Description
Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet bring together twenty-two scholars to look closely at the complexities of children's culture. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys asks questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about "masculine" topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired commonplaces about gender, race, and class? Can different critical approaches—new historicism, narratology, or postcolonialism—enable us to gain leverage on the different implications of gender, age, race, and class in our readings of children's books and children's culture?Reviews
"This book is extremely valuable to newcomers to the fields of children's literature and cultural studies, and no scholar of children's literature will want to be without it."—Elizabeth Keyser, editor of Children's Literature"Clark describes the book as a 'sampler' of the many cloths of feminist writing. It is theoretically sophisticated and engaging on many levels."—Kenneth Kidd, Michigan Quarterly Review "Girls, Boys, Books, Toys is an indispensable text for anyone engaged with the cultural and postfeminist analysis of literature. It is also an effectively developed meditation on a postfeminist hermeneutic, and a full-bodied, big-hearted and brazen insistence upon the genius of children's literature."—Michael Joseph, Rutgers University
Author Information
Beverly Lyon Clark is a professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys. Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Philological Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, Women's Review of Books, and other journals. Margaret R. Higonnet is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. She is the former editor of Children's Literature. Her articles have appeared in Poetics Today, Enfance, Revue des livres pour enfants, and other journals.
|
Add paperback to shopping cart