents the disabled body in a very simplified and rather bigoted register, he also to some extent engages with the more complex potentialities of disability to represent the failure of the state. The normalizing perpetration of a Westernized medical apparatus against disabled people becomes the proof and of political disintegration and the dissolution of hope for the emergent nation, whether in Rushdie's fictional version of India or Pakistan. In the third chapter, "Disability and the Realization of Metaphor in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance," I consider Rohinton Mistry's disability representations in relation to his engagement with the tradition of European realism. While Mistry attempts to re-locate the normal type articulated by the European novel, and subverts the conventions of European fiction even as he employs them, he still depends upon a largely uncontested tradition of disability representation. While he re-locates the norm in many demographic respects, he does not fully manage to rescue disability from an ancillary and symbolic role in the fiction. Mistry uses disabled characters symbolically to imagine political upheaval from a disadvantaged and sometimes from a subaltern position, creating in disabled characters their symbolic correlates. In my fourth chapter, "Collective Disability and the Dis-located Norm in Indra Sinha's Animal's People," I consider the ways in which this novel effaces paradigms of normalcy by imagining an environment in which disability is the unifying commonality of community life. While Mistry and Rushdie ultimately write disability as narrative anomaly in the ways described by Mitchell and Snyder, Sinha inverts the paradigm of the anomalous body in his fictional representation of the Bhopal disaster. The failure of the Indian state to protect its citizenry results in collective disability identification, while those able-bodied individuals who might be treated as normal in another fiction become suspicious outsiders. In my fifth chapter, "Unaccommodating Fictions: Disability, Authorship, and the Politics of Failure in Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow," I consider the ways in which gay, disabled, Parsi writer Firdaus Kanga represents failure and dependency as character weakness. Kanga validates neoliberal competition by re-imagining the potential for economic and social attainment as properties of mind at the exclusion of the body, and, in so doing, inaugurates an adaption of paradigms of normalcy. Kanga's imaginary valorises the economically competitive individual, but simply removes the constraint of bodily normalcy from this ideal marketable man. For Kanga, economic freedom from parental, societal, or governmental intervention is edifying, as masculinity is achieved through uninhibited competition. In my conclusion, "Good Doctors and Bad Doctors in Rushdie, Mistry, Sinha, and Kanga," I consider the representation of the clinic and of physicians in addition to the representation of disabled people in the novels included in this thesis. Doctors and medical apparatus become symbolic correlates for different political impositions and political strategies, often representing the abuses and failures of government or of public policy. I will frame my discussion within Foucault's concept of the clinic, and will consider the ways in which traditional and Western medicine take on symbolic meaning in these fictions of India.
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Crowe, Elizabeth A. "The Wit and Wisdom in the Novels of Diana Wynne Jones." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2005. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd846.pdf.
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Tomlinson, Johanna Ruth Brinkley. "Playing with words: child voices in British fantasy literature 1749-1906." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5865.
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Two children, Dan and Una, sit in the woods and listen to a story of Britain's early history told to them by Sir Richard, a spirit conjured from the past for this instructive purpose. In this tale, Sir Richard gains treasure by defeating the "devils" that terrorize a village of African people. In many ways, this framed narrative sets up the expected hierarchy found in children's literature wherein the adult actively narrates a story and the child silently listens and learns. However, the children of Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill do something else--they question and challenge. At the end of the story, Dan declares, "I don't believe they were Devils" and backs up his disbelief by drawing on other books he has read. While much scholarship on children's literature reads child characters through the lens of adult desire and finds them voiceless and empty, I seek out moments wherein these imagined children, like Dan and Una, challenge adult dissemination of knowledge. Building upon recent scholarship that sees the child less as a straightforward projection of desire and more complexly as a site for conflicting ideologies and tensions, my dissertation enters into the critical conversation concerning the figure of the child and suggests a fresh, new approach to reading adult-child relations in children's literature. Urging readers to focus on the ways in which fantasy literature imagines and represents child characters' relationships to language--as readers, authors, storytellers, and questioners--I argue that whether deliberately or unselfconsciously these works imagine a child capable of interacting with language in order to seize power and thus unsettle the force of adult desire. Even as the characters themselves remain the products of adult creation, the relationship to language they model for their implied readers transcends a simple one-to-one correlation of adult authorial desire and a child reader's internalization. Each of my four chapters focuses on a pair of authors: Sarah Fielding and Mary Martha Sherwood, Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, Frederika Macdonald and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Rudyard Kipling and E. Nesbit. Instead of mere escapism and fancy, these portraits of childhood address debates surrounding the emerging genre of the novel, religious censorship, educational legislation, imperial ideology, medical discourses, and textbook publication. By juxtaposing these novels in pairs alongside these significant historical contexts, my project brings the child's voice, which we often ignore, to the surface. Like Dan and his declaration of disbelief, the readers imagined by these important works of fantasy refuse to sit in silence and instead play with words to question, create, and challenge.
