Children’s Literature: History, Genres & Benefits
The Golden Age of Children’s Literature (1863-1911)
The Golden Age of Children’s Literature, spanning from 1863 to 1911, marked a significant shift in how childhood was perceived. Children’s books became more respectful, emphasizing enjoyment and imagination over pure instruction. Writers moved away from didacticism and moralizing, focusing instead on entertainment and sparking children’s imaginations.
Fairy Tales and the Rise of Fantasy
The renaissance of traditional fairy tales went hand-in-hand
Read MoreSymbolism in the Novel: Mirrors, Hats, and More
Mirrors
The mirror is a recurring symbol that appears multiple times in the novel. It supports the notion of the protagonist’s splitting, who, finding himself in the mirror, moves away from it and returns to the past.
- The mirror serves as a bridge or time warp to the past.
- It moves to the voice of conscience.
- It appears in several chapters throughout the novel.
- It serves to focus and reconstruct the protagonist’s past; that is, to delve into his memories of childhood, adolescence, and his history.
Black
Read MoreGulliver’s Travels: Satire, Society, and Swift
In Gulliver’s Travels, humanity is attacked, or criticized, from at least three different angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part IV, he conceives a horror of the human race which is not apparent, or only intermittently apparent, in the earlier books, and changes into a sort of unreligious anchorite whose one desire is to live in some desolate spot where he can devote himself to meditating on the goodness of the Houyhnhnms. However,
Read MoreFahrenheit 451: Montag’s Transformation and Rebellion
Montag’s Transformation and Rebellion in Fahrenheit 451
When Montag meets with Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles, he forgets that they are a good deal like Millie; they are devoted to their television families, they are politically enervated, and they show little interest in the imminent war. Because their husbands are routinely called away to war, the women are unconcerned. War has happened before, and it may happen again.
Listening to their empty babble, animated by his rebel posture, and with Faber whispering
Read MoreShelley, Keats, and Browning: A Concise Biography
Shelley
Shelley: Born the heir to rich estates and the son of a Member of Parliament, Shelley went to University College, Oxford in 1810, but in March of the following year, he and a friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, were both expelled for the suspected authorship of a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. In 1811, he met and eloped to Edinburgh with Harriet Westbrook and, one year later, went with her and her older sister first to Dublin, then to Devon and North Wales, where they stayed for six
Read MoreAnalyzing Identity and Culture in “Jonny Appleseed” and “Mr. & Mrs. Iyer”
Jonny Appleseed: A Coming-of-Age Story
Jonny Appleseed (2018) is a coming-of-age story written by Joshua Whitehead, a Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation who studied Indigenous literatures and cultures focused on gender and sexuality. The novel is a love letter to the Indigenous queer community and Indigenous women, in which the author, through lyricism, narrates the story of a queer and Indigenous character in the form of poetic prose. Jonny Appleseed, the main character, is a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer
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