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Children's literature
Children's
literature or juvenile literature includes stories,
books, magazines, and poems that are enjoyed by children. Modern children's literature
is classified in two different ways: genre or age of the reader.
Children's
literature can be traced to stories and songs. The development of early
children's literature is difficult to trace. Even after printing became
widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created
for adults and later adapted for a younger audience. Since the 15th
century, a large quantity of literature, often with a moral or religious message, has been
aimed specifically at children. The late
nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries became known as the "Golden Age of Children's
Literature" as this period
included the publication of many books acknowledged today as classics.
Children's literature
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Introduction
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There
is no widely definition of children's literature. It can be broadly defined as
anything that children read or more
specifically defined as fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or drama for children
and young people. Nancy Anderson, defines
children's literature as "all books written for children,
excluding works such as comic books, joke books, cartoon books, and
non-fiction works that are not intended to be read from front to back, such
as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference materials".
Some
works defy easy categorization. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
was written and marketed for young adults, but it is also popular among adults. The series' extreme popularity led The New
York Times to create a separate
best-seller list for children's books.
Despite
the widespread association of children's literature with picture books,
spoken narratives existed before printing, and the root of many children's
tales go back to ancient storytellers.
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History
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Early children's literature consisted
of spoken stories, songs, and poems that
were used to educate,
instruct, and entertain children. Scholars have
qualified this viewpoint by noting that there was a literature designed to convey the values,
attitudes, and information necessary for children within their cultures.
18th century: the development of
the concept of childhood,
a separate genre of children's literature began to emerge
19th century: Danish author and poet
Hans Christian Andersen traveled through Europe and gathered many
well-known fairy tales. He was followed by the
Brothers Grimm, who preserved the traditional tales told in
Germany. The Grimms's contribution to children's literature
goes beyond their collection of stories.
Golden age: The
shift to a modern genre of children's literature occurred in the mid-19th century. Child-oriented
books more attuned to the child's imagination. The
availability of children's literature greatly increased as well, as paper and printing became widely available and
affordable, the population grew and literacy rates improved.
E.g. Lewis Carroll's fantasy, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, regarded as the
first "English masterpiece written for children."
Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of
Pinocchio
Robert Louis Stevenson , Treasure
Island
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- Picture book
A
picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often
aimed at young
children. Two of the earliest books with something
like the format picture books still retain now were Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter from 1845 and Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit from 1902.
Picture book
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Target audiences
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Picture
books are most often aimed at young children, and while some may have very basic language
especially designed to help
children develop their reading skills, most are written with vocabulary a child
can understand but not necessarily
read. For this reason, picture books tend to have two functions in
the lives of children: they
are first read to young children by adults, and then children read them themselves
once they begin learning to read.
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- Fairy tale
Fairy tale
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History
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The
oral
tradition of the fairy tale came long before the written page. Tales were
told or enacted dramatically, rather than written down, and handed down from
generation to generation. Fairy tales appear, now and
again, in written literature throughout literate cultures, as in The Golden Ass.
The Salon Era: In the mid-17th
century, a vogue for magical tales emerged among the intellectuals who
frequented the salons of
Paris. These salons were regular gatherings hosted by prominent aristocratic women, where women and men
could gather together to discuss the issues of the day. Sometimes in the
middle of the 17th century, a passion for the conversational parlour game
based on the plots of old folk tales swept through the salons. Great emphasis
was placed on a mode of delivery that seemed natural and spontaneous. The decorative language of the fairy tales served an
important function: disguising the rebellious subtext of the stories and
sliding them past the court censors. Not surprisingly, the tales by
women often featured young aristocratic girls whose lives were controlled by
the arbitrary whims of fathers, kings, and elderly wicked fairies.
Later works: The first collectors
to attempt to preserve not only the plot and characters of the tale, but also
the style in which they were told, were the Brothers Grimm, collecting German fairy tales; ironically, this meant although
their first edition remains a treasure for folklorists, they rewrote
the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable, which ensured their
sales and the later popularity of their work. Sometimes they
regarded fairy tales as a form of fossil, the remnants of a once-perfect
tale. However, further research has concluded that fairy tales never had a
fixed form, and regardless of literary influence, the tellers constantly altered them for their own
purposes. The work
of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them
to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of
romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly
representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence.
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Contemporary tales
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Literary: In
contemporary literature, many authors have used the form of fairy tales for
various reasons, such as examining
the human condition from the simple framework a fairytale provides.
Some authors seek to recreate
a sense of the fantastic in a contemporary discourse. Some writers use
fairy tale forms for modern
issues; this can include using the psychological dramas implicit in
the story. Sometimes, especially in children's literature, fairy tales are retold with a twist simply for comic effect.
