American Childrens Literature And The Construction Of Childhood

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American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood

Author : Gail Schmunk Murray
Publisher : Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood by : Gail Schmunk Murray

Download or read book American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood written by Gail Schmunk Murray and published by Macmillan Reference USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the many ways cultures have to socialize the young, western cultures have relied heavily on books to transmit certain social values and to cast aspersions on others. In her new study, American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood, author Gail S. Murray argues that the meaning of childhood is socially constructed and that its meaning has changed over time. Of course, "society" has never spoken with one voice but in almost every era, a dominant culture has prevailed. Books written for children reveal this dominant culture, reflect its behavioral standard, and reinforce its expectations. Covering the entire history of American children's literature, from The New England Primer to the works of authors like Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, Murray explores the messages behind the stories, and what these messages reveal about the society that conveyed them.

Kiddie Lit

Author : Beverly Lyon Clark
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801881701
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (817 download)

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Book Synopsis Kiddie Lit by : Beverly Lyon Clark

Download or read book Kiddie Lit written by Beverly Lyon Clark and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2005-01-02 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honor Book for the 2005 Book Award given by the Children's Literature Association The popularity of the Harry Potter books among adults and the critical acclaim these young adult fantasies have received may seem like a novel literary phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, however, readers considered both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as works of literature equally for children and adults; only later was the former relegated to the category of "boys' books" while the latter, even as it was canonized, came frequently to be regarded as unsuitable for young readers. Adults—women and men—wept over Little Women. And America's most prestigious literary journals regularly reviewed books written for both children and their parents. This egalitarian approach to children's literature changed with the emergence of literary studies as a scholarly discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Academics considered children's books an inferior literature and beneath serious consideration. In Kiddie Lit, Beverly Lyon Clark explores the marginalization of children's literature in America—and its recent possible reintegration—both within the academy and by the mainstream critical establishment. Tracing the reception of works by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, and J. K. Rowling, Clark reveals fundamental shifts in the assessment of the literary worth of books beloved by both children and adults, whether written for boys or girls. While uncovering the institutional underpinnings of this transition, Clark also attributes it to changing American attitudes toward childhood itself, a cultural resistance to the intrinsic value of childhood expressed through sentimentality, condescension, and moralizing. Clark's engaging and enlightening study of the critical disregard for children's books since the end of the nineteenth century—which draws on recent scholarship in gender, cultural, and literary studies— offers provocative new insights into the history of both children's literature and American literature in general, and forcefully argues that the books our children read and love demand greater respect.

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood

Author : Crystal Lynn Webster
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469663244
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood by : Crystal Lynn Webster

Download or read book Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood written by Crystal Lynn Webster and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and social space for play, for learning, and for their own aspirations. Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.

The Nation in Children's Literature

Author : Kit Kelen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136248943
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (362 download)

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Book Synopsis The Nation in Children's Literature by : Kit Kelen

Download or read book The Nation in Children's Literature written by Kit Kelen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the meaning of nation or nationalism in children’s literature and how it constructs and represents different national experiences. The contributors discuss diverse aspects of children’s literature and film from interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches, ranging from the short story and novel to science fiction and fantasy from a range of locations including Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Norway, America, Italy, Great Britain, Iceland, Africa, Japan, South Korea, India, Sweden and Greece. The emergence of modern nation-states can be seen as coinciding with the historical rise of children’s literature, while stateless or diasporic nations have frequently formulated their national consciousness and experience through children’s literature, both instructing children as future citizens and highlighting how ideas of childhood inform the discourses of nation and citizenship. Because nation and childhood are so intimately connected, it is crucial for critics and scholars to shed light on how children’s literatures have constructed and represented historically different national experiences. At the same time, given the massive political and demographic changes in the world since the nineteenth century and the formation of nation states, it is also crucial to evaluate how the national has been challenged by changing national languages through globalization, international commerce, and the rise of English. This book discusses how the idea of childhood pervades the rhetoric of nation and citizenship, and how children and childhood are represented across the globe through literature and film.

History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature

Author : Jackie C. Horne
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317121694
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature by : Jackie C. Horne

Download or read book History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature written by Jackie C. Horne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the 'flat' characters of eighteenth-century children's literature become 'round' by the mid-nineteenth? While previous critics have pointed to literary Romanticism for an explanation, Jackie C. Horne argues that this shift can be better understood by looking to the discipline of history. Eighteenth-century humanism believed the purpose of history was to teach private and public virtue by creating idealized readers to emulate. Eighteenth-century children's literature, with its impossibly perfect protagonists (and its equally imperfect villains) echoes history's exemplar goals. Exemplar history, however, came under increasing pressure during the period, and the resulting changes in historiographical practice - an increased need for reader engagement and the widening of history's purview to include the morals, manners, and material lives of everyday people - find their mirror in changes in fiction for children. Horne situates hitherto neglected Robinsonades, historical novels, and fictionalized histories within the cultural, social, and political contexts of the period to trace the ways in which idealized characters gradually gave way to protagonists who fostered readers' sympathetic engagement. Horne's study will be of interest to specialists in children's literature, the history of education, and book history.

