Description
Book SynopsisChildrenâs Literature & Culture: An Introduction guides readers in the study of culture in, around, and through childrenâs literature. Childrenâs literature has long been used as a mechanism by which a culture passes its values from one generation to the next. Because of this culturally didactic purpose, childrenâs literature can be viewed as one of the most fruitful areas of study of any given culture, while attending to the cultures from which works of childrenâs literature emerge and in which they circulate can also help better understand not only the ideas of childhood that underpin individual texts for children, but the role they play in the construction and transmission of different cultural ideologies. This book teaches readers this double work of using culture to understand childrenâs literature and vice versa. This volume traces the scholarly methodologies and histories that have attended the study of each of the twenty chaptersâ given subject - from the representation of race in and around childrenâs literature to questions of censorship to how libraries can and do shape childrenâs literature. In the process, it prepares readers to confidently enter and forward scholarly debates and to teach such debates to their own students.
