LITERATURE AND THE CHILD, 9th Edition, offers thorough, concise coverage of the genres and formats of children’s literature and guidance on using literature in the classroom. With a focus on diverse award-winning titles, this market-leading text includes beautifully written and illustrated discussions of exemplary titles for readers in nursery school through middle school. A stunning design features interior illustrations by Lauren Stringer, an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator. Each genre chapter contains criteria for evaluating literary quality, equipping students with a resource to guide text selection in the classroom. Practical, research-based information about teaching appears throughout, including sample teaching ideas and an emphasis on the importance of selecting and teaching complex texts. Extensive booklists provide excellent, ongoing resources and highlight texts that emphasize diversity. This text helps teachers understand how to select books that best serve their curriculum goals as well as the interests and needs of their students. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Children's literature takes many forms - works adapted for children in antiquity, picture books and pop-ups - and now includes the latest online games and eBooks. This vast and amorphous subject is both intimately related to other areas of literary and cultural investigation but also has its own set of concerns, issues and challenges. From familiar authors including Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl, classic books such as Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and The Secret Garden, to modern works including Harry Potter and the Twilight series, thisVery Short Introduction provides an overview of the history of children's literature as it has developed in English, whilst at the same time introducing key debates, developments, and figures in the field. Raising questions about what shape the future of literature for children should take, and exploring the crossover with adult fiction, Reynolds shows that writing for children - whether on page or screen - has participated in shaping and directing ideas about culture, society and childhood. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Since this book's debut, LITERATURE AND THE CHILD has become a popular choice in the children's literature market. The book covers the two major topical areas of children's literature -- genres of children's literature (e.g., picture books, folklore, etc.) and the use of children's literature in the classroom. The book is beautifully written and illustrated to reflect the tone and feel of children's books. The authors pay careful attention to diversity and provide research-based information about teaching. Extensive booklists are provided for the student to use as an ongoing resource as well as teaching ideas that can be applied in future instruction. Significantly enhanced technology offerings on CD-ROM include an all-new video component featuring in-depth interviews with leading children's book authors and illustrators, an improved title search engine, and an online Tool Bank feature. Additionally, this book includes a four-month subscription to InfoTrac College Edition, and each chapter includes suggested articles from the prestigious HORNBOOK journal, as well as further suggestions for in-class discussion and outside writing assignments.

The Romantic myth of childhood as a transhistorical holy time of innocence and spirituality, uncorrupted by the adult world, has been subjected in recent years to increasingly serious interrogation. Was there ever really a time when mythic ideals were simple, pure, and uncomplicated? The contributors to this book contend—although in widely differing ways and not always approvingly—that our culture is indeed still pervaded, in this postmodern moment of the very late twentieth century, by the Romantic conception of childhood which first emerged two hundred years ago. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, western Europe experienced another fin de siècle characterized by overwhelming material and institutional change and instability. By historicizing the specific political, social, and economic conflicts at work within the notion of Romantic childhood, the essayists in Literature and the Child show us how little these forces have changed over time and how enriching and empowering they can still be for children and their parents. In the first section, “Romanticism Continued and Contested,” Alan Richardson and Mitzi Myers question the origins and ends of Romantic childhood. In “Romantic Ironies, Postmodern Texts,” Dieter Petzold, Richard Flynn, and James McGavran argue that postmodern texts for both children and adults perpetuate the Romantic complexities of childhood. Next, in “The Commerce of Children's Books,” Anne Lundin and Paula Connolly study the production and marketing of children's classics. Finally, in “Romantic Ideas in Cultural Confrontations,” William Scheick and Teya Rosenberg investigate interactions of Romantic myths with those of other cultural systems.

A love for reading is one of the most precious gifts that we can give children. It nurtures their imagination and creativity, lets them explore other worlds, and opens their minds to new truths and knowledge in appealing, inspiring ways. But how can we sort through thousands of children's books to discover the really worthwhile ones? Elizabeth Wilson offers us a newly revised, comprehensive guide to the very best in children's literature. Just as in the original volume, she comments on the tone and content of excellently written, captivating books in over two dozen subject areas. Hundreds of new titles have been added while retaining timeless classics and modern favorites-all of which respect traditional values. So that no matter what the children's ages are or whether they love fact or fiction, you can trust these books to share things that you can believe in and kids will delight in.

Graveyards or wonderlands have more often than firesides and nurseries been the element in which we encounter the child in English literature, and Robert Pattison begins his narrative by asking why literary children are seldom associated with parents and family, but instead repeatedly occur as solitary figures against a background of social and philosophic melancholy. In a skillful fusion of theology, social history, and literature, Pattison isolates and analyzes the repeated conjunction of the literary figure of the child with two fundamental ideas of Western culture--the fall of man and the concept of Original Sin. His study of child figures used in English literature and their antecedents in classical literature and early Christian writing documents the symbiotic development of an idea and an image. Pattison encounters a wide range of literary offspring, among whom are Marvell's little girls, Gray's young Etonians, Blake's children of innocence and experience, the youthful narrators of Dickens and Gosse, the children of George Eliot and Henry James, and the young protagonists in the children's literature of James Janeway, Christina Rossetti, and Lewis Carroll.