Childrens Literature Essay Example for Free

Childrens Lit eonture stressIt is hard to imagine a world without books for children. Ever since there were children, there has been childrens literature too. There piddle been childrens stories and folk-tales when man first learned to speak. Childrens books, however, are a slowly growth of literature. Miss Yonge says, Up to the Georgian era there were no books at all for children or the poor, excepting the class-books containing old ballads and short tales. We shall nevertheless overtake that there were English books for children long before this time. In western Europe, there was no separate ho give of books for children before the eighteenth century. The Bible, stories of saints and martyrs, and bestiaries or books about exotic animals, were probably the first printed books available to children. Childhood, as we ring about it today, is a relatively new concept. Until the 17thcentury, children were thought of as undersized versions of adults and treated accordingly. In nearly societies, children were a source of labor.There were slightly books (mostly for the children of wealthy families) even before the invention of movable attribute by Gutenberg in 1455, but they were instructional in nature and were used to instill lessons of m oral examinationity, manners, and religion.. With the rise of Puritanism in England early in the seventeenth century, literature for children became moralistic. Seeing children as amoral savages needing to be taught right, society used stories change with death and damnation to frighten children into good behavior. Humor and imagination were banned.The Sunday School Movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which aimed at bringing religion to the working class, continued the didactic stair in the thousands of cheap tracts of simple stories distributed throughout England and the United States. Over the next centuries, there was a delaying shift in attitude toward children which was reflected in the reading material produced for them. Hornbooks and chapbooks appeared, still designed to instruct, but some included woodcut illustrations in addition to ABCs and religious lessons.The most famous and prolific newspaper for children of the 18th century was John Newbery. He publish books which were immediately attractive to children in a small format, with illustrations, and bound in brightly-coloured flowered paper. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Robin Hood, Mother jack tales, Robinson Crusoe, and Gullivers Travels were create and were the most attractive to the world of a childs imagination. A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement C. Moore was published in 1823 and was one of the first works to introduce humor and laughter into the world of childrens literature.The Victorian era was a golden age for childrens books. Victorian family life is realistically depicted in Louisa May Alcotts forgetful Women (1868), whereas Mark Twains Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Robe rt Louis Stevensons Treasure Island (1880) emphasize adventure all three books present in full developed characters. At the turn of the century several childrens magazines were being published, the most important being the St. Nicholas snip (18871943). It was also the time of classic books , such as Alice in Wonderland, and great illustrators Kate Greenaway, Edward Lear, and Howard Pyle to mention a few.In the middle of the 19th century, there were major changes in illustrations of books. Until then, wood engraving was the norm with the development of chromolithography, which permitted publish in many colors, the world of book illustration changed dramatically. Great writers teamed with great illustrators to produce the books. The industrial variation led to advances in printing which made books colorful, affordable, and plentiful. The growing middle class, with its increased interest in education, grow the audience for childrens books.Walter Crane, whose work is highlighted in this exhibit, was a British artist and one of the first people to use the new printing techniques to bring color and design techniques into the world of childrens literature. The twentieth century continued a publishing industry for young people with adventure stories, series books like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, science allegory and fantasy. During the 20th cent. in particular, new collections of tales that reach back to the oral roots of literature have scratch from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.International folktales have also received increasing attention. Among the many authors pursuing these themes, Verna Aardema compiles African folktales and Yoko Kawashima Watkins studies Asian oral traditions. During the 1980s and 90s in particular, multicultural concerns became an important aspect of the new realistic tradition in childrens literature. From the mid-sixties through the 90s socially relevant childrens books have appeared, treating subjects like death, drugs , sex, urban crisis, discrimination, the environment, and womens liberation.Recent years have brought books of children think to movies and commercial products from Disney to Star state of wars as well as the psychologically-oriented young adult novel. The great scientific and societal changes of the early twentieth century had a great influence on the adventure story. The exploits of the World War I fliers replaced the cowboy and big game hunter in the dreams of young boys. Many of these adventure stories were published in long series, written by different writers all using the same name.The best cognize was the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate which produced such series as the Rover Boys, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew in the midst of 1906 and 1984. Maurice Sendak and Chris Van Allsburg are two important and contemporary childrens book author who publish their stories todays. Bibliographyh Hunt, Peter, (1995), Childrens lit An illustrated history, O xford University Press. Cullingford , Cedric, (1998), Childrens Literature and its Effects, Cassel E. Gavin, Adrienne, (2001), Mystery in Childrens Literature.From the Rational to the Supernatural, Palgrave Publishers Ltd Lerer, Seth, (2008), Childrens Literature A Readers History from Aesop to Harry Potter, University of Chicago Press. Lynch-brown, Carol, (2010), Essentials of childrens literature, Pearson OMalley, Andrew, (2003), The devising of the Modern Child Childrens Literature in the Late Eighteenth Century F. Touponce, William, Childrens Literature and the Pleasures of the Text, From Childrens Literature acquaintance Quarterly, Volume 20, Number 4, Winter 1995, pp. 175-182