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

Front Cover
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
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

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
Illustration Credits
289
Index
291
Copyright

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