Girls, Boys, Books, Toys : Gender in Children's Literature and Culture

by Clark, Beverly Lyon; Higonnet, Margaret R.

• ISBN13: 9780801865268
• ISBN10: 0801865263
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-09-21
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet bring together twenty-two scholars to look closely at the complexities of children's culture. "Girls, Boys, Books, Toys" asks questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about "masculine" topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired commonplaces about gender, race, and class? Can different critical approaches -- new historicism, narratology, or postcolonialism -- enable us to gain leverage on the different implications of gender, age, race, and class in our readings of children's books and children's culture?

Author Biography

Beverly Lyon Clark is a professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys. Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Philological Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, Women's Review of Books, and other journals. Margaret R. Higonnet is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. She is the former editor of Children's Literature. Her articles have appeared in Poetics Today, Enfance, Revue des livres pour enfants, and other journals.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(10)
Beverly Lyon Clark
PART I / HISTORY
Repudiating ``Sleeping Beauty''	11	(14)
U. C. Knoepflmacher
Child's Play as Woman's Peace Work: Maria Edgeworth's ``The Cherry Orchard,'' Historical Rebellion Narratives, and Contemporary Cultural Studies	25	(15)
Mitzi Myers
``These Two irreconcilable things---art and young girls'': The Case of the Girls' School Story	40	(13)
Mavis Reimer
Romancing the Home: Gender, Empire, and the South Pacific	53	(18)
Claudia Marquis
PART II / THEORY
The Liberal Bias in Feminist Social Science Research on Children's Books	71	(12)
Roger Clark
Heidi Kulkin
Liam Clancy
Coming ``to sing their being'': The Poetry of Grace Nichols	83	(14)
Lissa Paul
Fictions of Difference: Contemporary Indian Stories for Children	97	(15)
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Making the Front Page: Views of Women/Women's Views in the Picture Book	112	(18)
William Moebius
Discourses of Femininity and the Intertextual Construction of Feminist Reading Positions	130	(12)
John Stephens
Robyn McCallum
Taking Over the Doll House: Domestic Desire and Nostalgia in Toy Narratives	142	(12)
Lois R. Kuznets
Comforts No More: The Underside of Quilts in Children's Literature	154	(15)
Cheryl B. Torsney
PART III / CULTURE
A Bad Hair Day for G.I. Joe	169	(14)
Karen Klugman
Imagining Dinosaurs	183	(13)
Susan Willis
Grrrls and Dolls: Feminism and Female Youth Culture	196	(14)
Lynne Vallone
An Arab Girl Draws Trouble	210	(17)
Allen Douglas
Fedwa Malti-Douglas
Just a Spoonful of Sugar? Anxieties of Gender and Class in ``Marry Poppins''	227	(16)
Lori Kenschaft
Notes	243	(16)
Works Cited	259	(24)
Contributors	283	(6)
Illustration Credits	289	(2)
Index	291