Best children literary criticism books according to redditors
We found 46 Reddit comments discussing the best children literary criticism books. We ranked the 20 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 46 Reddit comments discussing the best children literary criticism books. We ranked the 20 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I think there's a plausible theory that says the Aliens franchise is in fact built on the Babar children's books. Notice that:
Which brings me to my third point: no, children were not originally the target audience of fairy tales. Children were often included in the audience, but they were not the primary audience. As such, the tales had lots of violence, lots of sex, lots of bawdy jokes and references, and lots of frank discussion about issues that impacted the storytellers’ worlds. For some context on when these stories might have been told, women often told such tales to each other while doing domestic work, chores, and other activities, or together with men around the fire after the children had gone to bed. They were chiefly for entertainment purposes, though there were often lessons embedded in them (because most tales do, after all). Writers, editors, and storytellers began to utilize fairy tales in 18th and 19th-century Europe in the moral and cultural education of children. Before that, they were chiefly for adults, whether for the teaching of lessons or entertainment purposes, which is why so many of the tales are particularly gruesome or filled with sexual exploits: they are not sanitized for children.
The Grimm brothers were trying to please two different audiences. Their first edition was not meant for children at all, and was instead a scholarly pursuit with them trying to record the tales faithfully, even down to colloquial language; they did this largely for nationalist reasons to create a unified German cultural story, at least partially based on Johann Herder’s fundamental philosophy centered around the idea that the only way for Germany (and thus, any nation) to revitalize its sense of self was through the collection and distribution of folklore, which Herder saw as “the summation of the national soul expressed in the poems of the folk”. It was only when people began buying the book and telling the stories to their children, complaining that the stories were too graphic in nature, that the Grimm brothers started extensively editing and sanitizing the tales. Many of the Christian references were added because of harsh criticism that they weren't Christian enough, for example. In Wilhelm’s later versions, he was bending to the will of middle-class parents and the church who wanted the stories to be made suitable for children. The Grimm brothers were poor (they were eating one meal a day at one point because they couldn't afford enough food), and so to maximize financial success when the collection began to get popular, they began to sanitize and edit them to make them more suitable. Disney is not the first to sanitize fairy tales, and the supposedly "dark original versions" are themselves sanitized or changed to fit with the desires of their primary audience.
Ultimately, fairy tales get changed because fairy tales occupy a unique space in the literary landscape: as a genre, they (along with other types of folklore) provide a culture with a single unifying collection of tales the population can claim as “theirs”. This unifying cultural story narrates the life of the people, complete with specific geographical landmarks, cultural/regional issues, and identifying characteristics that mark a tale as coming from “our culture”. It is tribal in nature: the differences between tales help distinguish “us” from the collective “them” by identifying and changing aspects of a cultural/oral narrative. Additionally, they give any particular population a romanticized national narrative of their history and cultural geography, assist in the education of new members (such as children/young adults or immigrants) of the cultural identity of the group, and address issues uniquely important to that culture.
For further reading, I recommend the following books and articles:
It's interesting of how you're using this idea that somehow since the book is for kids, it can't have significant implications in it as well. If we actually choose to look beyond the first 3 inches, one can find an awful lot to examine.
Minerva McGonagal? Minerva is the Roman Goddess of wisdom. Fluffy, or cerberus, happens to guard the place which contains the key to eternal life? I'm sure Orpheus would be Jealous. All the latin, describing the function of spells (and a mirror)? But I mean all kids know latin, right?
Steven King:
> The fantasy writer's job is to conduct the willing reader from mundanity to magic. This is a feat of which only a superior imagination is capable, and Rowling possesses such equipment. She has said repeatedly that the Potter novels are not consciously aimed at any particular audience or age. The reader may reasonably question that assertion after reading the first book in the series, but by the time he or she has reached ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' it becomes increasingly clear that the lady means what she says. Nor can there be any question that her stated refusal to dumb down the language of the books (the current one is presented with such British terms as petrol, pub and cuppa unchanged) has lent the stories an attraction to adults that most children's novels simply don't have.
ofLiterature written about Harry Potter for a series that's only 3 inches deep.
That's my two cents anyways.
It's up to you to decide. This guy's exaggerating this case. JKR has always been fully supportive of fan art and fan fictions and fan sites, and people generally exploring her world with each other. Here's an overview of the trial, though I'm linking it more so you can click this site's sources at the bottom of the page.
The long and short of it is, the HP Lexicon was a huge fan encyclopedic site that I and everyone I know used for reference. The site owners wanted to publish it as a book for-profit. Rowling herself wanted to publish an encyclopedia. This was not the first encyclopedia or similar book JKR prevented, it's just the most publicized, she also stopped Mugglenet from publishing a for-profit encyclopedia.
