Children's Literature of the English Renaissance

Children's Literature of the English Renaissance PDF

Author: Warren W. Wooden

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2015-01-13

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0813165059

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Warren W. Wooden's pioneering studies of early examples of children's literature throw new light on many accepted works of the English Renaissance period. In consequence, they appear more complex, significant, and successful than hitherto realized. In these nine essays, Wooden traces the roots of English children's literature in the Renaissance beginning with the first printed books of Caxton and ranging through the work of John Bunyan. Wooden examines a number of works and authors from this period of two centuries -- some from the standard canon, others obscure or neglected -- while addressing questions about the early development of children's literature.

The Common Writer

The Common Writer PDF

Author: Nigel Cross

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1988-06-09

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780521357210

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This book examines the conditions of authorship and the development of publishing and journalism during the nineteenth century. It provides a detailed account on the social, cultural, and economic factors that control literary activity, and determine literary success or failure. There are chapters on the place of women and working-class writers in a predominantly male, middle-class publishing industry; on literary clubs, societies, and feuds; on patronage, charity, and state support for writers; on literary journalists and the development of the bohemian character; on the facts that inspired the fictional world of Thackeray's Pendennis and Gissing's New Grub Street; and on the long-running debates on the status of writers and the state of literature. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, The Common Writer adds substantially to our understanding of nineteenth-century literary history and culture.

Interactive Books

Interactive Books PDF

Author: Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-27

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 113509814X

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Movable books are an innovative area of children’s publishing. Commonly equated with spectacular pop-ups, movable books have a little-known history as interactive, narrative media. Since they are hybrid artifacts consisting of words, images and movable components, they cross the borders between story, toy, and game. Interactive Books is a historical and comparative study of early movable books in relation to the children who engage with them. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh focuses on the period movable books became connected with children from the mid-17th to the early-19th centuries. In particular, she examines turn-up books, paper doll books, and related hybrid experiments like toy theaters and paignion (or domestic play set) produced between 1650 and 1830. Despite being popular in their own time, these artifacts are little known today. This study draws attention to a gap in our knowledge of children’s print culture by showing how these artifacts are important in their own right. Reid-Walsh combines archival research with children’s literature studies, book history, and juvenilia studies. By examining commercially produced and homemade examples, she explores the interrelations among children, interactive media, and historical participatory culture. By drawing on both Enlightenment thinkers and contemporary digital media theorists Interactive Books enables us to think critically about children’s media texts paper and digital, past and present.

Women, Theology and Evangelical Children’s Literature, 1780-1900

Women, Theology and Evangelical Children’s Literature, 1780-1900 PDF

Author: Irene Euphemia Smale

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-12

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 3031190289

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This book provides a wealth of fascinating information about many significant and lesser-known nineteenth-century Christian authors, mostly women, who were motivated to write material specifically for children’s spiritual edification because of their personal faith. It explores three prevalent theological and controversial doctrines of the period, namely Soteriology, Biblical Authority and Eschatology, in relation to children’s specifically engendered Christian literature. It traces the ecclesiastical networks and affiliations across the theological spectrum of Evangelical authors, publishers, theologians, clergy and scholars of the period. An unprecedented deluge of Evangelical literature was produced for millions of Sunday School children in the nineteenth century, resulting in one of its most prolific and profitable forms of publishing. It expanded into a vast industry whose magnitude, scope and scale is discussed throughout this book. Rather than dismissing Evangelical children’s literature as simplistic, formulaic, moral didacticism, this book argues that, in attempting to convert the mass reading public, nineteenth-century authors and publishers developed a complex, highly competitive genre of children’s literature to promote their particular theologies, faith and churchmanships, and to ultimately save the nation.

The Making of the Alice Books

The Making of the Alice Books PDF

Author: Ronald Reichertz

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780773520813

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Analysing Lewis Carroll's Alice books in the context of children's literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, Ronald Reichertz argues that Carroll's striking originality was the result of a fusion of his narrative imagination and formal and thematic features from earlier children's literature. The Making of the Alice Books includes discussions of the didactic and nursery rhyme verse traditionally addressed by Carroll's critics while adding and elaborating connections established within and against the continuum of English-language children's literature. Drawing examples from a wide range of children's literature Reichertz demonstrates that the Alice books are infused with conventions of and allusions to earlier works and identifies precursors of Carroll's upside-down, looking-glass, and dream vision worlds. Key passages from related books are reprinted in the appendices, making available many hard-to-find examples of early children's literature.

The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature

The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature PDF

Author: Gillian Lathey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-09-13

Total Pages: 519

ISBN-13: 1136925740

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This book offers a historical analysis of key classical translated works for children, such as writings by Hans Christian Andersen and Grimms’ tales. Translations dominate the earliest history of texts written for children in English, and stories translated from other languages have continued to shape its course to the present day. Lathey traces the role of the translator and the impact of translations on the history of English-language children’s literature from the ninth century onwards. Discussions of popular texts in each era reveal fluctuations in the reception of translated children’s texts, as well as instances of cultural mediation by translators and editors. Abridgement, adaptation, and alteration by translators have often been viewed in a negative light, yet a closer examination of historical translators’ prefaces reveals a far more varied picture than that of faceless conduits or wilful censors. From William Caxton’s dedication of his translated History of Jason to young Prince Edward in 1477 (‘to thentent/he may begynne to lerne read Englissh’), to Edgar Taylor’s justification of the first translation into English of Grimms’ tales as a means of promoting children’s imaginations in an age of reason, translators have recorded in prefaces and other writings their didactic, religious, aesthetic, financial, and even political purposes for translating children’s texts.