Children's Literature and New York City

Padraic Whyte, Keith O'Sullivan, Padraic Whyte, Keith O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415823029
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135923006
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection explores the significance of New York City in children's literature, stressing literary, political, and societal influences on writing for young people from the twentieth century to the present day. Contextualized in light of contemporary critical and cultural theory, the chapters examine the varying ways in which children's literature has engaged with New York City as a city space, both in terms of (urban) realism and as an 'idea', such as the fantasy of the city as a place of opportunity, or other associations. The collection visits not only dominant themes, motifs, and tropes, but also the different narrative methods employed to tell readers about the history, function, physical structure, and conceptualization of New York City, acknowledging the shared or symbiotic relationship between literature and the city: just as literature can give imaginative 'reality' to the city, the city has the potential to shape the literary text. This book critically engages with most of the major forms and genres for children/young adults that dialogue with New York City, and considers such authors as Margaret Wise Brown, Felice Holman, E. L. Konigsburg, Maurice Sendak, J. D. Salinger, John Donovan, Shaun Tan, Elizabeth Enright, and Patti Smith.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Bank Street and Beyond: New York City in the Here and Now Books of Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Margaret Wise Brown
• Chapter 2. ‘Form Follows Function’: Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet (1941−1951)
• Chapter 3. Striated Space and Smooth Space in Nick McDonell’s Twelve
• Chapter 4. Navigating Adolescence through the Streets of New York: I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip
• Chapter 5. ‘Cities Will Sing’: Natural New York
• Chapter 6. A City Cold and Wild: Nature and Social Justice in Slake’s Limbo and Ten Mile River
• Chapter 7. ‘New York is a Great Place’: Urban Mobility in Twentieth- Century Children’s Literature
• Chapter 8. Catalysing Urban Interaction: Individual and Crowded Identities in New York City
• Chapter 9. Self in the City: Young Adult Fiction about New York City after 9/11
• Chapter 10. I am an Island: Caribbean Immigrants to New York City in Children’s Literature
• Chapter 11. The View from the Top of the Bus: Curious George in Émigré New York
• Chapter 12. New York City: A Dystopian Utopia in Visual Narratives
• Chapter 13. A Right to Music: New York and Mid-Century Liberal Imagination in The Cricket in Times Square
• Chapter 14. Just Kids: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Androgyne in New York
• Editors and Contributors
• Index