I think the most important thing to remember is JKR/WB had been through a strange phase where ultimately they decided they were fine with original fan works for-profit. For more info, I'd read Harry, A History, by Melissa Anelli (if I had it in front of me, I'd find quotes, but I'm at work). She explains that when the internet was still fairly new, tons of kids with HP fansites were getting cease and desist letters. WB just didn't realize the consequences of what they were doing and did a 180, apologized and allowed the sites (if I'm not mistaken, this was known as Potter Wars, but I forget). A few years after that was the issue of Wizard Rock bands (you read that right). The pioneers of this genre were Harry and the Potters in 2002. They were also told to stop performing and selling merchandise, but eventually after a relatively undramatic battle, WB decided they were okay. So for years, JKR/WB had experienced their fair share of fan works for-profit. I'm not in JKR's head, but she seemed to love and support all of it.
What makes the HP Lexicon book different is that it was not original work, it was "just" a re-organization of JKR's work, and perhaps more importantly, had the exact same purpose of what JKR was planning on publishing. The reason I use the quotes is because it's obviously a ton of work to organize that information into an encyclopedia. Also, it looks like RDR (the publishing company that was sued) acted a bit shady and probably didn't help their case, but I'm not a lawyer and can't really judge their actions as one, this is just the impression I get reading the links I sent you.
Also, the HP Lexicon book was still published, meeting the guidelines of the suit, but after all that, is exactly like an encyclopedia anyway. ??
Personally, I wish they hadn't sued. I would have known the difference and still bought both, but I guess less massive fans might have been confused which one to buy, which was the main point of the suit in the first place.
As a huge huge fan of Rowling, if there's anything I've learned admiring a human like a god (which I can now see I did with Rowling) is that she isn't a god. There's things she's done or said (not to mention plays she put her name on) that I wish she hadn't, but she's human. She also started her own charity, Lumos, to bring light to the mis-used funds for third world orphanages that have poor conditions for the kids, most of which are not even orphans and have families that want them. She pays all her taxes to her country because she appreciates what they did when she needed them. She is an advocate for equal rights, and ultimately does a lot of good. Nobody is completely embodied in their wiki pages, and nobody is perfect either.
Everybody pretty much covered it from the top-down data-driven side. Specifically for me I focus on local-level conservation efforts and teaching people how everything is intertwined with our everyday. I highly focus on environmental empathy, because how are we going to get people to make a concerted effort to go green, much less keep up with the information, unless they care about the environment (related, I also focus on green actions that are good for the wallet, like making homemade cleaning fluids, not idling your modern car, and turning off lights you're not using).
For example throwing a cigarette on the ground could
Note how the ground near roads in general doesn't fare well, but especially where you see a lot of cigarette butts at red lights. Ground erodes there as less plants are able to grow. More and more pollution ends up going down the drains along roads. Our natural water filters (aka marshes) work overtime and eventually cannot support life as well. Animals die of accidental ingestion or getting trapped in litter and no longer exist to fill the niche they served, and nothing evolved fast enough to fill that niche instead (this is the problem with exacerbated climate change in general-- nature can't replace itself fast enough). This causes the marsh to die off even faster. Eventually either local citizens end up with unsafe to drink water, or their taxes/water bill goes up to account for the increased filtration needed.
My favorite three books to explain at its most basic level this issue as well as how to teach yourself and children conservation efforts:
Not really sure how being an independent is qualifier for anything....everyone should do their research and climate issues should not be a partisan thing. I am too independent but even if climate change were not a real and dangerous issue, I'd still rather switch to things that will produce less pollution so my lungs can breathe easier and my water taste better. I'd still care about saving an endangered species that's dying due to our own actions of overhunting or deforestation, tenfold if it is the sole provider of a niche.
PS- Sorry you're getting downvoted. :(
Here's a list of sources, in English translation, for the stories I discussed in this video. All of them are public domain, and readily available in at least one edition on Wikisource. All of these stories can be found in their original languages as well.
Grimm's Cinderella, from a 1952 edition translated by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_Household_Tales_(Edwardes)/Ashputtel
Grimm's Hansel and Gretel, from a 1952 edition translated by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_Household_Tales_(Edwardes)/Hansel_and_Grethel
Grimm's Sleeping Beauty, from a 1952 edition translated by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_Household_Tales_(Edwardes)/Briar_Rose
Perault's Cinderella, from a 1901 translation by Charles Welsh:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tales_of_Mother_Goose/Cinderella,_or_the_Little_Glass_Slipper
Perrault's Sleeping Beauty, from a 1901 translation by Charles Welsh:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tales_of_Mother_Goose/The_Sleeping_Beauty_in_the_Wood
Giambattista Basile's Sun, Moon, and Talia, from an 1850 translation of the Pentamerone by John Edward Taylor:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Pentamerone,_or_The_Story_of_Stories/Sun,_Moon_and_Talia
I had a much harder time tracking down the original, 1812 edition of the Grimm's stories along with the original introduction. The best I could find digitally was an edition translated by Oliver Loo and published in 2014. It's currently available on Amazon for just $3.00:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MMX1Z5W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
If anyone would like a hand finding alternate translations of the sources, other versions of the stories, or the medieval art that inspired my drawings, feel free to send me a PM.