Suffer the Little Children

Author : Jodi Eichler-Levine
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814722997
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis Suffer the Little Children by : Jodi Eichler-Levine

Download or read book Suffer the Little Children written by Jodi Eichler-Levine and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-04-08 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Illuminates the importance of fear and suffering in shaping African American and Jewish children’s literature. . . . Gives a cogent understanding of how each community's difficult historical narratives coupled with their religious and social lives have helped to prepare children to engage an American civic life that has been hostile at times to their ethnic groups." —Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania This compelling work examines classic and contemporary Jewish and African American children’s literature. Through close readings of selected titles published since 1945, Jodi Eichler-Levine analyzes what is at stake in portraying religious history for young people, particularly when the histories in question are traumatic ones. In the wake of the Holocaust and lynchings, of the Middle Passage and flight from Eastern Europe's pogroms, children’s literature provides diverse and complicated responses to the challenge of representing difficult collective pasts. In reading the work of various prominent authors, including Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levine changes our understanding of North American religions. If children are the idealized recipients of the past, what does it mean to tell tales of suffering to children? Suffer the Little Children asks readers to alter their worldviews about children’s literature as an “innocent” enterprise, revisiting the genre in a darker and more unsettled light. Jodi Eichler-Levine is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Shofar, and Postscripts.

Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature

Author : Anne Lundin
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135576394
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (355 download)

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Book Synopsis Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature by : Anne Lundin

Download or read book Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature written by Anne Lundin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-10-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering historical study, Anne Lundin argues that schools, libraries, professional organizations, and the media together create and influence the constantly changing canon of children's literature. Lundin examines the circumstances out of which the canon emerges, and its effect on the production of children's literature. The volume includes a comprehensive list of canonical titles for reference.

American Childhood

Author : Anne Scott MacLeod
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780820318035
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis American Childhood by : Anne Scott MacLeod

Download or read book American Childhood written by Anne Scott MacLeod and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1995-10-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of fourteen essays, Anne Scott MacLeod locates and describes shifts in the American concept of childhood as those changes are suggested in nearly two centuries of children's stories. Most of the essays concern domestic novels for children or adolescents--stories set more or less in the time of their publication. Some essays also draw creatively on childhood memoirs, travel writings that contain foreigners' observations of American children, and other studies of children's literature. The topics on which MacLeod writes range from the current politicized marketplace for children's books, to the reestablishment (and reconfiguration) of the family in recent children's fiction, to the ways that literature challenges or enforces the idealization of children. MacLeod sometimes considers a single author's canon, as when she discusses the feminism of the Nancy Drew mystery series or the Orwellian vision of Robert Cormier. At other times, she looks at a variety of works within a particular period, for example, Jacksonian America, the post-World War II decade, or the 1970s. MacLeod also examines books that were once immensely popular but currently have no appreciable readership--the Horatio Alger stories, for example--and finds fresh, intriguing ways to view the work of such well-known writers as Louisa May Alcott, Beverly Cleary, and Paul Zindel.

Making Americans

Author : Gary D. Schmidt
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609381920
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Making Americans by : Gary D. Schmidt

Download or read book Making Americans written by Gary D. Schmidt and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Americans is a study of a time when the authors and illustrators of children's books consciously set their eyes on national and international sights, with the hope of bringing the next generation into a full sense of citizenship. Schmidt examines the literature for young people published during a momentous period in our nation's past, and documents in detail its role as an instrument of nation-building and social reform. A thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of children's books as cultural transmitters and transformers.

Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature

Author : Ms Rebecca Morris
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 1472424239
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (724 download)

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Book Synopsis Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature by : Ms Rebecca Morris

Download or read book Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature written by Ms Rebecca Morris and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together children’s literature scholars from China and the United States, this collection provides an introduction to the scope and goals of a field characterized by active but also distinctive scholarship in two countries with very different rhetorical traditions. The volume’s five sections highlight the differences between and overlapping concerns of Chinese and American scholars, as they examine children’s literature with respect to cultural metaphors and motifs, historical movements, authorship, didacticism, important themes, and the current status of and future directions for literature and criticism. Wide-ranging and admirably ambitious in its encouragement of communication between scholars from two major nations, Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature serves as a model for examining how and why children’s literature, more than many literary forms, circulates internationally.

Behold the Child

Author : Gillian Avery
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Behold the Child by : Gillian Avery

Download or read book Behold the Child written by Gillian Avery and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of children's literature from colonial times to the early 20th century.

