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Author Beauvais, Clémentine.

Title The mighty child : time and power in children's literature / Clementine Beauvais, Christ's College Cambridge
Published Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company, [2015]
©2015

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Description 1 online resource
Series Children's literature, culture, and cognition ; volume 4
Children's literature, culture, and cognition ; v. 4.
Contents Machine generated contents note: Some groundwork -- pt. I Time -- From puer aeternus to puer existens: The advent of the child "thrown forth" -- A series of footnotes to Rose -- The temporal otherness of childhood -- The Little Prince, between untameable others and untimely selves -- The very timely puer aeternus -- The thorny scandal of otherness -- "Not a second for repose": Untimely others -- "Serious men" and miserly adults -- The fox as didactic adult -- Childhood and the future -- Existential wait and the child as hope -- Hope for the end of the wait -- What are we waiting for? Existential wait in children's literature and adventure -- Promised plenitude with polar bears -- The unknowable end of the wait -- The rhythmical otherness of childhood -- The divided adult -- pt. II Otherness -- "Gaps", desire, and the didactic discourse -- Fiction and desire -- What's in the gap? Picturebook theory and the mighty "gap-filler" -- "Readerly" gap, or didactic gap? -- The didactic gap, between "reasonable" interpretation and child might -- Denning the adult-child didactic relation -- Collapsed prescriptions in the didactic discourse -- Subject but object but project: The child "thrown around" -- Cheating death: The Dumbledore problem -- Problems of others -- The adult-child relationship as a special "problem of others" -- The child as "living affirmation of human transcendence" -- The other, beyond the ethical and the empathetic -- How to cure your dad of his problem of others -- The pains of living among others -- Togetherness in the face of otherness -- The other within oneself -- pt. III Commitment -- "An exigence and a gift": Committed children's literature -- Political literature for children -- The didactic discourse of committed children's literature -- Theorising committed literature -- Anguish and hope in the committed children's book -- The political child and the apolitical adult in committed children's literature -- Going on a guilt-trip: Ecological children's literature -- Contemporary children's literature as a form of committed literature -- The pedagogical romance -- Love -- All education is a failure -- Pleasure and jouissance of the pedagogical text -- Spud subversion -- Adulthood reloaded: The pedagogical romance as a form of play
Summary The Mighty Child offers an existentialist approach to the theorization and criticism of children's literature, nuancing the academic claim that children's literature, specifically defined as 'didactic', alienates childhood from adulthood and disempowers its implied child reader. This volume recentres the theoretical debate around the constructions of time and power which characterize conceptions of childhood and adulthood in children's literature. The 'hidden', didactic adult of children's literature, this volume argues, is not solely the dictatorial planner of the child's future, but a
Analysis børne- og ungdomslitteratur
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Children's literature -- History and criticism
Time in literature.
Power (Philosophy) in literature.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
Children's literature
Power (Philosophy) in literature
Time in literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2014034040
ISBN 9789027269157
9027269157
1322664978
9781322664972