Playing with Books: A Study of the Reader as Child - Softcover

Morgenstern, John

 
9780786442959: Playing with Books: A Study of the Reader as Child

Inhaltsangabe

This ambitious study of the textual characteristics of children s literature examines its history and stylistics, analyzes the modern conception of childhood, and dissects the rhetoric of selected children s novels. Underlying it all is the author s interest in children s play and what it reveals about their nature and the literature intended for them.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Morgenstern is an associate professor in the English department of Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

Aus dem Klappentext

This book is simultaneously a history of children's literature, an analysis of the modern conception of childhood, a study of the stylistics of children's literature, and a rhetorical examination of children's novels. All these diverse strands are connected by a single thesis exploring the nature of children's play and what it reveals about children's biological nature and the nature of their literature. Chapter One examines the earliest forms of children's literature and evaluates how, as pre-readers and a kind of primitive Other, children must "fall into literacy" at some point along their educational path. Chapter Two examines the psychoanalytical stylistics and unique "taste" of children's literature, focusing on the repression of sex, horror, and irony in children's books. Chapter Three reveals the biological significance of children's play, constructing a rhetoric with which to study children's literature as a kind of toy that children are biologically predisposed to learn from. Finally, Chapters Four through Six study the narrative techniques of several children's novels, focusing particularly on how Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland created an original formula which can be clearly described and differentiated from that of adult novels.

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