Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults

Description

This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children’s and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children’s and young adult literature. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures 1 Children’s Literature and the Affective Turn: Affect, Emotion, Empathy Section I Affect and the Historical Child Reader 2 From Virtue Ethics to Emotional Intelligence: Advice from Medieval Parents to Their Children 3 Charity, Affect, and Waif Novels 4 ‘Feeling is believing’: Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and the Power of Emotion 5 ‘She cannot smile the smile that wells up from the heart’: Beauty, Health, and Emotion in Six to Sixteen and The Secret Garden Section II Theory of Mind 6 Emotions and Ethics: Implications for Children’s Literature 7 Simplified Minds: Empathy and Mind-Modelling in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle 8 ‘Would I lie to you?’: Unreliable Narration and the Emotional Rollercoaster in Justine Larbalestier’s Liar Section III Place and Space 9 Spatialities of Emotion: Place and Non-place in Children’s Picture Books 10 Changing Minds and Hearts: Felt Theory and the Carceral Child in Indigenous Canadian Residential School Picture Books Section IV Emotions of Belonging 11 ‘Love: it will kill you and save you, both’: Love as Rebellion in Recent YA Dystopian Trilogies 12 At the Risk of ‘Feeling Brown’ in Gay YA: Machismo, Mariposas, and the Drag of Identity 13 ‘Conceal, Don’t Feel’: Disability, Monstrosity, and the Freak in Edward Scissorhands and Frozen Notes on Contributors Index