Children's literature studies : a research handbook

x, 234 p. : ill. ; 21 c

Moulding them in the industry's image: Journalism education's impact on students' professional views

Long-running debates over the value of university-based journalism education have suffered from a lack of empirical foundation, leading to a wide range of assertions both from those who see journalism education playing a crucial role in moulding future journalists and those who do not. Based on a survey of 320 Australian journalism students from six universities across the country, this study provides an account of the professional views these future journalists hold. Findings show that students hold broadly similar priorities in their role perceptions, albeit to different intensities from working journalists. The results point to a relationship between journalism education and the way in which students' views of journalism's watchdog role and its market orientation change over the course of their degree – to the extent that, once they are near completion of their degree, students have been moulded in the image of industry professionals

Readers: Books and Biography

This chapter investigates how book historians have used autobiographical records and documents – diaries, notebooks and commonplace books, and marginalia – to uncover the place of books and reading in everyday life from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century. It aims to provide a survey of the field while also drawing on individual case studies of particular readers. It demonstrates how readers used their books and shows how the individual act of reading was embedded within a larger web of social, economic, and educational contexts. Attending to autobiographical documents can provide information about how reading practices were shaped and influenced by the book trade, social and correspondence networks, and institutions of reading such as subscription libraries. The material forms of autobiography, meanwhile, show how reading in the past has been shaped by social practices, such as commonplacing, letter writing, and marginal annotation

Barnlitteraturforskningens arkeologi

Criticism of children’s literature is not, although it too often may seem so, a phenomenon of the later half of the 20th century. The contradiction between didactics and aesthetics, for many established as an axiom in modern children’s literature research, has been contra productive when it comes to differences between older and modern literature. While older has become representative for the didactic, the simple and the single-minded, modern has become representative for the aesthetic, the complex and the multifold (the ambiguous). Beginning with an analysis of the very early research in the field of children’s literature, the article points at several inconsistencies in the principles of later research. A presentation of international studies of importance for later surveys and historical works, among them the American scholar William Sloane and his comparative studies of children’s literature in the 17th and 20th centuries, is conducted in order to contextualise links between different kind of historical perspectives on literature, art and childhood. The bottom-line is what primarily counts in the history of research. Paradigms in some works easily get the status of established truths and are passed on without discussion, while others simply vanish from the bibliographies without comments. On basis of an extensive material of texts, theories and pictures (comparisons with pictorial art are taken in) the article analyses from a constructional perspective long lived assumptions and paradigms and argues for a new methodology – the archaeology of children’s literature research - that includes both the research itself and the researcher. Examples from recent research (Penny Brown, Beverly Lyon Clark, Marah Gubar) clearly show that contextualising literature within history, criticism and debate may result in new and corrective approaches. Motifs, passions and goals of the researcher are all part of the research. Self-reflection is the central keyword