12 research outputs found
A Roundtable for Victoria M. Grieve, Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s
Dr. Thomas Field introduces a roundtable discussion of Victoria M. Grieve\u27s Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s, providing a synopsis of reviewer critiques before the reviewers expand on their views and the author responds
Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series. By Erika Haber. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. xvii, 259 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00, hard bound.
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Review: The Commodification Of Childhood: The Children'S Clothing Industry And The Rise Of The Child Consumer
American Studie
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American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream
Histor
Radical Childrenâs Literature for Adults and The Inner City Mother Goose
This article explores the radical possibilities of childrenâs literature for adults, using as a case study The Inner City Mother Goose, a book of poetry for adults written by Eve Merriam and published, with âvisualsâ by Lawrence Ratzkin, in 1969. As one of the most frequently banned books of the 1970s, a period in which childrenâs literature and childhood itself saw dramatic changes, The Inner City Mother Goose is a good representative of the childrenâs book for adults, suggesting the ways in which parody, satire, and formal conventions of genres typically associated with childrenâs reading (nursery rhymes, abecedaries, board books, picture books, etc.) can function as aesthetic and formal cues that call the boundaries of adulthood and childhood into question to humorous but also, at times, politically radical effect. In the slippage between audiences, especially as children mischievously embrace texts that invite young people in while implicitly or explicitly excluding them, children not only gain access to ostensibly forbidden knowledge but also gain insight into adult hypocrisy. Most importantly, they gain an incentive to act independently and autonomously so as to eliminate contradictions between the âtruthsâ and values they have been taught and those they have discovered by reading a childrenâs book that was ostensibly not intended for children