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Dixon, Marzena M. "The structure and rhetoric of twentieth-century British children's fantasy." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14858.
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This thesis discusses twentieth century children's fantasy fiction. The writers whose creative output is dealt with include Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Pat O'Shea, Peter Dickinson, T.H.White, Lloyd Alexander and, to a lesser extent, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien. These authors have been chosen because their books, whilst being of a broadly similar nature, nevertheless have a sufficient diversity to illustrate well many different important aspects of children's fantasy. Chapter I examines the sources of modern fantasy, presents the attitudes of different authors towards borrowing from traditional sources and their reasons for doing so, and looks at the changing interpretation of myths. Chapter II talks about the presentation of the primary and secondary worlds and the ways in which they interact. It also discusses the characters' attitudes towards magic. Chapter III looks at the presentation of magic, examines the traditional fairy-tale conventions and their implementation in modern fantasies, and discusses the concepts of evil, time, and the laws governing fantasy worlds. Chapter IV deals with the methods of narration and the figure of the narrator. It presents briefly the prevailing plot patterns, discusses the use of different kinds of language, and the ideas of pan-determinism and prophecy. The concluding chapter considers the main subjects and aims of children's fantasy, the reasons why the genre is so popular, and its successes and failures.
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Wood, Gary. "Islamic Imaginings: Depictions of Muslims in English-Language Children's Literature in the United States from 1990 to 2010." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/78103.
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This research examines changes in the depiction of Muslims in Islamic-themed children's literature over two time strata, one decade before and one decade after the events of September 11, 2001. Random sampling with replacement across the two strata yielded a total sample of 59 books, examined at three coding levels: bibliographic data, story/plot data (genre, rural/urban setting, time epoch, conflict type, conflict context, religious instruction), and primary character data (age, culture/ethnicity, and gender). Content is examined using both quantitative comparisons of manifest characteristics and qualitative comparison of emergent themes. Mann-Whitney U tests revealed no statistically significant changes regarding the quantities of manifest features, while additional qualitative analyses suggest six substantive latent thematic changes identified with respect to genre (3), time epoch/setting (1), conflict type (1), and gender related to conflict type (1). Regarding genre, while the quantity of books with humor, with Arabic glossary additions and those employing non-fiction are consistent, the kinds of humor, the nature of glossaria and the subject focus of non-fictions are believed to have changed. With respect to a story's setting, shifts are identified in the treatment of rural and urban spaces, even while most books continue to be set in rural locales. Finally, with respect to a story's conflict type and the primary characters engaged in that conflict, it is believed that changes are evident with respect to self-versus-self conflict type and that female characters are generally lacking in stories of self-identity discovery.Master of Science
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Mouzughi, Huda. "A discourse perspective on the translation of children's literature : the case of English/Arabic translation of fairy tales." Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10399/1105.
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Barai, Aneesh. "Modernist repositionings of Rousseau's ideal childhood : place and space in English modernist children's literature and its French translations." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2014. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/7903.
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It is a little-known fact that several modernists wrote for children: this project will focus on T.S. Eliot‘s Old Possum‟s Book of Practical Cats, James Joyce‘s The Cat and the Devil, Gertrude Stein‘s The World is Round and Virginia Woolf‘s Nurse Lugton‟s Curtain. While not often thought of as a modernist, I contend that Walter de la Mare‘s short stories for children, especially The Lord Fish, take part in this corpus of modernist texts for children. These children‘s stories, while scarcely represented in critical circles, have enjoyed a wide popular audience and have all been translated into French. Modernism is often considered an elitist movement, but these texts can contribute to its reassessment, as they suggest an effort towards inclusivity of audience. The translation of children‘s literature is a relatively new field of study, which builds from descriptive translation studies with what is unique to children‘s literature: its relation to pedagogy and consequent censorship or other tailoring to local knowledge; frequently, the importance of images; the dual audience that many children‘s books have in relating to the adults who will select, buy and potentially perform the texts; and what Puurtinen calls ‗readaloud- ability‘ for many texts. For these texts and their French translations, questions of children‘s relations to place and space are emphasised, and how these are complicated in translation through domestication, foreignisation and other cultural context adaptations. In particular, these modernists actively write against Rousseau‘s notion of the ―innocent‖ boy delighting in the countryside and learning from nature. I examine the international dialogue that takes place in these ideas of childhood moving between France and England, and renegotiated over the span of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This study thus seeks to contribute to British modernist studies, the growing field of the translation of children‘s literature, and children‘s geographies.
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Brandt, Kristen Clark. "Cultural and Narrative Shifts of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature in Hawthorne's Wonder Book for Girls and Boys." TopSCHOLAR®, 2018. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/3083.
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Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century such as dominant cultural narratives and artwork to transform the classical narratives in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys into narratives that reflect customs in conversational discourse and childrearing practice.
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Bradfield, Kylie Z. "The teaching of children's literature: A case study of primary teachers' pedagogical content knowledge." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2017. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/112507/1/Kylie_Bradfield_Thesis.pdf.
