The mighty child : time and power in children's literature / Clémentine Beauvais, Christ's College Cambridge.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Beauvais, Clémentine, author.

Series:

Children's literature, culture, and cognition ; v. 4.

Children's literature, culture, and cognition ; 4

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Children's literature--History and criticism.

Children's literature.

Time in literature.

Power (Philosophy) in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (238 pages) : illustrations (chiefly color).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company, [2015]

Language Note:

English

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 also a disempowered entity, yearning for unpredictability in the semi-educational, semi-aesthetic endeavor of the children's book. Leaning on current work in the field of children's literature theory, on French phenomenological existentialism, and on the philosophy and sociology of childhood, The Mighty Child is addressed to contemporary theorists and critics of children's literature.

Contents:

The Mighty Child

Editorial page

Title page

LCC data

Epigraph

Table of contents

Table of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Some groundwork

Part 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

Part 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

Defining 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

Part 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

Conclusion

Bibliography

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Name index

Subject index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9789027269157

9027269157

OCLC:

900540112