Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy

Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy
Author: Ingrid E. Castro
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498594301

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Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy

Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy
Author: Ingrid E. Castro
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-09-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781498594318

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Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds draws on childhood studies scholarship to contextualize children's agentic entanglements with fantasy. Fantasy offers children opportunities for greater peer connectivity, identity exploration, holistic citizenry, and creative empowerment.

"All the Worlds Beyond"

Author: Madeleine Bennett
Publisher:
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2018
Genre: Children's literature
ISBN:

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Portals of Power

Portals of Power
Author: Lori M. Campbell
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2010-03-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786456558

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Fantasy writing, like literature in general, provides a powerful vehicle for challenging the status quo. Via symbolism, imagery and supernaturalism, fantasy constructs secondary-world narratives that both mirror and critique the political paradigms of our own world. This critical work explores the role of the portal in fantasy, investigating the ways in which magical nexus points and movement between worlds are used to illustrate real-world power dynamics, especially those impacting women and children. Through an examination of high and low fantasy, fairy tales, children's literature, the Gothic, and science fiction, the portal is identified as a living being, place or magical object of profound metaphorical and cultural significance.

Fantasy and the Real World in British Children's Literature

Fantasy and the Real World in British Children's Literature
Author: Caroline Webb
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2014-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317935756

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This study examines the children’s books of three extraordinary British writers—J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, and Terry Pratchett—and investigates their sophisticated use of narrative strategies not only to engage children in reading, but to educate them into becoming mature readers and indeed individuals. The book demonstrates how in quite different ways these writers establish reader expectations by drawing on conventions in existing genres only to subvert those expectations. Their strategies lead young readers to evaluate for themselves both the power of story to shape our understanding of the world and to develop a sense of identity and agency. Rowling, Jones, and Pratchett provide their readers with fantasies that are pleasurable and imaginative, but far from encouraging escape from reality, they convey important lessons about the complexities and challenges of the real world—and how these may be faced and solved. All three writers deploy the tropes and imaginative possibilities of fantasy to disturb, challenge, and enlarge the world of their readers.

The SAGE Handbook of Global Childhoods

The SAGE Handbook of Global Childhoods
Author: Nicola J. Yelland
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 704
Release: 2021-09-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 152976209X

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This Handbook explores the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies through a uniquely global lens. It focuses on enquiries and investigations into the everyday lives of young children in the age range of birth to 8 years of age, giving space to their voices and involving interrogations about the various aspect of their lives. This Handbook engages with the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, education, cultural studies, ethnography, and philosophy, with contributions from scholars from across the globe who have focused their work on the complexities of childhoods in contemporary times. By considering a range of epistemologies, ontologies and perspectives to present the contemporary & systematic research on the topic from a wide range of academics and authors in the field, this Handbook provides a significant contribution to the international dialogue of Global Childhoods. Part 1: Global Childhoods Part 2: Researching Global Childhoods Part 3: Contemporary Childhoods Part 4: Pedagogies and Practice Part 5: Creating Communities for Global Children

The Child Eater

The Child Eater
Author: Rachel Pollack
Publisher:
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2014
Genre: Fantasy fiction
ISBN: 9781848663220

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On Earth, the Wisdom family has always striven to be more normal than normal. But Simon Wisdom, the youngest child, is far from normal: he can see the souls of the dead. And now the ghosts of children are begging him to help them, as they face something worse than death. The only problem is, he doesn't know how. In a far-away land of magic and legends, Matyas has dragged himself up from the gutter and inveigled his way into the Wizards' college. In time, he will become more powerful than all of them - but will his quest blind him to the needs of others? For Matyas can also hear the children crying. But neither can save the children alone, for the child eater is preying on two worlds...

Girls Transforming

Girls Transforming
Author: Sanna Lehtonen
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013-05-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0786461365

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This book explores representations of girlhood and young womanhood in recent English language children's fantasy by focusing on two fantastic body transformation types: invisibility and age-shifting. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory, the study discusses the tropes of invisibility and age-shifting as narrative devices representing gendered experiences. The transformations offer various perspectives on a girl's changing body and identity and provide links between real-life and fantastic discourses of gender, power, invisibility and aging. The main focus is on English-language fantasy published since the 1970s but the motifs of invisibility and age-shifting in earlier tales and children's books is reviewed; this is the first study of children's fantasy literature that considers these tropes at length. Novels discussed are from both critically acclaimed authors and the less well known. Most of the novels depicting invisible or age-shifting girls are neither thoroughly conventional nor radically subversive but present a range of styles. In terms of gender, children's fantasy novels can be more complex than they are often interpreted to be.

Screening Children in Post-apocalypse Film and Television

Screening Children in Post-apocalypse Film and Television
Author: Debbie Olson
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1666918687

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This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television.. By exploring the function of child characters within a dystopian framework, this volume illustrates how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.

Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction

Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction
Author: Ingrid E. Castro
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498597394

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This collection merges representations of children and youth in various science fiction texts with childhood studies theories and debates. Set in the past, present, and future, science fiction landscapes and technologies sometimes constrain, but often expand, agentic expression, movement, and collaboration.