Children's Fiction
Children's fiction refers to literature specifically written for and targeted at children. It encompasses a wide range of genres, including picture books, chapter books, and young adult novels. Children's fiction often addresses themes and issues relevant to young readers, and it plays a crucial role in fostering imagination, empathy, and literacy skills in children.
7 Key excerpts on "Children's Fiction"
- Carrie Hintz, Eric L. Tribunella(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
...Ultimately, the definition one chooses at a given moment—and we must allow for the possibility of making different choices at different moments—will be determined largely by one’s purpose. The scholar of “medieval children’s literature,” the university archivist, the elementary-school teacher, the youth-services librarian, the parent, the gift-buying relative, the professor in an introductory college course on children’s literature, and the contemporary child are all likely to approach children’s literature with different goals and investments, and thus they will define children’s literature in different ways, whether or not they are conscious of the assumptions underlying their choices. Children’s Literature as Genre Perry Nodelman argues for understanding children’s literature as a coherent genre, not just as a disparate set of texts grouped artificially by virtue of their intended audience of child readers: “It might, in fact, be a specific genre of fiction whose defining characteristics seem to transcend specifics of time and place, cut across other generic categories such as fantasy or realism, and even remain consistent despite variations in the ages of intended audiences” (81). A literary genre is a category of literature, such as adventure fiction or mysteries. Readers recognize or determine whether an individual text belongs to a particular genre based on its possession of common or familiar features, tropes, or patterns associated with that genre. Works for children could be textbooks or primers, cautionary tales, domestic novels, or nonsense verse—different literary genres...
eBook - ePubA Guided Reader to Early Years and Primary English
Creativity, principles and practice
- Margaret Mallett(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 6 The rich landscape of children’s literature Introduction Fiction is at the heart of English teaching at all ages. It is through reading, hearing, viewing and talking about fiction that children enrich that inner world of the imagination, first created through play, an important theme explored in the extracts in Chapter 1. Stories in all their different forms show us how others live and feel, allow us to share in adventures, to live other lives vicariously and to integrate all this to discover what it is to be a human being. Year by year the treasure store of children’s fiction grows, especially now that graphic, screen-based and interactive texts have joined those published in traditional print form. But rather than nudging print texts aside, use of the new technology has enhanced many print texts, adding variety and visual power. This is particularly true of picturebooks which have become ever more imaginative and ever more interactive in design. What are the implications for teachers as they survey this richness and reflect on the place of fiction in the English lesson? Chapter 3, on reading, considers how children learn to read and respond to fiction. This chapter concentrates on the features and the value of genres of fiction important for the under-elevens. What are the implications for teachers’ subject knowledge about fiction texts of all kinds as they find themselves faced by all this richness and variety? It is an important question because teachers have a great influence on the value children give to reading, their enthusiasm for fiction, the choices they make and their developing literacy. Enjoyment of fiction also shows them the possibilities open to them as writers, including as writers of creative texts...
eBook - ePub- Caroline Barratt-Pugh, Mary Rohl, Caroline Barratt-Pugh, Mary Rohl(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Literature is expressed in many ways: in picture books, all forms of art, television, films, plays, musicals, dance, interactive computer programs, classical and pop music, and so on. Different cultures may express stories in different forms. For example, a culture that does not include writing, such as early Aboriginal cultures, may express stories through dance and music (Cusworth & Simons 1997). These stories are all part of a body of literature that has popularly appealed to children and to adults who want to share vicarious experiences with children. Until late last century there was no specific body of literature that was specifically designed for children, except for collections of 'cautionary tales' which were expected to promote good manners and high standards of morality. Apart from these tales, children read books that were generally available to adult audiences. Often very few books were available to children and they learnt to read from any resources available, such as The Bible or, as shown in the movie My Brilliant Career, from newspapers which papered the walls of their houses. Much literature that is popularly thought to be appropriate for children is derived from folk tales and often carries mature and sometimes sombre messages. Fairy tales from Grimm and Flans Anderson are examples of folk tales that have comparatively recently become identified as stories suitable for children. The story of 'Flansel and Gretel' (Briggs 1974), for example, is a story of family betrayal, child abuse, deception of children by a supposedly caring adult, with a violent death as a solution to evil. These are powerful ideas for adults, let alone young children. The story is also one of heroism which demonstrates the power of children to overcome problems in the world of adults and defeat the powers of evil, and it concludes with a satisfying family reconciliation...
