Electronic book text | |
September 17, 2014 | |
9781421414584 | |
9781421414577 | |
English | |
368 | |
17 halftones | |
8.50 Inches (US) | |
5.50 Inches (US) | |
$24.95 USD, £18.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Audacious Kids, revised edition
The Classic American Children's Story
Often called the Golden Age of Children's Books, the years stretching from the Civil War to World War I were a remarkable epoch in juvenile literature, an era when the best authors on both sides of the Atlantic wrote some of their finest work primarily for children. In Audacious Kids, Jerry Griswold provides a groundbreaking and lucid study of twelve of these classic American children's tales, including such time-honored stories as Little Women, Tom Sawyer, The Secret Garden, and The Wizard of Oz.
Griswold's most remarkable insight is that, fundamentally, these twelve books all tell essentially the same story: a child is orphaned, makes a journey, is adopted and harassed by adults, and eventually triumphs over them and comes into his or her own. Griswold, a leading figure in the study of children's literature, also reveals that these tales emphasize motifs that are distinctly American, such as positive thinking, concern with health, and the concealment of sex and violence, and he shows how these secular parables replaced religion with psychology and preached gospels of emotional self-control and optimism.
In this revised edition, which is aimed at students, scholars, and general readers, Griswold has updated the text throughout and added a new preface, introduction, and select bibliography.
About the Author
Reviews
"Audacious Kids has foregrounded innovative ways of analysing childhood in American classics and has paved the way for scholars interested in the field . . . One of the real delights afforded by Audacious Kids is that it is scholarly, convincing and highly accessible to a range of academic and nonacademic readers. Griswold is able to captivate his readers with simple yet insightful text. The content is concise, ambitious, informative, provocative, and of course still audacious."—Taraneh Matloon, International Research Society for Children's Literature
"I am so grateful for all Jerry Griswold has given the field in his columns and books. Our great books and writers for children deserve the thoughtful and lucid analysis that he has always provided."—Anita Silvey's Children's Book-A-Day Almanac
"Audacious Kids places children's literature in conversation with the critical treatises about the constitution of the American mind, and, by extension, the American story."—Journal of History of Childhood and Youth
"Audacious Kids is a trailblazing historical account of American children's literature. Jerry Griswold's analyses of individual works are astute, and his writing is witty and accessible."—Beverly Lyon Clark, Wheaton College, author of Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America
The Johns Hopkins University Press | |
revised edition | |
|
|
|
|
Electronic book text | |
September 17, 2014 | |
9781421414584 | |
9781421414577 | |
English | |
368 | |
17 halftones | |
8.50 Inches (US) | |
5.50 Inches (US) | |
$24.95 USD, £18.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Other Titles by Jerry Griswold
Feeling Like a Kid
Other Titles in LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General
Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature
The Academic Avant-Garde
Embracing Vocation
Other Titles in Literature: history & criticism
Goethe and Rousseau
Laden Choirs
Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel