Parables from Nature is an important collection of stories by Margaret Gatty. This publication, being the complete collection of parables for children and inspired by nature includes all twenty-nine stories from four originally published volumes, and presented here in one single volume. This is an excellent book for those interested in obtaining this complete collection of Parables from Nature and for those who are fans of the writing of author Margaret Gatty.

Dr. Seuss's infectious rhymes, fanciful creatures, and roundabout plots not only changed the way children read but imagined the world. And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, Green Eggs and Ham,The Cat and the Hat, these and other classics have sold hundreds of millions of copies and entertained children and adults for decades. After graduating from Dartmouth, Theodor Geisel used his talents as an ad-man, political provocateur, and social satirist, gradually but irrevocably turning to children's books. Theodor SEUSS Geisel tells the unlikely story of this remarkable transformation. In this compact and engrossing biography, Donald Pease reveals the evolution of Dr. Seuss's creative persona while offering an honest appraisal of his life. The book also features many of Dr. Seuss's lesser-known illustrations, including college drawings, insecticide ads, and wartime political cartoons-all of which offer a glimpse of his early artistic style and the visual origins of the more famous creatures that later populated his children's books. As Pease traces the full arc of Dr. Seuss's prolific career, he combines close textual readings of many of Dr. Seuss's works with a unique look at their genesis to shed new light on the enduring legacy of America's favorite children's book author.

Thema dieses Buches ist die Vermittlung von Fachwissen in fiktionalen Texten fur Kinder und Jugendliche. Die interdisziplinare Vorgehensweise verknupft dabei die Themen 'Wissen und Sprache' sowie 'Wissen und Literatur'. Die Autorin analysiert ein Korpus fiktionaler Kinder- und Jugendbucher hinsichtlich der fachlichen Wissensvermittlung, der Experten-Laien-Kommunikation und des Fachsprachengebrauchs. Am Beispiel des Fachs Pferd/Reiten zeigt sie, wie das fachliche Wissen altersangemessen reprasentiert wird. Ein abschliessendes Modell verdeutlicht das fur die Fachwissensvermittlung notwendige Zusammenspiel von sprachlichen und literarischen Gestaltungsmitteln. Daruber hinaus bietet die Studie methodische Anregungen fur weitere Forschungen zum Wissenstransfer mithilfe fiktionaler Textsorten.

This 'little history' takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. John Sutherland is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious passion for books and reading has defined his own life. Now he guides young readers and the grown-ups in their lives on an entertaining journey 'through the wardrobe' to a greater awareness of how literature from across the world can transport us and help us to make sense of what it means to be human. Sutherland introduces great classics in his own irresistible way, enlivening his offerings with humor as well as learning: Beowulf, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the Romantics, Dickens, Moby Dick, The Waste Land, Woolf, 1984, and dozens of others. He adds to these a less-expected, personal selection of authors and works, including literature usually considered well below 'serious attention' - from the rude jests of Anglo-Saxon runes to The Da Vinci Code. With masterful digressions into various themes - censorship, narrative tricks, self-publishing, taste, creativity, and madness - Sutherland demonstrates the full depth and intrigue of reading. For younger readers, he offers a proper introduction to literature, promising to interest as much as instruct. For more experienced readers, he promises just the same.

Fairy tales and folktales have long been mainstays of children's literature, celebrated as imaginatively liberating, psychologically therapeutic, and mirrors of foreign culture. Focusing on the fairy tale in nineteenth-century England, where many collections found their largest readership, National Dreams examines influential but critically neglected early experiments in the presentation of international tale traditions to English readers. Jennifer Schacker looks at such wondrous story collections as Grimms' fairy tales and The Arabian Nights in order to trace the larger stories of cross-cultural encounter in which these books were originally embedded. Examining aspects of publishing history alongside her critical readings of tale collections' introductions, annotations, story texts, and illustrations, Schacker's National Dreams reveals the surprising ways fairy tales shaped and were shaped by their readers. Schacker shows how the folklore of foreign lands became popular reading material for a broad English audience, historicizing assumed connections between traditional narrative and children's reading. The tales imported and presented by such British writers as Edgar Taylor, T. Crofton Croker, Edward Lane, and George Webbe Dasent were intended to stimulate readers' imaginations in more ways than one. Fairy-tale collections provided flights of fancy but also opportunities for reflection on the modern self, on the transformation of popular culture, and on the nature of "Englishness." Schacker demonstrates that such critical reflections were not incidental to the popularity of foreign tales but central to their magical hold on the English imagination. Offering a theoretically sophisticated perspective on the origins of current assumptions about the significance of fairy tales, National Dreams provides a rare look at the nature and emergence of one of the most powerful and enduring genres in English literature.

