What Children’s Literature Means To Me
I have always had an interest in critical thinking and analysis. As a child, I would frequently enjoy stories for young adults and children from a surface level. After high school, I enjoyed over four years of employment at my local library, mainly shelving the children’s section and trying my best to put the right books in people’s hands. By the time I got to Longwood, Children’s Literature as my minor seemed like a natural fit.
Over the past two years, I’ve taken upper level English classes that allowed me to see books for a younger audience from a marketing perspective as well as a scholarly perspective. I began with English 308: Children’s Literature. At the time, I was also under the impression that I would be teaching elementary school students, so of course, again, a natural fit for me. That class taught me the value of surface and passive ideology, the beauty of motiffs and symbolism in books and how the direct style and tone of a book as well as the time and culture it’s written in can impact the reader. Young Adult Literature was much the same, except with longer books and topics that were more relevant to an older audience.
By my third semester I was invested in the history of literature for young readers and learned a lot more about how the very meaning of childhood has changed over the years. For example, the overall idea of “childhood” didn’t exist until the early 19th and 20th centuries. Before this, in the 1600s, children were mainly used as a source of cheap labor and as a practical edition to the household. By the 1800’s Puritans had come up with the idea that each child was in fact sinful, whereas Evangelicals held the notion that children were both sinful and romantic. (To clarify: “romantic” in the sense that children are innocent, pure souls who are blank slates / are Christlike).
Finally, now I am taking a class on diversity in children’s literature. As someone who identifies with several under represented groups this class is fascinating to me as it takes historical contexts and world-wide cultural influences and analyzes them around the literature they produce. I am finding that culturally, Western society tends to sugarcoat things to reinforce the idea of maintaining an innocence in childhood, usually to the young reader’s detriment.
English 209: Intro to Literary Analysis
English 383: History of Literature for Young Readers
English 380: Children’s Literature
English 381: Literature for Young Adults
English 384: Diversity in Literature for Young Readers