English 180 - Fall, 2020

Children's Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Miller, Elizabeth
CRN: 53266
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50
GE Areas: Writing Experience

Description

This course focuses on classic literature for children, ranging from Lewis Carroll’s _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ (1865) to newer classics such as _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone_ (1997) and _Esperanza Rising_ (2000). _Alice_ has long been considered a watershed work of children’s literature because it conceives of childhood as a special period of existence with intrinsic value, a time of rich imaginative engagement that is superior to the tedium of adulthood that follows. Critics of children’s literature have noted that a shift associated with the start of a “Golden Age” of children’s literature, from roughly 1865-1930, occurred at the same time that child labor laws began protecting children from waged labor in factories, mills, and farms, ensuring a period of time for education before entering the labor force. We will consider in this class how such changing cultural conceptions of childhood interrelate with children’s literature. We will also examine how the child reader emerged as a new marketing category in the modern era, and will look at the adaptation of children’s classics into multiple print and visual forms, as with Disney’s reshaping of fairy tales into film. We will think about how children’s literature has changed from 1865 to the present, but also how it has stayed the same. Themes such as miniaturization and figures such as the orphan are as alive in contemporary children’s literature as they were in the nineteenth century. In this sense, we will ask what children’s literature tells us about children.

Grading

papers, quizzes, exams.

Texts

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J. K. Rowling
The Hobbit , J. R. R. Tolkien
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
Esperanza Rising, Pam Munoz Ryan
Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery
Bud Not Buddy, Christopher Paul Curtis