Their world is huge, luckily sans boundaries, bright, intriguing and spontaneous, allowing absurdities of all kinds to exist. Their horizons are fleeting, giving space to dragons, fairies, elves, wizards, goblins and unicorns, to rabbits that talk and broomsticks that fly. Their sense of adventurism make them scale mountains, drink potions that do wonders and imagine frogs that turn into princes. Their world is the world of pure innocent fun. And their literature is as a colour-riot as their world. Perceived as adults in the making, their books deal also with the issues of environment conservation, child labour, differently-abled and relationships – to name a few.
Children’s literature in India is a subaltern field, only now beginning to attract its long overdue attention. While literature in English for adults attained an enviable position with the likes of Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Kamala Markandaya etc winning awards, critical acclaim and giving structure to the literature from the subcontinent, children who had an interest in reading books beyond their prescribed syllabus for decades took doses of Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Mills and Boons i.e all work of foreign writers and the translations of Panchatantra, Jataka Tales and Amar Chitra Kathaein from Indians, leaving much to be desired in the field of children’s literature in English in the country. The only significant name and very significant for that matter is of Ruskin bond who has been prolifically and tirelessly writing delightful short stories for children.
For a long time, children books by Indian writers confined themselves to the genres of mystery and adventure, with some historical fiction, school stories a...
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...yphenated genres – fantasy, realistic, science-based, informative, didactic, historical, folk, mythical, fables, environmental, nonsensical that it’s going to take into account; the bafflingly different age group and thus the variety that it’s going to cover, the length of the pieces that it is going to counter, and the vast period it is going to study. It is also interesting to see how writers who themselves have been brought up on a staple diet of foreigner books are writing books rich in Indian content.
Working in the genre of children’s literature can be quite aesthetically rewarding and may lead to springing up and then further the development of areas of study in the vista of children’s literature.
Works Cited
Subramanium, S. All for Children. The Hindu. 03 Apr. 2005. Print
Vijaykumar, Chithira. “Through the sands of Time.” The Hindu. 8 Feb. 2011. Print
Wilson, Nance S. “ZINDEL, Paul.” Continuum Encyclopedia Of Children’s Literature (2003): 848-849. Literary Reference Center. Web. 24 Jan. 2014.
In conclusion, critical evaluation of what makes a book good or bad depends on the selection criteria and agenda of those making the evaluation. The prizes have been criticised through the years and the selection committees have risen to this by changing the selection process, even if this change has been slow. Children’s Literature is in flux due to the ever-changing ideas and perceptions of childhood. Children’s books seen as prestigious today may become, like Blyton, unpalatable to the critics of tomorrow.
219-224. Library Services Institutefor Minnesota Indians. Guidelines for Evaluating Multicultural Literature: 1970, pp. iv-v. Norton, Donna. 'Through the Eyes of a Child. Prentice Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffes, New Jersey: 1995.
Senick, Gerard J., and Hedblad, Alan. Children’s Literature Review: Excerpts from Reviews, and Commentary on Books for Children and Young People (Volumes 14, 34, 35). Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research, 1995..
Griffith, John, and Charles Frey. Classics of Children's Literature. 6th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. 21-29, 322-374. Print.
Falconer, Rachel. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. New York: Routledge, 2009.
It has always been amazing to realize how well the literature I read as a child has stayed with me through the years. It takes an exceptional writer to compose a narrative that maintains a storyline on the same level of a child's understanding; it takes everything short of a miracle to keep a child's interest. However, that undertaking has been accomplished by many skilled authors, and continues to be an area of growth in the literary world. Only this year the New York Times has given the genre of children's literature the credit it deserves by creating a separate best-sellers list just for outstanding children's books. Yet, on another level, children's literature is not only for the young. I believe that the mark of a brilliant children's author is the age range of those who get pleasure from the stories; the wider the range, the better.
Children literature is a term that refers to the texts written for children. The artist uses creative ways to ensure that children are provided with educational books, touching on a variety of themes. This paper will include comparison of two characters from the two texts, “Hana's Suitcase: A True Story,” authored by Karen Levine and “Charlotte’s Web,” written by E.B. White, with the aim of understanding ways in which problems are solvable as indicated by selected characters.
...ia J. Campbell. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. 39-65. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Scot Peacock. Vol. 82. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
Zitkala Sa’s autobiography “Impressions of an Indian childhood” Should remain a part of the American Literary canon because her writing is full of rich history. Within the history that she depicts, she shows a different perspective. A lot of times, people do not realize the perspective of the Indians when looking back at this time. Her writing shows what begins out as a happy childhood.
Richardson, Alan. “Wordsworth, Fairy Tales, and the Politics of Children’s Reading.” Romanticism and . Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Ed. James Holt McGavran Jr. Athens: . . . University of Georgia Press, 1991.
... (eds), Children’s Literature Classic Text and Contemporary Trends, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan in association with Open University
Golden Age children’s literature focuses on the happiness and showing children the positive aspects of society. The...
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
Literature has been part of society since pen met paper. It has recorded history, retold fables, and entertained adults for centuries. Literature intended for children, however, is a recent development. Though children’s literature is young, the texts can be separated into two categories by age. The exact splitting point is debatable, but as technology revolutionized in the mid-twentieth century is the dividing point between classic and contemporary. Today’s children’s literature is extraordinarily different from the classics that it evolved from, but yet as classic was transformed into modern, the literature kept many common features.