This book focuses on girls and girlhoods, texts for and about girls, and the cultural contexts that shape girls' experience. It brings together scholars from girls' studies and children's literature, fields that have traditionally conducted their research separately, and the collaboration showcases the breadth and complexity of girl-related studies.

Contributors from disciplines such as sociology, literature, education, and gender studies combine these disciplinary approaches in novel ways with insights from international studies, postcolonial studies, game studies, and other fields. Several of the authors engage in activist and policy-development work around girls who experience poverty and marginalization. Each essay is concerned in one way or another with the politics of girlhood as they manifest in national and cultural contexts, in the everyday practices of girls, and in textual ideologies and agendas.

In contemporary Western societies girls and girlhood function to some degree as markers of cultural reproduction and change. The essays in this book proceed from the assumption that girls are active participants in the production of texts and cultural forms; they offer accounts of the diversity of girls' experience and complex significances of texts by, for, and about girls.

El aumento explosivo en las ventas de literatura infantil y juvenil (LIJ) denota un cambio importante en las letras mexicanas de los ultimos 40 anos. Literatura infantil y juvenil mexicana: Entrevistas entrega el primer libro de entrevistas con sus figuras pioneras. Diecinueve de estos escritores para ninas y ninos brindan animadas respuestas a las preguntas profundamente informadas, antecedidas por tres entrevistas introductorias con dos editores y una critica: Daniel Goldin y Socorro Venegas, del Fondo de Cultura Economica, y Laura Guerrero Guadarrama, academica de la Universidad Iberoamericana. Las entrevistas fechadas entre 2018 a 2019 incluyen conversaciones con autoras y autores establecidos, como Elena Poniatowska, Alicia Molina, Francisco Hinojosa, Juan Villoro, Maria Baranda y Carlos Pellicer, ademas de algunos novatos, como el influyente bloguero Adolfo Cordova y el novelista de tematica gay para jovenes, Esteban Hinojosa Rebolledo. Entre los entrevistados prolificos se incluyen los escritores de sagas Tono Malpica y Jaime Alfonso Sandoval, y las cuentistas de bestsellers Vivian Mansour y Monica Brozon. El folclor mexicano aparece en obras de Norma Munoz Ledo y Martha Riva Palacio Obon, mientras otras abordan historias de migracion mexicana, como los textos de Ana Romero, Yuyi Morales y Duncan Tonatiuh. Incluso otros publican aventuras de indole etica, como Veronica Murguia y Alberto Chimal. Las 22 entrevistas son lectura indispensable para especialistas y una divertida introduccion para principiantes.

