Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture

Beverly Lyon Clark, Margaret R. Higonnet

JHU Press, Oct 24, 2000 - Literary Criticism - 312 pages

No previous collection of criticism has focused on gender in the broad range of children's literature. No previous collection has embraced both children's literature and material culture.

Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet bring together twenty-two scholars to look closely at the complexities of children's culture. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys asks questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about "masculine" topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired commonplaces about gender, race, and class? Can different critical approaches—new historicism, narratology, or postcolonialism—enable us to gain leverage on the different implications of gender, age, race, and class in our readings of children's books and children's culture?

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• Repudiating Sleeping Beauty: 11
• Childs Play as Womans Peace Work Maria Edgeworths The Cherry Orchard Historical Rebellion Narratives and Contemporary Cultural Studies: 25
• These two irreconcilable thingsart and young girls The Case of the Girls School Story: 40
• Romancing the Home Gender Empire and the South Pacific: 53
• The Liberal Bias in Feminist Social Science Research on Childrens Books: 71
• Coming to sing their being The Poetry of Grace Nichols: 83
• Fictions of Difference Contemporary Indian Stories for Children: 97
• Making the Front Page Views of WomenWomens Views in the Picture Book: 112
• Discourse of Femininity and the Intertextual Construction of Feminist Reading Positions: 130
• Taking Over the Doll House Domestic Desire and Nostalgia in Toy Narratives: 142
• Comforts No More The Underside of Quilts in Childrens Literature: 154
• A Bad Hair Day for GI Joe: 169
• Imagining Dinosaurs: 183
• Grrrls and Dolls Feminism and Female Youth Culture: 196
• An Arab Girl Draws Trouble: 210
• Just a Spoonful of Sugar? Anxieties of Gender and Class in Mary Poppins: 227
• Notes: 243
• Works Cited: 259
• Contributors: 283
• Illustration Credits: 289
• Index: 291

About the author

Beverly Lyon Clark is a professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys. Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Philological Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, Women's Review of Books, and other journals. Margaret R. Higonnet is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. She is the former editor of Children's Literature. Her articles have appeared in Poetics Today, Enfance, Revue des livres pour enfants, and other journals.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture; A Johns Hopkins paperback
• Editors: Beverly Lyon Clark, Margaret R. Higonnet
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, revised
• Publisher: JHU Press, 2000
• ISBN: 0801865263, 9780801865268
• Length: 312 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social