UID:
almahu_9949179334502882
Format:
1 online resource (238 pages) :
,
illustrations (chiefly color).
Edition:
1st ed.
ISBN:
90-272-6915-7
Series Statement:
Children's literature, culture, and cognition ; 4
Content:
The Mighty Child offers an existentialist approach to the theorization and criticism of children's literature, nuancing the academic claim that children's literature, specifically defined as 'didactic', alienates childhood from adulthood and disempowers its implied child reader. This volume recentres the theoretical debate around the constructions of time and power which characterize conceptions of childhood and adulthood in children's literature. The 'hidden', didactic adult of children's literature, this volume argues, is not solely the dictatorial planner of the child's future, but also a disempowered entity, yearning for unpredictability in the semi-educational, semi-aesthetic endeavor of the children's book. Leaning on current work in the field of children's literature theory, on French phenomenological existentialism, and on the philosophy and sociology of childhood, The Mighty Child is addressed to contemporary theorists and critics of children's literature.
Note:
Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
,
The Mighty Child -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Epigraph -- Table of contents -- Table of figures -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Some groundwork -- Part I. Time -- From puer aeternus to puer existens: The advent of the child "thrown forth" -- A series of footnotes to Rose -- The temporal otherness of childhood -- The Little Prince, between untameable others and untimely selves -- The very timely puer aeternus -- The thorny scandal of otherness -- "Not a second for repose": Untimely others -- "Serious men" and miserly adults -- The fox as didactic adult -- Childhood and the future -- Existential wait and the child as hope -- Hope for the end of the wait -- What are we waiting for? Existential wait in children's literature and adventure -- Promised plenitude with polar bears -- The unknowable end of the wait -- The rhythmical otherness of childhood -- The divided adult -- Part II. Otherness -- "Gaps", desire, and the didactic discourse -- Fiction and desire -- What's in the gap? Picturebook theory and the mighty "gap-filler" -- "Readerly" gap, or didactic gap? -- The didactic gap, between "reasonable" interpretation and child might -- Defining the adult-child didactic relation -- Collapsed prescriptions in the didactic discourse -- Subject but object but project: The child "thrown around" -- Cheating death: The Dumbledore problem -- Problems of others -- The adult-child relationship as a special "problem of others" -- The child as "living affirmation of human transcendence" -- The other, beyond the ethical and the empathetic -- How to cure your dad of his problem of others -- The pains of living among others -- Togetherness in the face of otherness -- The other within oneself -- Part III. Commitment -- "An exigence and a gift": Committed children's literature -- Political literature for children.
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The didactic discourse of committed children's literature -- Theorising committed literature -- Anguish and hope in the committed children's book -- The political child and the apolitical adult in committed children's literature -- Going on a guilt-trip: Ecological children's literature -- Contemporary children's literature as a form of committed literature -- The pedagogical romance -- Love -- All education is a failure -- Pleasure and jouissance of the pedagogical text -- Spud subversion -- Adulthood reloaded: The pedagogical romance as a form of play -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Primary sources -- Secondary sources -- Name index -- Subject index.
,
English
Additional Edition:
ISBN 1-322-66497-8
Additional Edition:
ISBN 90-272-0158-7
Language:
English
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