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here.' The 'Alice' books are two of the most translated, most quoted, and best-known books in the world, but what exactly are they? Apparently delightful, innocent fantasies for children, they are also complex textures of mathematical, linguistic, and philosophical jokes. Alice's encounters with the White Rabbit, the Cheshire-Cat, the King and Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and many other extraordinary characters have made them masterpieces of carefree nonsense, yet they also appeal to adults on a quite different level. Layers of satire, allusion, and symbolism about Victorian culture and politics, as well as revelations about the intricate subconscious problems of their author, add to their fascination and make them impossible to classify. This new edition explores the phenomenal range of reference, and the paradoxical appeal of two of the most inventive books in world literature. It also includes an episode removed by Carroll from the proofs of Through the Looking-Glass, called 'The Wasp in a Wig'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Esta coleccion de articulos se dirige a la disciplina de las adaptaciones literarias infantiles y/o juveniles con la intencion de traspasar las fronteras que convencionalmente separan la cultura canonica de la cultura popular. El publico infantil y juvenil cada vez se decanta mas por discursos narrativos provenientes del arte cinematografico, el comic o los videojuegos, en detrimento de los textos tradicionalmente considerados literarios. El prolifico ambito de los videojuegos y los comics, que ilustra la impronta de las nuevas textualidades en el imaginario infantil y juvenil, recibe especial atencion. En consonancia con las ultimas tendencias del publico, esta coleccion recoge desde trabajos que analizan la revitalizacion de un mito medieval en formato comic (El Preste Juan en "Avataars"), hasta estudios sobre los ultimos exitos del cine de animacion ("El Bosque Animado") o nuevas perspectivas sobre las adaptaciones de clasicos infantiles literarios y cinematograficos ("Mujercitas", "Marcelino pan y vino"). Los autores, especialistas en cada uno de los temas expuestos, abordan los textos adaptados desde una rigurosa perspectiva academica que incluye las ultimas tendencias en estudios culturales, teoria de la recepcion y teoria digital.

Given the long-standing belief that children ought to be shielded from disturbing life events, it is surprising to see how many stories for kids involve killing. "Bloody Murder" is the first full-length critical study of this pervasive theme of murder in children's literature. Through rereadings of well-known works, such as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, and "The Outsiders," Michelle Ann Abate explores how acts of homicide connect these works with an array of previously unforeseen literary, social, political, and cultural issues. Topics range from changes in the America criminal justice system, the rise of forensic science, and shifting attitudes about crime and punishment to changing cultural conceptions about the nature of evil and the different ways that murder has been popularly presented and socially interpreted.

"Bloody Murder" adds to the body of inquiry into America's ongoing fascination with violent crime. Abate argues that when narratives for children are considered along with other representations of homicide in the United States, they not only provide a more accurate portrait of the range, depth, and variety of crime literature, they also alter existing ideas about the meaning of violence, the emotional appeal of fear, and the cultural construction of death and dying.

Some of the most innovative and spell-binding literature has been written for young people, but only recently has academic study embraced its range and complexity. This Companion offers a state-of-the-subject survey of English-language children's literature from the seventeenth century to the present. With discussions ranging from eighteenth-century moral tales to modern fantasies by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the Companion illuminates acknowledged classics and many more neglected works. Its unique structure means that equal consideration can be given to both texts and contexts. Some chapters analyse key themes and major genres, including humour, poetry, school stories, and picture books. Others explore the sociological dimensions of children's literature and the impact of publishing practices. Written by leading scholars from around the world, this Companion will be essential reading for all students and scholars of children's literature, offering original readings and new research that reflects the latest developments in the field.

Contributions by Jani L. Barker, Rudine Sims Bishop, Julia S. Charles-Linen, Paige Gray, Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Jonda C. McNair, Sara C. VanderHaagen, and Michelle Taylor Watts The Brownies' Book occupies a special place in the history of African American children's literature. Informally the children's counterpart to the NAACP's The Crisis magazine, it was one of the first periodicals created primarily for Black youth. Several of the objectives the creators delineated in 1919 when announcing the arrival of the publication-"To make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race" and "To make colored children realize that being 'colored' is a beautiful, normal thing"-still resonate with contemporary creators, readers, and scholars of African American children's literature. The meticulously researched essays in A Centennial Celebration of "The Brownies' Book" get to the heart of The Brownies' Book "project" using critical approaches both varied and illuminating. Contributors to the volume explore the underappreciated role of Jessie Redmon Fauset in creating The Brownies' Book and in the cultural life of Black America; describe the young people who immersed themselves in the pages of the periodical; focus on the role of Black heroes and heroines; address The Brownies' Book in the context of critical literacy theory; and place The Brownies' Book within the context of Black futurity and justice. Bookending the essays are, reprinted in full, the first and last issues of the magazine. A Centennial Celebration of "The Brownies' Book" illuminates the many ways in which the magazine-simultaneously beautiful, complicated, problematic, and inspiring-remains worthy of attention well into this century.