The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture

Author : Jennifer Miskec
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317394771
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture by : Jennifer Miskec

Download or read book The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture written by Jennifer Miskec and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume to consider the popular literary category of Early Readers – books written and designed for children who are just beginning to read independently. It argues that Early Readers deserve more scholarly attention and careful thought because they are, for many younger readers, their first opportunity to engage with a work of literature on their own, to feel a sense of mastery over a text, and to experience pleasure from the act of reading independently. Using interdisciplinary approaches that draw upon and synthesize research being done in education, child psychology, sociology, cultural studies, and children’s literature, the volume visits Early Readers from a variety of angles: as teaching tools; as cultural artifacts that shape cultural and individual subjectivity; as mass produced products sold to a niche market of parents, educators, and young children; and as aesthetic objects, works of literature and art with specific conventions. Examining the reasons such books are so popular with young readers, as well as the reasons that some adults challenge and censor them, the volume considers the ways Early Readers contribute to the construction of younger children as readers, thinkers, consumers, and as gendered, raced, classed subjects. It also addresses children’s texts that have been translated and sold around the globe, examining them as part of an increasingly transnational children’s media culture that may add to or supplant regional, ethnic, and national children’s literatures and cultures. While this collection focuses mostly on books written in English and often aimed at children living in the US, it is important to acknowledge that these Early Readers are a major US cultural export, influencing the reading habits and development of children across the globe.

Empire's Nursery

Author : Brian Rouleau
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479804509
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Empire's Nursery by : Brian Rouleau

Download or read book Empire's Nursery written by Brian Rouleau and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How children and children’s literature helped build America’s empire America’s empire was not made by adults alone. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, young people became essential to its creation. Through children’s literature, authors instilled the idea of America’s power and the importance of its global prominence. As kids eagerly read dime novels, series fiction, pulp magazines, and comic books that dramatized the virtues of empire, they helped entrench a growing belief in America’s indispensability to the international order. Empires more generally require stories to justify their existence. Children’s literature seeded among young people a conviction that their country’s command of a continent (and later the world) was essential to global stability. This genre allowed ardent imperialists to obscure their aggressive agendas with a veneer of harmlessness or fun. The supposedly nonthreatening nature of the child and children’s literature thereby helped to disguise dominion’s unsavory nature. The modern era has been called both the “American Century” and the “Century of the Child.” Brian Rouleau illustrates how those conceptualizations came together by depicting children in their influential role as the junior partners of US imperial enterprise.

Children's Literature

Author : Seth Lerer
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226473023
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Children's Literature by : Seth Lerer

Download or read book Children's Literature written by Seth Lerer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. Children’s Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter. The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. Children’s Literature is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word. “Lerer has accomplished something magical. Unlike the many handbooks to children’s literature that synopsize, evaluate, or otherwise guide adults in the selection of materials for children, this work presents a true critical history of the genre. . . . Scholarly, erudite, and all but exhaustive, it is also entertaining and accessible. Lerer takes his subject seriously without making it dull.”—Library Journal (starred review) “Lerer’s history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years. . . . With his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a child’s imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read.”—San Francisco Chronicle “There are dazzling chapters on John Locke and Empire, and nonsense, and Darwin, but Lerer’s most interesting chapter focuses on girls’ fiction. . . . A brilliant series of readings.”—Diane Purkiss, Times Literary Supplement

Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood

Author : Kerry H. Robinson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136304169
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (363 download)

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Book Synopsis Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood by : Kerry H. Robinson

Download or read book Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood written by Kerry H. Robinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood provides a critical examination of the way we regulate children’s access to certain knowledge and explores how this regulation contributes to the construction of childhood, to children’s vulnerability and to the constitution of the ‘good’ future citizen in developed countries. Through this controversial analysis, Kerry H. Robinson critically engages with the relationships between childhood, sexuality, innocence, moral panic, censorship and notions of citizenship. This book highlights how the strict regulation of children’s knowledge, often in the name of protection or in the child’s best interest, can ironically, increase children’s prejudice around difference, increase their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse, and undermine their abilities to become competent adolescents and adults. Within her work Robinson draws upon empirical research to: provide an overview of the regulation and governance of children’s access to ‘difficult knowledge’, particularly knowledge of sexuality explore and develop Foucault’s work on the relationship between childhood and sexuality identify the impact of these discourses on adults’ understanding of childhood, and the tension that exists between their own perceptions of sexual knowledge, and the perceptions of children reconceptualise children’s education around sexuality. Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood is essential reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking courses in education, particularly with a focus on early childhood or primary teaching, as well as in other disciplines such as sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.

The Making of the Modern Child

Author : Andrew O'Malley
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135947325
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (359 download)

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Book Synopsis The Making of the Modern Child by : Andrew O'Malley

Download or read book The Making of the Modern Child written by Andrew O'Malley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the concept of childhood in the late-18th century was constructed through the ideological work performed by children's literature, as well as pedagogical writing and medical literature of the era. Andrew O'Malley ties the evolution of the idea of "the child" to the growth of the middle class, which used the figure of the child as a symbol in its various calls for social reform.

Poetics of Children's Literature

Author : Zohar Shavit
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820334812
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetics of Children's Literature by : Zohar Shavit

Download or read book Poetics of Children's Literature written by Zohar Shavit and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children's literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work. Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children's literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre's canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children's literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.