Abstract
How and why does this book claim that its approaches to children’s literature are ‘new’? In order to explain this, I examine in this chapter what children’s literature critics already claim they do, and then contrast this with the approaches in the chapters in this volume, to demonstrate how and why these differ from what has come before in most previous criticism.
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Recommended further reading
Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, orig. publ. 1959). The history that first formulated childhood as a historically and culturally variable concept.
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). Discusses gender as constructed in similar ways to Jacqueline Rose’s discussion of the child as constructed in The Case of Peter Pan.
Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, orig. pub. 1967). Analyses philosophical ideas about writing, education and knowledge, particularly in relation to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762).
Freud, Sigmund, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ in On Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, comp. and ed. Angela Richards, The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, orig. pub. 1905). Introduces psychoanalytic ideas about memory and identity which disrupt assumptions about a coherent, know-able, consciousness.
Jenks, Chris, Allison James and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Sociologists working with ideas of childhood as construction (see also previous works by these authors).
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© 2004 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein
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Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (2004). Introduction. Children’s Literature: New Approaches. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (eds) Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523777_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523777_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-1738-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-52377-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)