Die in diesem Band versammelten Beitrage befassen sich mit Kinder- und Jugendliteratur vornehmlich unter dem Aspekt des Spannungsverhaltnisses von Erziehungsvorstellung und literarischer AEsthetik. Die Marchen der Bruder Grimm, die Bildergeschichten von Wilhelm Busch, Johanna Spyris Heidi-Roman, Rowlings Harry Potter, Sendaks Wo die wilden Kerle wohnen, Bucher von Henning Mankell, von Joyce Carol Oates, von Nicky Singer, von Sigrid Zeevaert und anderen kommen ausfuhrlicher zur Sprache. Besondere Berucksichtigung finden das Motiv des Essens und Trinkens in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur und die Identitatsfindung mit den damit verbundenen Entwicklungsaufgaben. Eroertert werden auch Fragen der Didaktik und Methodik der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur.

Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children argues for the benefits and potential of "primary science fiction," or science fiction for children under twelve years old. Science fiction for children is often disregarded due to common misconceptions of childhood. When children are culturally portrayed as natural and simple, then they seem like a poor audience for the complex scientific questions brought up by the best science fiction. The books and the children who read them tell another story. Using three empirical studies and over 350 children's books including If I Had a Robot Dog, Bugs in Space, and Commander Toad in Space, Equipping Space Cadets presents interdisciplinary evidence that science fiction and children are compatible after all. Primary science fiction literature includes many high-quality books that cleverly utilize the features of children's literature formats in order to fit large science fiction questions into small packages. In the best of these books, authors make science fiction questions accessible and relevant to children of various reading levels and from diverse backgrounds and identities. Equipping Space Cadets does not stop with literary analysis, but also presents the voices of real children and practitioners. The book features three studies: a survey of teachers and librarians, quantitative analysis of lending records from school libraries across the United States, and coded read-aloud sessions with elementary school students. The results reveal how children are interested in and capable of reading science fiction, but it is the adults, including the most well-intentioned librarians and teachers, who hinder children's engagement with the genre due to their own preconceptions about the genre and children.

For over half a century, scholars have laboured to show that C. S. Lewis's famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery.
Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In Planet Narnia he demonstrates that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to the seven novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis's writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward reveals how the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets - - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn - - planets which Lewis described as "spiritual symbols of permanent value" and "especially worthwhile in our own generation." Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that in each book the plot-line, the ornamental details, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality. The cosmological theme of each Chronicle is what Lewis called 'the kappa element in romance', the atmospheric essence of a story, everywhere present but nowhere explicit. The reader inhabits this atmosphere and thus imaginatively gains connaitre knowledge of the spiritual character which the tale was created to embody.
Planet Narnia is a ground-breaking study that will provoke a major revaluation not only of the Chronicles, but of Lewis's whole literary and theological outlook. Ward uncovers a much subtler writer and thinker than has previously been recognized, whose central interests were hiddenness, immanence, and knowledge by acquaintance."

Der Band weist essayistisches Schreiben erstmalig in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur nach. Dabei sind die ausgewahlten Texte ein Beitrag zur reflexiven Auseinandersetzung mit einer unvollkommenen und komplexen Welt. Zunachst wird eine UEbersicht uber den Forschungsstand zu Essay und Essayismus gegeben. Anschliessend werden vier Modi des essayistischen Verfahrens herausgearbeitet und auf Texte von Walter Benjamin, Christoph Hein, Bibi Dumon Tak und Sarah Michaela Orlovsky angewandt. Zwischen den Kapiteln bieten essayistische Passagen eine Verknupfung. Auf den Einzelanalysen aufbauend diskutiert die Autorin gattungstypologische Fragen und ein essayistisches Bildungsverstandnis.