eBook - ePubAssessing Children′s Writing
A best practice guide for primary teaching
- Kate Allott(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Learning Matters(Publisher)
...3 Fiction In this chapter This chapter considers how children’s story writing develops, and how their mastery of the key elements of stories – plot, character, setting, atmosphere, language effects – can be assessed. Some of the common difficulties of fiction writing will be discussed, and for each sample analysed there will be suggestions of next steps for the writer. Children write stories regularly during their primary years, although many of them will then write few or none during the rest of their education and the rest of their lives. Many children love writing stories and draw effectively on their reading of fiction during the process. However, for some children writing successful fiction is much more difficult than writing non-fiction: they find it difficult to orchestrate those different elements that make stories successful. Constructing a plot in which interesting or even exciting things happen and everything is neatly resolved at the end is not easy. Cain and Oakhill (1996) emphasised the importance in stories of a series of causally related events, and suggested that reading comprehension skills affected children’s ability to produce coherent stories. Traditionally, children have been supported in this aspect of fiction writing by opportunities to retell known stories, but these may be too complicated for the younger writer, so need to be carefully chosen if they are to work as a bridge towards children constructing their own plots. In recent years, the Talk for Writing initiative, first introduced in 2008 (Talk4Writing, n.d.), introduced a process in which children first learned and orally retold stories, then changed elements while keeping the basic structure of the story, then invented their own stories...
eBook - ePubMediating Identities in Eighteenth-Century England
Public Negotiations, Literary Discourses, Topography
- Isabel Karremann, Anja Müller(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 1 Identifying an Age-Specific English Literature for Children Anja Müller Defining Children’s Literature Harvey Darton’s pioneering monograph Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life opens with the following definition: ‘By “children’s books” I mean printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet’ (1). Darton’s exclusive treatment of non-didactic material as the quintessential prototype of children’s literature 1 still reverberates through most twentieth-century definitions of the genre. Sheila Egoff, for example, suggests ‘that the aim of children’s writing be delight not edification; that its attributes be the eternal childlike qualities of wonder; simplicity, laughter and warmth; and that in the worldwide realm of children’s books, the literature be kept inside, the sociology and pedagogy out’ (quoted in Lesnik-Oberstein, 25). 2 In addition to this apparent levity, Perry Nodelman also insists on the covert depths of children’s literature and on its subversive potential: ‘These texts can be easily and effortlessly heard or read, but once read, they continue to develop significance, importance, complexity, to echo ever outward and inward. These are texts that resonate’ (2). Despite Nodelman’s emphasis on the pleasant character of children’s literature, his inclusion of a didactic intention qualifies Darton’s rigid split between didacticism and entertainment. For certain, children’s literature is rarely merely an entertaining or aesthetic enterprise; it has always been suffused with ideologies. Definitions of children’s literature insisting on the genre’s appeal to children’s playfulness or on their capability of subversive readings can be referred to a liberal humanist concept of the child that can hardly betray its debts to Romanticism. Obviously, definitions of children’s literature depend on concepts of childhood...
eBook - ePubTheory for Beginners
Children's Literature as Critical Thought
- Kenneth B. Kidd(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Fordham University Press(Publisher)
...Children’s literature can be narrowly prescriptive, of course, but much of the time it is imaginative, expansive, and surprising in its strategies of engagement and cultivation. It invites us all to dream, wonder, and explore. In helping children to read, it also helps them to “read”—to interpret, contextualize, understand. 2 It often does so self-reflexively, inviting would-be readers to engage materially as much as psychologically and emotionally. Literature for young children often takes picturebook form, and recent years have seen an upsurge in YA graphic novels. These materials are not simply “illustrated”; rather, they invite and even demand different sorts of interaction and manipulation. Aaron Kashtan makes the case that comics help us grasp the materiality of texts, and the same can be said for children’s books, with their varying styles, sizes, shapes, and textures. Given all of this, it is no surprise that psychological discourse looks to children’s literature for inspiration or that children’s literature correspondingly has a psychological texture. I told that story of reciprocity in Freud in Oz. Theory for Beginners shifts focus to how philosophy and theory draw motivation and power from children’s literature, conventionally understood, while also encouraging and even developing materials for beginners—what I am referring to as children’s literature “otherwise,” meaning in an alternative form or register. Like psychoanalysis, philosophy and theory are ostensibly adult projects that nonetheless concern themselves with childhood and make use of—and sometimes produce—texts for children and/or beginners...
eBook - ePubChildren's Fiction about 9/11
Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities
- Jo Lampert(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Children’s literature is highly significant both in its cultural transparency (in its intent to instruct and induct children into cultural practices and beliefs) and in its obscurity (in making the complex simple enough for children and from sometimes intentionally shying away from difficult things). Importantly, children’s literature is a useful choice of text to investigate because of its relatively rapid production after the attacks. The picture painted by 9/11 books for young people provides some insight into this ‘changed’ world....
