Portal:Children's literature

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Portrait by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Children's literature is literature written for and/or marketed towards a primarily juvenile audience. While some books are authored for a youthful audience, others become associated with children through marketing or tradition. Still others are "crossover" books, read by children and adults alike. Literature addressed directly to children arose in Western Europe in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, becoming a very profitable industry in the 19th century. It includes picture books, fairy tales, animal stories, school stories, science fiction, fantasy, series fiction, chapter books, children's poetry, and other genres. Throughout its 300-year history, children's stories have reflected the values of the societies that produced them.

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Proserpine is a verse drama written for children by the English Romantic writers Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Composed in 1820 while the Shelleys were living in Italy, it is often considered a partner to the Shelleys' play Midas. Proserpine was first published in the London periodical The Winter's Wreath in 1832. The drama is based on Ovid's tale of the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto. Mary Shelley's version focuses on the female characters. In a largely feminist retelling from Ceres's point of view, Shelley emphasises the separation of mother and daughter and the strength offered by a community of women. Ceres represents life and love, and Pluto represents death and violence. The genres of the text also reflect gender debates of the time. Percy contributed in the lyric verse form traditionally dominated by men; Mary created a drama with elements common to early 19th-century women's writing: details of everyday life and empathetic dialogue. Proserpine is part of a female literary tradition which, as feminist literary critic Susan Gubar describes it, has used the story of Ceres and Proserpine to "re-define, to re-affirm and to celebrate female consciousness itself". However, the play has been both neglected and marginalised by critics.

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Der Struwwelpeter (1845) is a series of illustrated moral tales by Heinrich Hoffman. The above poem translates as:

"Just look at him! there he stands,

With his nasty hair and hands.

See! his nails are never cut;

They are grimed as black as soot;

And the sloven, I declare,

Never once has combed his hair;

Anything to me is sweeter

Than to see Shock-headed Peter."

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Anna Laetitia Barbauld (/bɑːrˈboʊld/, by herself possibly /bɑrˈboʊ/, as in French) (née Aikin) (20 June 1743 – 9 March 1825) was a prominent 18th-century English poet, essayist, and children's author. A "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when female professional writers were rare. She was a noted teacher at the celebrated Palgrave Academy and an innovative children's writer; her famous primers provided a model for pedagogy for more than a century. Her essays demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to be publicly engaged in politics, and other women authors emulated her. Even more importantly, her poetry was foundational to the development of Romanticism in England. Barbauld was also a literary critic, and her anthology of 18th-century British novels helped establish the canon as we know it today. Barbauld's literary career ended abruptly in 1812 with the publication of her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, which criticized Britain's participation in the Napoleonic Wars. The vicious reviews shocked Barbauld and she published nothing else within her lifetime. Her reputation was further damaged when many of the Romantic poets she had inspired in the heyday of the French Revolution turned against her in their later, more conservative, years. Barbauld was remembered only as a pedantic children's writer during the 19th century, and largely forgotten during the 20th century, but the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s renewed interest in her works and restored her place in literary history.

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Did you know...

Hot Chip

• ... that the music video for British electropop band Hot Chip's (pictured) song "Boy From School" was said to invoke the memory of the children's art series, Art Attack?
• ... that American children's literature author Howard Pease, who often set his stories on tramp freighters, himself shipped out when he needed new material?
• ...that Carnegie Medal-winning children’s author Berlie Doherty has written the libretti for three operas?

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• Wikipedia:WikiProject Children's literature

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Categories

▼ Children's literature

► Children's writers

► Children's books

► Children's literature criticism

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Featured articles

• Chinua Achebe
• Anna Laetitia Barbauld
• Enid Blyton
• The Coral Island
• Nancy Drew
• Edmund Evans
• Ian Fleming
• The Fox and the Hound (novel)
• Anne Frank
• The Guardian of Education
• The Hardy Boys
• The Hunger Games (novel)
• Lad, A Dog
• Lessons for Children
• Make Way for Ducklings
• Julianne Moore
• Baron Munchausen
• Original Stories from Real Life
• Proserpine (play)
• Satyajit Ray
• Talbot Baines Reed
• Religious debates over the Harry Potter series
• J. K. Rowling
• Mary Martha Sherwood
• The Story of Miss Moppet
• Tom Swift
• The Adventures of Tintin
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• Sarah Trimmer
• Mary Wollstonecraft

Featured lists

• Aurealis Award for best young-adult novel
• Andre Norton Award
• Timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft

Children's literature and Young adult literature

Children's literature: Book talk • Children's literature criticism • Children's literature periodicals • International Children's Digital Library • Native Americans in children's literature

Young adult literature: Gay teen fiction • Lesbian teen fiction • List of young adult authors • Young Adult Library Services Association

Associations and awards: Children's Book Council of Australia • CBCA book awards • Governor General's Literary Award for Children's Literature and Illustration • IBBY Canada • American Library Association • Association for Library Service to Children • Newbery Medal • Caldecott Medal • Golden Kite Award • SCBWI • Sibert Medal • Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal • Batchelder Award • Coretta Scott King Award • Belpre Medal • Carnegie Medal • Kate Greenaway Medal • Nestlé Smarties Book Prize • Guardian Award • Hans Christian Andersen Award • Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award • Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators

Lists: List of children's classic books • List of children's literature authors • List of children's non-fiction writers • List of fairy tales • List of illustrators • List of publishers of children's books Template:/box-footer

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