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Resulting in the development of a framework labelled Literary Pedagogical Content Knowledge (LPCK), this thesis aimed to describe the complex interplay of three components in primary school classrooms: content, pedagogy, and children's literature. A case study research design elicited descriptive evidence of nine teachers' understandings of the teaching of children's literature, recognising that teacher knowledge bases involve complex, situated knowledge. The thesis, underpinned by constructivism and through the use of semi-structured interviews, built on Shulman's formulation of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) by considering teachers' alignment with Literary Theory.
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Humphrey, Judith Ann. "Liberating images : a feminist analysis of the girls' school-story." [n.p.], 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/.
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Hsin, Chia-Hui. "Gained in translation : the effects of translators' gender on English-language children's literature as translated in China and Taiwan." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/1458.
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This thesis explores how translators’ gender affects their reading and interpretation of foreign children’s literature, particularly from source texts by British male authors to target texts by Taiwanese female translators. It argues that masculine voices characteristic of British texts and Chinese translations from the early twentieth century have been changed both by modern liberal authors and regulated by emerging female translators working with female editors. The study examines ways in which translators reproduce social and gender norms from both the source and the target cultures. It also investigates how gender identity affects translators’ use of language and their attitudes toward the target texts of different groups of readers. The thesis provides historical background and an overview of the children’s publishing business and infrastructure in Taiwan before discussing polysystem theory and feminist criticism in relation to translation. It uses a combination of close reading and comparative analysis across a large sample of texts to identify instances where gender appears to have affected the translation. The analysis begins with classics – such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) – that have been translated both by male and female translators. It then considers a selection of contemporary novels, most translated by women, as usual for translations of children’s books in Taiwan. Finally, a number of translated picturebooks are analyzed, revealing a set of highly feminized translation practices related to equally feminine paratexts. Works by the following writers are discussed: David Almond, J.M. Barrie, Quentin Blake, Anthony Brown, John Burningham, Lewis Carroll, Aidan Chambers, Alan Garner, Kenneth Grahame, Charles Keeping, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, David Mckee, Mark Haddon, Davod Merling, China Miéville, Michael Morpurgo, Philip Pullman, R.L. Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde.
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Kulikauskaitė, Justė. "Issues of Translation of Children's and Youth Literature: Translation of Terry Deary's "Horrible Histories" series from English into Lithuanian." Bachelor's thesis, Lithuanian Academic Libraries Network (LABT), 2014. http://vddb.library.lt/obj/LT-eLABa-0001:E.02~2014~D_20140717_083611-56358.
Full textAbstract:
The aim of the paper is to analyse the translations of the chosen novels of Terry Deary’s
Horrible Histories series into Lithuanian and to find out the main problems in children’s and
youth literature translations. The present paper intends to address a pertinent issue
related to the process of translation. The issue that dominates the field of translation is the
lack of attention towards the analysis and criticism of translation. Little research has been
done in order to analyse the translations from the English into Lithuanian language with the
pursuit of improving their quality. In addition, even less is known about the analysis of
children’s and youth literature translations.
The most prominent problems in Terry Deary's "Horrible Histories" translations are the following: Age Level and Appropriate Vocabulary Choice, SL and TL Linguistics and Cultural Context Adaptation,
Equivalence and Fluency, Wordplay and Puns, Intertextuality, Text and Image Relationship,
and Translatability of Proper Names. These problems mainly originate from the systematic
differences of the English and Lithuanian languages, the clash of two diverse cultural realias and especially the usage of the... [to full text]Darbo tikslas - išanalizuoti pasirinktų Terry Deary knygų vertimus iš anglų kalbos ir išsiaiškinti pagrindines vaikų ir jaunimo literatūros vertimo problemas. Dėmesys skiriamas vertimo proceso problematikai.Viena svarbiausių problemų, dominuojančių vertimo srityje yra tai, kad labai mažai dėmesio skiriama vertimų iš anglų į lietuvių kalbą analizei, kuri padėtų pagerinti vertimų kokybę. Dar mažiau yra žinoma apie vaikų ir jaunimo literatūros vertimų analizę. Svarbiausios problemos, dominuojančios Terry Deary "Kraupiosios istorijos" serijoje, yra šios: Skaitytojų amžius ir tinkamas žodynas, originalo ir vertimų lingvistika bei kultūrinio konteksto pritaikymas, ekvivalentiškumas ir sklandumas, žodžių žaismas, intertekstualumas, teksto ir iliustracijų ryšys, tikrinių vardų vertimas. Šios problemos kyla dėl sistematinių anglų ir lietuvių kalbų skirtumų, skirtingų kultūrinių realijų ir, ypač, dėl šnekamosios kalbos originaluose.
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Roy, Malini. "Shape-shifters : Romantic-era representations of the child in the Wollstonecraft-Godwin family circle." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:59d59e07-eb4d-46b3-a7c972cd12102b2d.
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