Children's Literature Introduction Lecture

Literature for Children -- An Introduction

Carol Fox

Literature for Children

Rockford College

September 3, 2008

The Purpose of Literature in Primary Education

"Its place is to provide the verbal element in the training of the imagination.

The imagination is not a self-indulgent, ornamental, or escapist faculty: It is the constructive power of the mind."

Northrop Frye

Definition of Children’s Literature

Literature is a body of writing that can be classed together because it has within it imaginative and artistic qualities. This includes prose and poetry – fiction and nonfiction.

Children’s literature is literature of interest and relevance to children from birth through adolescence.

Literature in the Classroom

A balance between

Aesthetic (sensory with focus on the response)

Didactic (focus on the teaching)

Each reading is an "event"

Aesthetic experience

Efferent experience

--Louise Rosenblatt

Rosenblatt

" There is no such thing as a generic reader or a generic literary work; there are in reality only the potential millions of individual readers of the potential millions of individual literary works."

Northrop Frye

Literature does have a unity. It is based upon our reality and our personal relationship with reality. Literature is mimetic. It mimics the natural world.

Frye’s Circle of Stories begins to show the relationship between an among stories. All of them necessary for understanding.

Genres (types) of Literature

Each genre has its own devices

Literary elements

Character -- Point of view

Plot -- Style and Tone

Setting -- Theme

Literary techniques

Onomatopoeia -- Fable

Visual imagery -- Allusion

Metaphor -- Anthropomorphic

Allegory -- Personification

The Value of Literature

Literature:

Provides pleasure.

Engenders understanding of what it is to be human.

Provides verbal models for articulate expression.

Provides form for expression of life’s experiences – our own and those of others.

Provides vicarious (virtual) experience.

Helps us focus on what is important.

Explores the mind of an artist-creator.

Allows us to evaluate literary and artistic preferences.