Children’s Literature Essay

It is hard to imagine a human existence without books for children. Ever since on that point were children, at that place has been childrens literature too. There father been childrens stories and folk-tales when man primary learned to speak. Childrens books, however, be a late 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 even so see that there were English books for children long before this time.In Hesperian Europe, there was no separate category 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 study about it today, is a relatively new concept. Until the 17thcentury, children were thought of as weakened versions of adults and treated accordingly. In most societi es, children were a source of labor.There were just about books (mostly for the children of wealthy families) even before the invention of movable type by Gutenberg in 1455, but they were instructional in nature and were used to bestow lessons of morality, manners, and trust.. With the rise of Puritanism in England early in the seventeenth century, literature for children became moralistic. visual perception children as amoral savages needing to be taught right, society used stories filled with death and eternal damnation to frighten children into good behavior. Humor and imagination were banned.The Sunday School endeavour of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which aimed at bringing religion to the working class, continued the didactic t peerless in the thousands of cheap tracts of honest stories distributed through and throughout England and the United States. Over the next centuries, there was a in small stages shift in attitude toward children which was re flected in the reading material produced for them. Hornbooks and chapbooks appeared, equable designed to instruct, but some included woodcut illustrations in step-up to ABCs and religious lessons.The most famous and prolific let outer for children of the eighteenth century was John Newbery. He make books which were immediately attractive to children in a small format, with illustrations, and bound in brightly-coloured flowered paper. In the eighteenth and early 19th centuries, Robin Hood, Mother Goose tales, Robinson Crusoe, and Gullivers Travels were published 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 dainty era was a golden age for childrens books. Victorian family life is realistically depicted in Louisa May Alcotts Little Women (1868), whereas Mark bracess Adventures of Tom Sa wyer (1876) and Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island (1880) emphasize attempt all three books present fully developed characters. At the uprise of the century several childrens magazines were being published, the most important being the St. Nicholas Magazine (18871943). It was also the time of classic books , such as Alice in Wonderland, and broad 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 print in many pretensions, the world of book illustration changed dramatically. Great writers teamed with great illustrators to produce the books. The industrial revolution led to advances in printing which do books colorful, affordable, and plentiful. The growing middle class, with its increased interest in education, expanded the earshot 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 alike(p) the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, science fiction and fantasy. During the 20th cent. in particular, new collections of tales that piss back to the oral roots of literature have come from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. internationalistic 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 verbal expression of the new realistic tradition in childrens literature. From the 1960s through the 90s socially relevant childrens books have appea red, treating subjects like death, drugs, sex, urban crisis, discrimination, the environment, and womens liberation.Recent years have brought books of children related to movies and commercial products from Disney to Star Wars as well as the psychologically-oriented young adult novel. The great scientific and social 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 peppy hunter in the dreams of young boys. Many of these adventure stories were published in long series, written by different writers all using the analogous name.The best known was the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate which produced such series as the Rover Boys, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew between 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 li terary productions An illustrated history, Oxford 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 shekels Press. Lynch-brown, Carol, (2010), Essentials of childrens literature, Pearson OMalley, Andrew, (2003), The Making 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 Association Quarterly, Volume 20, Number 4, Winter 1995, pp. 175-182