Abstract
This essay examines Eleanor Estes's critically neglected 1960 novel The Witch Family, arguing that the novel anticipates some of the major preoccupations of later children’s literature in its early concern with issues of textuality. While Estes is largely known as a writer of simple family stories, The Witch Family is an innovative work of metafiction, which explicitly engages with a number of philosophical and literary-critical issues central to postmodern and poststructuralist discussion. Posing central and overt questions regarding the relationship between reality and fiction, the novel illustrates the contextual, communal, and relational aspects of language and finally suggests that the ability to tell stories ethically is tied to the recognition of one’s own contingent position within language.
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Dawn Heinecken is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Louisville and is the author of The Warrior Women of Television: A Feminist Cultural Analysis of the New Female Body in Popular Media and, with Vickie Shields, a co-writer of Measuring Up: How Advertising Affects Self-Image, which won the 2004 National Communication Association’s award for Outstanding Research in Visual Communication. Her other publications focus on critical cultural analysis of gender and body image representations in popular culture, including professional wrestling, romance novels, fan fiction, as well as the marketing of “adult home novelty” products to women.
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Heinecken, D. The Reality of Fiction and the Ethics of Storytelling in Eleanor Estes's The Witch Family . Child Lit Educ 41, 260–272 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9108-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9108-x