Juvenile Literature

1st Essay Topics

Prepare a 5-7 page essay on any one of the following topics. You should use critical materials from our texts or from the library, so that your essay incorporates 3 or more critical sources.

1.)

The issue of readership or audience is particularly problematic in children's literature. One audience is explicitly implied (children), but there are of course multiple audiences for these texts (and cultural productions) beginning with parents, but including teachers, publishers, and adult readers. Other audiences include older (and younger) siblings, readers from other cultures, and of course, readers who are illiterate (in terms of the genre itself). Consider the ways that juvenile texts are constructed to "conscript" or gratify members from any two or more of the audiences. You may want to use this essay to explore the complicated situation of reading in terms of children's literature. The issues here can range across the board, but they would have to include the delicate concerns of social, political, racial, gender, and other ideologies. Often, the differences among readers leads to very strong difference in their interpretive "takes" on a text. For example one often finds that a child absolutely loves a text that the adult reader believes is highly objectionable. These concerns might also be addressed. In any event, you have to sort something out of this topic and focus on one or two issues at the very most.

2.)

The journey is a common theme in children's literature, but the nature of the journey is what is critical in terms of our appreciation of the significance of these texts. The journey, often inflected by Christian imagery (or explicitly driven by those themes as in Bunyan or C. S. Lewis), but that still doesn't explain the appeal of the journey for young readers. Examine the journey taken by characters in one or more texts in an effort to explain how the journey might respond to concerns, anxieties, ambitions, desires, etc. in children.

3.)

No juvenile literature class can avoid (or should avoid) the abundant sexual imagery in literature written for children. The appearance of sexual imagery --in terms of its origins-- is complex in its own right. Clearly these images are shaped by writers and readers alike. Writers (and here I include the anonymous 'authors' of so many texts) may want to project their own hopes and desires in a story, in the same way that child-readers (in their selection of story elements), project their own sexual ambitions, sexual fantasies, and --equally likely-- sexual confusion. Cultural forces, which place a great deal of emphasis on gender roles and character formation through sexual identity, are also critical to this mix. Some of those influences may be historically or even culturally specific, while others (as Bettelheim would argue) speak to the intrinsic nature of the child. Discuss the ways in which issues of sexuality work their way through one or more of the texts that we have read. You should consider their appeal to children, and their limits (in the child's mind). Consider why they are so necessary, so common, and often so confusing.