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Cover image of Girls, Boys, Books, Toys
Cover image of Girls, Boys, Books, Toys
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Girls, Boys, Books, Toys

Gender in Children's Literature and Culture

edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet

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No previous collection of criticism has focused on gender in the broad range of children's literature. No previous collection has embraced both children's literature and material culture.

Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet bring together twenty-two scholars to look closely at the complexities of children's culture. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys asks questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially scripted plots for...

No previous collection of criticism has focused on gender in the broad range of children's literature. No previous collection has embraced both children's literature and material culture.

Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet bring together twenty-two scholars to look closely at the complexities of children's culture. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys asks questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about "masculine" topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired commonplaces about gender, race, and class? Can different critical approaches—new historicism, narratology, or postcolonialism—enable us to gain leverage on the different implications of gender, age, race, and class in our readings of children's books and children's culture?

Reviews

Reviews

Clark describes the book as a 'sampler' of the many cloths of feminist writing. It is theoretically sophisticated and engaging on many levels.

This book is extremely valuable to newcomers to the fields of children's literature and cultural studies, and no scholar of children's literature will want to be without it.

Girls, Boys, Books, Toys is an indispensable text for anyone engaged with the cultural and postfeminist analysis of literature. It is also an effectively developed meditation on a postfeminist hermeneutic, and a full-bodied, big-hearted and brazen insistence upon the genius of children's literature.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
312
ISBN
9780801865268
Illustration Description
21 b&w illus.
Author Bios
Beverly Lyon Clark
Featured Contributor

Beverly Lyon Clark

Beverly Lyon Clark is the A. Howard Meneely Professor of English at Wheaton College and coeditor (with Margaret Higonnet) of Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture, also available from Johns Hopkins.