Study Guide
Introduction to Block 1: P.7
- The study of Children's Literature is a vibrant and growing field.
- The success of authors like J.K. Rowling or Philip Pullman has shown that Children's Literature is not only part of children’s worlds but also popular reading for adults.
- In short, Children's Literature matters: it is significant to parents, educators, psychologists, students of literature and, most importantly, to children themselves.
- The course team has chosen to focus on three particular forms of analysis:
1- There will be discussions of ways that writing for children might be studied as literature; students with background in arts find some work more familiar, while those coming from social sciences expect to learn something new about literary theory.
2- There will be Input from linguistics and language studies, including work on how to analyse pictures alongside text and how to examine stylistic features.
3- There will be work from field of childhood studies, which looks at how ideas about childhood are embedded in Children's Literature and how these inform our understandings of texts.
