Barua, Navakanta (1926–2002)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tilottoma Misra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Children's Magazines ◽  
Art And Culture

Navakanta Barua was one of the best known Assamese modernist writers of the twentieth century who worked through multiple genres. A graduate from the Visva Bharati University and with an MA from the Aligarh Muslim University, he joined Cotton College, Guwahati as a Lecturer in English in 1954, where he worked till his retirement from service. During his lifetime, Navakanta published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and songs, five novels, eight volumes of non-fictional prose and literary criticism, besides a substantial body of children’s literature. He edited two children’s magazines (Jonbai and Pohar) and a journal of art and culture (Seerolu). He translated into Asamiya the verses of Kabir and some of the major works of Euripides, Goethe, Pushkin, Rabindranath Tagore, Nazrul Islam, Sumitranandan Pant, Subramanyam Bharati, Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. Some of his best translations render the texture and nuances of the original in a brilliantly creative manner.

Blackness, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Dominican Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Stacy Ann Creech
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Specific Construction

From pre-Columbian times through to the twentieth century, Dominican children's literature has struggled to define itself due to pressures from outside forces such as imperialism and colonialism. This paper examines the socio-political contexts within Dominican history that determined the kind of literature available to children, which almost exclusively depicted a specific construction of indigeneity, European or Anglo-American characters and settings, in an effort to efface the country's African roots. After the Educational Reform of 1993 was instituted, however, there has been a promising change in the field, as Dominican writers are engaged in producing literature for young people that includes more accurate representations of Blackness and multiculturalism.

The Children’s Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary System

This chapter explores the development of the children’s novel throughout the twentieth century. This period represents a change from the protection of childhood to the commodification of childhood, and from essentially gentleman-amateur publishing to highly professional production and marketing. But for all its successes, the idea that the children’s novel is necessary inferior to its adult counterpart dies hard. This is the more illogical because novels for children do not have exact counterparts in the adult literary ‘system’. From an adult point of view, all children’s literature is necessarily ‘popular’ or ‘lowbrow’, or at its ‘best’ merely ‘middlebrow’. Equally, the term ‘literature’ is not useful or relevant in the criticism of children’s novels, and the most valued texts in children’s literature may be precisely those that have the least to offer the adult.

“Who Are You?”: Modernism, Childhood, and Historical Consciousness in Faulkner’s The Wishing Tree

2017 ◽  
pp. 122-134
Author(s):  
Hannah Godwin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Child Reader

This chapter considers an “uneasy yet potentially fruitful confluence” between modernist writing and children's literature in the only Faulkner tale penned specifically for children. Drawing on “the Romantic reverence for the child as transcendent and inspirational,” a reverence qualified to some degree by twentieth-century psychoanalysis and its suspicion of childhood innocence, modernist artists portrayed the child as “a vessel of consciousness” and “instinctual, intense perceptions,” and thus a source of “defamiliarizing perspectives” that fostered artistic experimentation. In The Wishing Tree, writing for young readers may have helped Faulkner awaken his creative potential. The Wishing Tree's rich mix of fantasy and history “works to imbue the child reader with a sense of historical consciousness” while recognizing her as the bearer “of a more hopeful future”.

Children’s Folklore and Its History in Poland

Tekstualia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-301
Author(s):  
Joanna Papuzińska-Beksiak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The Internet

The article discusses the phenomenon of children’s folklore in the age of the Internet, especially with respect to the forms of communication that the Internet facilitates. Children’s folklore has always been connected with the evolving philosophy of childhood. The turn of the turn of the twentieth century marks the emergence of serious studies in children’s oral and textual folklore. This kind of creative output has been recognized as a subcategory of children’s literature (J. Korczak, J. Brzechwa, J. Tuwim etc.). Nowadays the theory of anti-pedagogy (R. Dahl) seems to be the most closely related to children’s folklore.

scholarly journals "You Know Very Well You're Not Real": Victorian Children's Fantasy Literature and the  Problem of Writing the Child

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Beatrice Turner
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Fantasy Literature ◽  
The Real ◽  
The North ◽  
Innocent Child ◽  
Return Journey ◽  
Child Reader

<p>This thesis examines eight "Golden Age"children's fantasy narratives and uncovers their engagement with the "impossibility" of writing the child. Only recently has children's literature criticism recognised that the child in the text and the implied child reader cannot stand in for the "real" child reader. This is an issue which other literary criticism has been at pains to acknowledge, but which children's literature critics have neglected. I have based my reading on critics such as Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Jacqueline Rose and Perry Nodelman, all of whom are concerned to expose the term "child" as an adult cultural construction, one which becomes problematic when it is made to stand in for real children. I read the child in the text as an entity which contains and is tainted by the trace of the adult who writes it; it is therefore impossible for a pure, innocent child to exist in language, the province of the adult. Using Derrida's conception of the trace and his famous statement that "there is nothing outside of the text," I demonstrate that the idea of the innocent child, which was central to Rousseau's Emile and the Romantic Child which is supposed to have been authored by Wordsworth and inherited wholesale by his Victorian audience, is possible only as a theory beyond language. The Victorian texts I read, which include Lewis Carroll's Alice texts, George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind and the Princess texts, Kingsley's The Water Babies and Mrs. Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room, all explore different ways in which the child might be successfully articulated: in language, in death, and through the return journey into fantasy. While all the texts attempt to reach the child, all ultimately foreground the failure of this enterprise. When a language is created which is child-authored, it fails as communication and meaning breaks down; when the adult ceases to write the narrative, the child within it ceases to exist.</p>

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