Mosaic

While the illustrations in David Wiesner's picture books evoke similar-looking worlds, the books tell stories that belong to different genres--or so literary theory suggests. After exploring how the similarities of these pictures challenge that theory and

Critics struggle to understand how gender influences authors and readers, focussing usually on gender as something that exists purely in individuals. These authors read Anne of Green Gables to demonstrate how what social scientists call "a gender perspect

This essay brings a feminist perspective to bear on the fairy-tale princess character type, both in classic tales and in Victorian literary fantasy. The essay argues that in "The Brown Owl" Ford Madox Ford's Ismara exemplifies the problematic state of gen

This essay offers a feminist critique of theories of the mythopoetic men's movement involved in the current debate about "boys in crisis." The essay argues that texts such as Secret Men's Business, by Australian author John Marsden, hinder rather than hel

This essay examines the effect that Dr. Seuss's experience as a cartoonist for the newspaper PM had on his later career as a writer of children's books. While Richard Minear's Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Gei

From 1850 to 1889, French writers and publishers produced large numbers of western novels that were eventually considered children's literature. An analysis of western novel titles shows how this literature objectified le Nouveau Monde and subjected it to

This essay is a reading of two short texts, Henri Bosco's L'Enfant et la rivi?re and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Cl?zio's Celui qui n'avait jamais vu la mer, illustrating the close link between them in terms of Gaston Bachelard's writing in Water and Dreams: An

This essay considers the ways that writers have territorialized childhood by creating fantasy worlds and friendly spaces for fictional children. It draws for the most part from children's literature, with brief references to "grown-up" works that further

Because books of geography construct imaginative topographies, they are instrumental in nation building. Geographies for children written in the eighteenth century demonstrate the ways that Britain imagined itself--in contrast to and conflict with Others,

Adults writing for adolescents inevitably use imperialist discourse to influence their readers' maturation. Kipling's Kim uses an existing imperialist society to present the protagonist's establishment of his psychosocial identity, while McCaffrey's Pegas

This analysis of romantic archetypes in Wallace's Peppermints in the Parlor draws from Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, and Joseph Campbell while also reflecting upon the developmental theories of Jean Piaget, Alleen Pace Nilsen, and Kenneth L. Donelson. It argu

This essay examines representations of adoption by single women in mass-market American texts writ ten between 1890 and 1918.The narratives considered here take a polysemic approach to the spinsters who figure in them, potentially subverting both conserva