A common comic motif is a world where all the fairy tales take place, and the
characters are aware of their role in the story, such as in the film series
Shrek. Other authors may have specific motives, such as multicultural or feminist reevaluations of
predominantly Eurocentric masculine-dominated fairy tales, implying
critique of older narratives.
Film:
Fairy
tales have been enacted dramatically; records exist of this in commedia dell'arte, and later in pantomime. The Walt Disney Company has had a significant
impact on the evolution of the fairy tale film. Some of the earliest
short silent films from the Disney studio were based on fairy tales, and some
fairy tales were adapted into shorts in the musical comedy series
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- Fable
Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are
anthropomorphized (given human qualities, such
as the ability to speak human language)
and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added
explicitly as a pithy maxim.
Fable
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History
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The fable is
one of the most enduring forms of folk literature,
spread abroad, modern researchers agree, less by literary anthologies than by
oral transmission. Fables can be found in the literature of almost every
country.
Aesopic or
Aesop's fable: The
varying corpus denoted Aesopica or Aesop's Fables includes
most of the best-known western fables, which are attributed to the legendary Aesop, supposed to have
been a slave in ancient
Greece around 550 BC. Many familiar fables of Aesop include "The Crow and the Pitcher",
"The Tortoise and the
Hare" and "The
Lion and the Mouse". In ancient Greek and Roman education, the
fable was the first of the progymnasmata—training exercises in prose composition and
public speaking—where in students would be asked to learn fables, expand upon
them, invent their own, and finally use them as persuasive examples in longer
forensic or deliberative speeches. The need of instructors to teach, and
students to learn, a wide range of fables as material for their declamations
resulted in their being gathered together in collections, like those of Aesop.
Modern era: In modern times, while the fable has
been trivialized in children's books, it has also been fully adapted to
modern adult literature. Felix
Salten's Bambi (1923) is a Bildungsroman
— a story of a protagonist's
coming-of-age — cast in the form of a fable. James Thurber used the ancient fable style in
his books Fables for Our
Time (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956), and in his stories
"The Princess and the
Tin Box" in The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948) and
"The Last Clock: A Fable for the Time, Such As It Is, of Man" in Lanterns
and Lances (1961). Władysław Reymont's The Revolt (1922), a metaphor
for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, described a revolt by animals that take
over their farm in order to introduce "equality." George Orwell's Animal Farm
(1945) similarly satirized Stalinist Communism in particular, and totalitarianism
in general, in the guise of animal fable. In the 21st century the
Neapolitan writer Sabatino Scia is the author of more than two hundred
fables, that he describes as “western
protest fables.” The characters are not only animals, but also things, beings and
elements from nature. Scia’s aim is the same as in the traditional fable,
playing the role of revealer of human society. In Latin America, the brothers Juan and Victor Ataucuri Garcia have contributed to the resurgence of the fable. But they do so
with a novel idea: use
the fable as a means of dissemination of traditional literature of that
place.
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A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and many other countries, but usage of the term only dates from the late 18th/early 19th century. In North America the term
Mother Goose Rhymes,
introduced in the mid-18th century, is still often used.
Nursery
rhyme
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History
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Lullabies:
The oldest children's songs of which we have records
are lullabies,
intended to help a child
sleep. Lullabies can be found in every human culture. For example, a
well-known lullaby such as "Rock-a-bye, baby on a tree top".
Early
nursery rhymes: From the later Middle Ages there are records of
short children's rhyming songs, often as
marginalia. From the mid-16th century they begin to be recorded in
English plays. "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man"
is one of the oldest surviving English nursery rhymes. Most nursery rhymes
were not written down until the 18th century, when the publishing of
children's books began to move from polemic and education towards
entertainment. The publication of John Newbery's
compilation of English rhymes, Mother
Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, c.
1765), is the first record we have of many classic rhymes, still in use
today.
19th century:
In the early 19th century printed collections of rhymes
began to spread to other countries, including Robert Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland
(1826) and in the United States, Mother Goose's Melodies (1833).[1] From this period we sometimes
know the origins and authors of rhymes—for instance, in "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"
which combines the melody of an 18th-century French tune "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman"
with a 19th-century English poem by Jane Taylor entitled "The Star"
used as lyrics.
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Meanings of nursery rhymes
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Many nursery rhymes have been argued to have hidden meanings and origins.
Many of the ideas about the links between rhymes and historical persons, or events, can be
traced back to Katherine Elwes's book The Real Personages of
Mother Goose (1930),
in which she linked famous nursery-rhyme characters with real people, on
little or no evidence. She assumed that children's songs were a peculiar form
of coded historical narrative, propaganda or covert protest, and rarely
considered that they could have
been written simply for entertainment.
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