Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition

Series · 2 books · 2014-2015

By Clementine Beauvais, Maria Nikolajeva

Books in series

Reading for Learning

2014

How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfer fictional experience into real life? Why do they care about fictional characters? How does fiction enhance young people's sense of self-hood? Supported by cognitive psychology and brain research, this ground-breaking book is the first study of young readers' cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction. It explores how fiction stimulates perception, attention, imagination and other cognitive activity, and opens radically new ways of thinking about literature for young readers. Examining a wide range of texts for a young audience, from picturebooks to young adult novels, the combination of cognitive criticism and children’s literature theory also offers significant insights for literary studies beyond the scope of children’s fiction. An important milestone in cognitive criticism, the book provides convincing evidence that reading fiction is indispensable for young people’s intellectual, emotional and social maturation.

The Mighty Child

2015

The Mighty Child offers an existentialist approach to the theorization and criticism of children’s literature, nuancing the academic claim that children’s literature, specifically defined as ‘didactic’, alienates childhood from adulthood and disempowers its implied child reader. This volume recentres the theoretical debate around the constructions of time and power which characterize conceptions of childhood and adulthood in children’s literature. The ‘hidden’, didactic adult of children’s literature, this volume argues, is not solely the dictatorial planner of the child’s future, but also a disempowered entity, yearning for unpredictability in the semi-educational, semi-aesthetic endeavor of the children’s book. Leaning on current work in the field of children’s literature theory, on French phenomenological existentialism, and on the philosophy and sociology of childhood, The Mighty Child is addressed to contemporary theorists and critics of children’s literature.

Authors

Maria Nikolajeva is an academic hailing from Russia, whose chief focus is on literary theory and the study of children's books. "I was born in Russia, and I moved to Sweden in 1981. Until 2008 I was a Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. Now I am a Professor and Chair at the University of Cambridge, UK, which is about the highest an academic can get. ... Some highlights (of my career) include a Fulbright Grant at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; a Fellowship at the International Youth Library in Munich and H. W. Donner Visiting Chair at Åbo Akademi. In 2006 I was also made Honorary Professor at the University of Worcester, UK. In 1993-97 I was President of the International Research Society for Children's Literature. However, the crown of my success is the International Brothers Grimm Award 2005 from the Osaka Institute for Children's Literature, given for a life-time achievement in children's literature research. I have written and edited twenty scholarly books and about three hundred articles and reviews. I have also published two young adult novels, two picturebooks, a cookbook and a memoir. My current research project is on literary cognitivism. I have been a visiting lecturer all over the world: Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia and South Africa. I am married to Staffan Skott, who is a Swedish writer and journalist. We have five children and ten grandchildren. My current hobbies are gardening, pottery, star gazing, papermaking and miniature making, and I also enjoy cooking and eating a good meal. Believe it or not, but I do read for pleasure sometimes. My favorite book is Winnie-the-Pooh. Recently, I have been re-reading classics, such as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Cervantes' Don Quixote and Melville's Moby-Dick."

from Academia.edu