Ethics and Children’s Literature

Description

Exploring the ethical questions posed by, in, and about children's literature, this collection examines the way texts intended for children raise questions of value, depict the moral development of their characters, and call into attention shared moral presuppositions. The essays in Part I look at various past attempts at conveying moral messages to children and interrogate their underlying assumptions. What visions of childhood were conveyed by explicit attempts to cultivate specific virtues in children? What unstated cultural assumptions were expressed by growing resistance to didacticism? How should we prepare children to respond to racism in their books and in their society? Part II takes up the ethical orientations of various classic and contemporary texts, including 'prosaic ethics' in the Hundred Acre Wood, moral discernment in Narnia, ethical recognition in the distant worlds traversed by L'Engle, and virtuous transgression in recent Anglo-American children's literature and in the emerging children's literature of 1960s Taiwan. Part III's essays engage in ethical criticism of arguably problematic messages about our relationship to nonhuman animals, about war, and about prejudice. The final section considers how we respond to children's literature with ethically focused essays exploring a range of ways in which child readers and adult authorities react to children's literature. Even as children's literature has evolved in opposition to its origins in didactic Sunday school tracts and moralizing fables, authors, parents, librarians, and scholars remain sensitive to the values conveyed to children through the texts they choose to share with them. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Notes on Contributors......Page 10 Preface......Page 14 Introduction......Page 16 Part I The Dilemma of Didacticism: Attempts to Shape Children as Moral Beings......Page 28 1 Transmitting Ethics through Books of Golden Deeds for Children......Page 30 2 Sermonizing in New York: The Children’s Magazines of Mary Mapes Dodge and José Martí......Page 44 3 Talking to Children about Race: Children’s Literature in a Segregated Era, 1930–1945......Page 56 Part II Ethical Themes in Classic and Contemporary Texts......Page 70 4 Discernment and the Moral Life in Prince Caspian and the Later Narnia Chronicles......Page 72 5 Making a Difference: Ethical Recognition through Otherness in Madeleine L’Engle’s Fiction......Page 90 6 A Prosaics of the Hundred Acre Wood: Ethics in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner......Page 104 7 Virtuous Transgressors, Not Moral Saints: Protagonists in Contemporary Children’s Literature......Page 116 8 Model Children, Little Rebels, and Moral Transgressors: Virtuous Childhood Images in Taiwanese Juvenile Fiction in the 1960s......Page 140 Part III Ethical Criticism of Children’s Literature......Page 158 9 The Rights and Wrongs of Anthropomorphism in Picture Books......Page 160 10 Lewis, Tolkien, and the Ethics of Imaginary Wars......Page 178 11 Heeding Rousseau’s Advice: Some Ethical Reservations about Addressing Prejudice through Children’s Literature......Page 196 Part IV Ethical Responses to Children’s Literature: Identification, Recognition, Adaptation, Conversation......Page 210 12 The Ethics of Reading Narrative Voice: An Anti-Bakhtinian View......Page 212 13 Prizing Social Justice: The Jane Addams Children’s Book Award......Page 222 14 Katniss Everdeen’s Emerging Moral Consciousness in The Hunger Games......Page 238 15 Using Children’s Literature as a Spark for Ethical Discussion: Stories that Deal with Death......Page 248 Index......Page 262