Brilliance of a fire: innocence, experience and the theory of childhood

This essay offers an extensive rehabilitation and reappraisal of the concept of childhood innocence as a means of testing the boundaries of some prevailing constructions of childhood. It excavates in detail some of the lost histories of innocence in order to show that these are more diverse and more complex than established and pejorative assessments of them conventionally suggest. Recovering, in particular, the forgotten pedigree of the Romantic account of the innocence of childhood underlines its depth and furnishes an enriched understanding of its critical role in the coming of mass education - both as a catalyst of social change and as an alternative measure of the child-centeredness of the institutions of public education. Now largely and residually confined to the inheritance of nursery education, the concept of childhood innocence, and the wider Romantic project of which it is an element, can help question the assumptions underpinning modern, competence-centred philosophies of childhood

Children\u27s Film as Social Practice

In his paper Children\u27s Film as Social Practice, J. Zornado argues that the animated feature is a genre distinct in its own right, and, although overlooked by film criticism up to now, deserves rigorous, scholarly attention. Zornado employs the term iconology to develop a foundation for a critical methodology indebted to Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan as well as contemporary film criticism. Iconology of the animated feature film is the study of the meaning systems of the dominant culture and the ways in which such systems are inscribed into all kinds of social practice geared, specifically, to seduce and inform the mind of the child. Zornado analyses Pixar\u27s Monsters, Inc. (2001), elaborating it as an example of an iconological reading of an animated feature and he argues that Monsters, Inc. encodes ideologies of hegemonic power relations and while at first seeming to criticize and to reveal the corrupting nature of hegemonic power relations; thus, the film\u27s narrative works ultimately to confirm the status quo in which the child, like the Other, must learn to accept his/her objectified and exploited status as natural and inevitable

A Becoming Habit

Much of Flannery O\u27Connor\u27s fiction undermines the notion that her texts, or any text for that matter, offers the reader a chance at fixed comprehensibility In fact, O\u27Connor\u27s fiction often clears itself away as a meaning-bearing icon in order to introduce the reader to something other, to the mystery latent and invisible in the manners. O\u27Connor remains remarkable as an avowed Catholic and as a writer because she resisted spelling out that mystery though her Catholic faith offered much in the way of dogma that might have sufficed. Even so, there is an indissoluble link between the writer and the Catholic that critics have recognized since the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood in 1952

A Poetics of History: Karen Cushman\u27s Medieval World

Historical fiction occupies an uncertain space in the field of children\u27s literature. Offer a teacher or scholar a work of historical fiction in any genre, from picture book to novel, and you are sure to get a varied, contentious response about what makes historical fiction work. Why? Because historical fiction has ambitious, ambiguous aims. For instance, should historical fiction be good history, even if this means the story might be, say, a little dull? Or, on the other hand, should the author take liberties with setting, dialogue, and character in order to provide the audience with a good read? What happens when a historical fiction contains no famous historical personages, or no clear identification as to when in history the story takes place? In short, what are we supposed to experience when we read historical fiction? History? Fiction