Children in Literature - Children’s Literature

The Editor: Paul Neubauer has studied at the Universities of Munich and Regensburg, the University of Alberta at Edmonton, Canada, and Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee, USA, spent years of research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., USA. At present he is teaching in the American Studies department of the University of Freiburg.

The focus of the papers selected for this volume ranges from the establishment of regional and national literatures for the young to the presentation and characterization of youth and adolescence in diverse forms and formats of literature. The changing goals of canonized texts for educational as well as inspirational purposes are reflected in the diversity of historical and cultural policies of instruction and emancipation through literary and poetical works; historical and sociological aspects dominate these questions addressed to individual works as well as to whole literatures designed for children.
On the other hand, the structural properties of children's literature and the actual reception of representative texts by child readers provide an equally fruitful area of psychological, pedagogical or aesthetic investigation. Here the rewriting of different kinds of literatures for the use of children receives as much attention as the creation of works aiming especially at the youthful readership of a given age and area; in this context of critical evaluations a variety of adaptations and reconceptualizations is presented - from medieval Portuguese historiography to Michel Tournier's changing configurations of his own works for different audiences.

Contents : Eva Kushner: Liberating Children's Imagination - Meta Grosman: Is Literature for Children Still Necessary? - Eva Maagerø/Elise Seip Tønnessen: A Walk in the Woods of Stories and Culture - Janet Laugharne: A Walk in the Narrative Woods of Fiction or How Telling a Story Can Reveal the Storyteller as Reader - Roger D. Sell: Teenage Novels in the FLE Classroom: Cultural Understanding Within Literature and Language Learning - Gertrude Durusoy: Les livres pour les jeunes: Simple lecture or véritable littérature? Essai d'analyse de textes contemporains tchèques, turcs, autrichiens et suisses - Elisa Gomes da Torre: A infância e juventude do héroi na historiografia medieval portuguesa ou a negação de se ser criança - Edson Rosa da Silva: Fables de La Fontaine: Une lecture pour enfants? - Paul Neubauer: Negotiating the Other: American Captivity Tales from Puritan Tracts to 20 th Century Children's Literature - Sonsoles Sánchez-Reyes: Los ninos, instrumentas de la trama y la caracterization en las novelas de Jane Austen - Gerald Gillespie: The Language of Father, Mother, and Child in the Fiction of James Joyce - Ljiljana Matic: Le Grand Meaulnes d'Alain Fournier: Autobiographie, roman sur la vie scolaire ou rêve d'adolescent - Sandra L. Beckett: Crossing the Boundaries: Michel Tournier's Tales for Children and Adults - Joseph Tyler: El Aspecto Infantil en la Ficción de Julio Cortázar - Isabelle Gillet: Archétype, figures d'enfants ou enfance chez Le Clézio - Willfried F. Feuser: Literary Representations of Childhood and Youth in Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and Germanophone African Literature - Tunda Kitenge-Ngoy: Représentation des jeunes dans le roman africain d'expression française - Meenakshi Bharat: The Child as Historical Witness in the English Novel of the Indian Subcontinent - Alan L. McLeod: Representations of Aborigines in Australian Children's Literature - Anna Jakabfi: Childhood and Youth Represented in Canadian Post-War Mainstream Fiction - Harold Barratt: Growing Up Alienated in the West Indies: The Child Image in Michael Anthony's and Olive Senior's Fiction.