Ranging from the fundamental question, whether a children's literature is possible, or what its formal and contextual parameters might be, to issues of contemporary cultural studies (postcolonialism, gender, race and class) this essay collection inserts children's literature into literary, theoretical and historical debate. From English renaissance children's reading, it shifting to Shaw's Castle Blair, an ambivalent metaphor for a nineteenth-century Ireland seeking postcolonial self determination, and a study of wild Irish ...
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Ranging from the fundamental question, whether a children's literature is possible, or what its formal and contextual parameters might be, to issues of contemporary cultural studies (postcolonialism, gender, race and class) this essay collection inserts children's literature into literary, theoretical and historical debate. From English renaissance children's reading, it shifting to Shaw's Castle Blair, an ambivalent metaphor for a nineteenth-century Ireland seeking postcolonial self determination, and a study of wild Irish girls' civilising education in England in De Horne Vaizey's and Meade's novels. The book interrogates Hodgson Burnett's obsessions with childhood innocence and her problematic adult-child relationships; the golliwog transformed from a transgressive figure into a non-PC icon; and schoolboys from the Jennings series and Greyfriars to Huck Finn and Harry Potter. Blyton, Dillon, Frost, Lynch, Parkinson, Ransome, Thomas, and Whelan come under scrutiny, as does the link between food, class, national heritage, and innocence. How Frost's and Thomas's stories reflect evolving conceptions of childhood is scrutinized. Unpublished archival material complicates assumptions about Patricia Lynch and Talbot Press children's religious publications. Dillon's 'nativist' novels display transitional stages of post-colonialization, and Whelan's and Parkinson's historiography is contrasted.
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