In den Beitragen dieses Bandes setzen sich an Hochschulen Lehrende verschiedener Generationen mit den eigenen kindlichen und jugendlichen Lektureerfahrungen auseinander. Wenn es um die Auswahl zu behandelnder kinder- und jugendliterarischer Texte in Seminaren an Hochschulen geht, wird nur zu oft auf Werke zuruckgegriffen, die in der eigenen Kindheit und Jugend gelesen wurden und zu denen ein affektives Verhaltnis fortbesteht. Das aktuelle kinder- und jugendliterarische Angebot ist von verwirrender Vielfalt; gleichzeitig fehlt es an einer stabilen Kanonbildung auf diesem literarischen Feld. So bietet sich den Lehrenden ein biografisch-lesesozialisatorischer Zugriff als Loesungsweg an. Dabei erweist sich die Relekture von in der Kindheit gelesenen Werken als eine (Wieder-)Entdeckung ungeahnter literarischer Schatze.

'this is all a fairy tale...and, therefore, you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true' The Water-Babies (1863) is one of the strangest and most powerful children's stories ever written. In describing the underwater adventures of Tom, a chimney-sweeper's boy who is transformed into a water-baby after he drowns, Charles Kingsley combined comic fantasy and moral fable to extraordinary effect. Tom's encounters with friendly fish, curious lobsters, and characters such as Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby are both an exciting fairy tale and a crash course in evolutionary theory. They also reflect the quirky imagination of one of the great Victorian eccentrics. Tom's adventures are constantly interrupted by Kingsley's sideswipes at contemporary issues such as child labour and the British education system, and they offer a rich satiric take on the great scientific debates of the day. This edition reprints the original complete version of the story, and includes a lively introduction, detailed explanatory notes, and an appendix that reprints Kingsley's first attempt to describe the mysterious creatures that live under the sea.

Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What makes for a good "coming out" story? Will increased queer representation in young people's media teach adolescents the right lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason considers these questions through a range of popular media, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture - queer visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the promise that "It Gets Better" and the threat that it might not - challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people's media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes that we see "queer YA" as a body of transmedia texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect - specifically, anxiety - instead of content.

What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? How is Meg and Mog related to Polish embroidery? And why does death in picture books involve being eaten? Fierce Bad Rabbits explores the stories behind our favourite picture books, weaving in tales of Clare Pollard's childhood reading and her re-discovery of the classic tales as a parent. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem - and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used wisely, and the wild things are closer than you think. 'A gem . . . hard to put down. Thoroughly enjoyable' Spectator 'Essential reading for every thinking parent' Penelope Lively 'An enlightening, perceptive analysis of the books that build us' Sunday Telegraph, 5 star review 'A happy way to reconnect with old friends' Times

Kim Reynolds, Jane Rosen, and Michael Rosen present a new anthology of radical writings for children from the first half of the twentieth century. In the years 1900 to 1960, large sections of the British population embraced a spectrum of left-wing positions with a view to maintaining peace and creating a more just, less class riven, more planned, and more enjoyable society for all. Children's books and periodicals were a central part of radical activity since the young were expected not just to inherit but also to help make this new society, and reading was regarded as the most direct way of helping them acquire the skills for this task. From alphabets through picture books, periodicals, information books, plays, song-books, pamphlets, and novels, many works of children's literature leaned left, but with the possible exception of references to Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against the Barons (1934), a Marxist retelling of the Robin Hood story, it is almost impossible to realise this from standard accounts of this period. This anthology contains a wide selection of the kinds of materials that left-wing and progressive parents would have wanted their children to read and which children understood as part of their initiation into a politically radical class.

'Oh grandmama, what great big teeth you have!' Charles Perrault's versions gave classic status to the humble fairy tale, and it is in his telling that the stories of Little Red Riding-Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and the rest have been passed down from the seventeenth century to the present day. Perrault's tales were enjoyed in the salons of Louis XIV as much as they were loved in the nursery, and it is their wit, humour, and lively detail that capture the imagination of adult and child alike. They transmute into vivid fantasies the hidden fears and conflicts by which children are affected: fears of abandonment, or worse, conflicts with siblings and parents, and the trials of growing up. In addition to the familiar stories, this edition also includes the three verse tales - the troubling account of patient Griselda, the comic Three Silly Wishes, and the notorious Donkey-Skin. This translation by Christopher Betts captures the tone and flavour of Perrault's world, and the delightful spirit of the originals.