Childrens Literature and Childhood Discourses: Exploring Identity through Fiction

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Childrens literature shapes what children learn about the world. It reflects social values, norms, and stereotypes. This book offers fresh insights into some of the key issues in fiction for children, from the representation of gender to embodied cognition and the translation of childrens literature.

Connecting classic childrens texts such as Alice in Wonderland with contemporary fiction including Murder Most Unladylike, the book innovatively brings together perspectives from corpus linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and human geography. It explores approaches to experiencing fiction, as well as methods for the study of literary texts. Childhood discourses are investigated through the materiality of texts, the spaces that literature takes up in libraries, the cultural history of fiction moulded through performances, as well as reading environments that shape childhood experiences, such as fashion and urban spaces.

Childrens Literature and Childhood Discourses emphasizes the crucial link between fictional stories and real life.

Reviews

Societies that do not value the power of storytelling for children do not value the future. This book promises to offer a much needed broadening perspective on the field of contemporary childrens literature and its vital place in helping young people navigate todays world. -- Sita Brahmachari, Award-winning Children's & YA author
As this collected volume crosses disciplinary divides, it not only constitutes a major contribution to childrens literature scholarship but also shows the substantial relevance of this field for example to linguistics, gender studies or childhood studies. It will appeal both to academic readers and those with other professional expertise related to children and childhood. -- Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, University of Wroclaw, Poland
This book represents a new and innovative approach to the study of childrens literature. It is likely to be of interest to linguists, literary scholars, education researchers, librarians, teachers and parents, and also to researchers in the numerous domains with which it makes connections. -- Martin Wynne, University of Oxford, UK
What happens to childrens minds when they read literature How do literary texts form a childs knowledge and experience of the world What roles might both societal factors, such as gender, and cognitive factors, such as embodiment, play in all this These questions, and many more, are explored in the multidisciplinary and muti-methodological studies that constitute this learned and pioneering volume. -- Michael Burke, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Author Bio

Anna Cermakova is a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University, UK and EdTech consultant for WiKIT, AS.

Michaela Mahlberg is Humboldt-Professor and Professor of Digital Humanities at FAU Erlangen-Nrnberg, Germany.