Description
Book SynopsisChildren''s book awards have mushroomed since the early twentieth-century and especially since the 1960s, when literary prizing became a favored strategy for both commercial promotion and canon-making. There are over 300 awards for English-language titles alone, but despite the profound impact of children's book awards, scholars have paid relatively little attention to them. This book is the first scholarly volume devoted to the analysis of Anglophone children''s book awards in historical and cultural context. With attention to both political and aesthetic concerns, the book offers original and diverse scholarship on prizing practices and their consequences in Australia, Canada, and especially the United States. Contributors offer both case studies of particular awards and analysis of broader trends in literary evaluation and elevation, drawing on theoretical work on canonization and cultural capital. Sections interrogate the complex and often unconscious ideological work of prizing
Trade Review
"This indispensable volume engages central questions in our field with admirable frankness and inclusivity of opinion."
- Katharine Capshaw, University of Connecticut, The Lion and the Unicorn
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgements
A Prize-Losing Introduction
Kenneth B. Kidd & Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.
Chapter I: Prizing National and Transnational: Australian Texts in the Printz Award
Clare Bradford
Chapter II: Prizing the Unrecognized: Systems of Value, Visibility, and the First World in International and Translated Children’s Texts
Abbie Ventura
Chapter III: The Guys Are the Prize: Adolescent Fiction, Masculinity, and the Political Unconscious of Australian Book Awards
Erica Hateley
Chapter IV: How Award-Winning Children’s Nonfiction Complicates Stereotypes
Joe Sutliff Sanders, Katlyn M. Avritt, Kynsey M. Creel, & Charlie C. Lynn
Chapter V: The Last Bastion of Aesthetics? Formalism and the Rhetoric of Excellence
in Children’s Literary Awards
Robert Bittner & Michelle Superle
Chapter VI: The Still Almost All-White World of Children’s Literature: Theory, Practice, and Identity-Based Children’s Book Awards
June Cummins
Chapter VII: The Pura Belpré Medal: The Latino/a Child in America, the "Need" for Diversity, and Name-branding Latinidad
Marilisa Jiménez Garcia
Chapter VIII: Peter’s Legacy: The Ezra Jack Keats Book Award
Ramona Caponegro
Chapter IX: Race and the Prizing of Children’s Literature in Canada: Spotlighting Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards
Barbara McNeil
Chapter X: Finding Nominations: Children’s Films at the Academy Awards
Peter C. Kunze
Chapter XI: Prizing Popularity: How the Blockbuster Book Has Reshaped Children’s Literature
Rebekah Fitzsimmons
Chapter XII: The Archive Award, or the Case of de Grummond’s Gold
Emily Murphy
Chapter XIII: Apologia
Michael Joseph & Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.
Chapter XIV: Prizing in the Children’s Literature Association
Kenneth B. Kidd
Contributors
Works Cited