It's a little more than that, actually.
I don't necessarily disagree that this would be a copyright violation of the official maps (I haven't seen them, and don't know how much OP lifted); but just to add some thoughts re: fan-fic works: just because a work is licensed doesn't mean it needs to be, and they are certainly not always licensed. The trademark ("Star Wars") most certainly would need to be licensed, but fan spin-offs wouldn't necessarily need to be licensed unless they centered around, e.g. a character with a developed personality from the original. So, say, a fan fiction about young Ned Stark would probably need to be licensed (Salinger v Colting), but a fan fiction of an unrelated family from Mole's Town (that doesn't otherwise infringe the trademarks of GoT) would probably not be. A recent Star Trek universe case that might have put some finer bounds on this was settled this year; the defendants didn't survive summary judgment (meaning it wasn't clearly fair use) and they would have had to go through a lengthy trial to determine whether the accumulation of copied elements constituted infringement. Not fun.
Also looking at the official map alone doesn't make it a copy- if he did all the individual city artwork himself, picked and chose what cities to include, took artistic liberties with shading, borders, the compass rose, etc., then it's a pretty gray area whether he infringed the copyright of the original maps. I see that his map does have "A Song of Ice and Fire" at the top, which he would obviously have to scrub to sell.
On the other hand, methinks if the fine borders of the map, which obviously can't be derived from the stories independently of other copyrighted maps, were copied from those maps, that would weigh pretty heavily against OP. But then, see The Lexicon, whose authors all but won a suit against J.K. Rowling (she "won" but they were allowed to publish their book with some directly copied passages removed).
Paul's description of "the third heaven": C.S. Lewis (in The Discarded Image) and Michael Ward (in Planet Narnia) deal a lot with ancient and medieval cosmology - very interesting stuff. Nutshell version: there were seven layers of the heavenly realm, each ruled by a "planet" - beginning with the first heaven ruled by the moon, the second heaven ruled by Mars and the third heaven ruled by Venus. Here's where it gets interesting...
...ancient Jewish cosmology says that the realm ruled by Venus is where God removed the Garden of Eden to, after the Fall. So, when Paul says he knew a man (himself?) who was "caught up to the third heaven...to paradise..." he is speaking in the framework of the then-current cosmology. Fascinating reading for those interested.
A few thoughts:
At one point Lewis and Tolkien were going to write companion novels about space and time. You can see echoes of this in the last chapter of Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in CSL's Space Trilogy when he mentions that space has been cut off from human travel and now any future voyages would be through time. There's also echoes of what might have been in JRRT's Notion Club Papers, which has a time-travel element, but was never published.
In addition, JRRT did not care for the Narnia series because he felt it lacked a coherent theme. However, in the controversial Planet Narnia, Michael Ward posits that CSL actually did have a theme: the medieval view of the planets (The Seven Heavens). There are definitely intriguing arguments made in the book, especially as he combines information from Narnia and the Space Trilogy into his thesis. I wouldn't say it's iron-clad, but if I was still in education, or had the luxury to write papers, this is an area I'd love to explore in depth - specifically the influence of Charles Williams on the evolution of CSL's thought.
If you're interested in aspects of their backgrounds that influenced their worldviews, I would recommend The Discarded Image from CSL (on medieval literature - my favorite CSL book) and The Road to Middle-Earth by Tom Shippey (on the philological undergirding of Middle-Earth). The Humprey Carpenter books are also good (JRRT Letters, Tolkien bio, Inklings bio) as are CSL's letters.
Here, just use my Christmas list:
NIV Zondervan Study Bible
The Goldsworthy Trilogy
Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God
Perspectives on Israel and the Church: 4 Views
Tough Topics
Tough Topics 2
God's Design for Man and Woman
Planet Narnia
Paul and the Law
Covenantal Apologetics
The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism
There's plenty more I'd recommend (like anything from John Piper), but that's a decent start.
I would want that handsome annotated bicentennial edition.
Any of them that say "complete" will have all of the tales. Some of them are broken into volumes. Get her any complete edition. Like this one.
Yeah it was a great class haha.
The class was primarily discussion based, and of course the 7 books were mandatory readings, but we also looked at essays from A Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation and Wizards vs. Muggles: Essays on Identity and the Harry Potter Universe
Anyone know anything about the "Oliver Loo" version which is also out?
http://www.amazon.com/Original-1812-Grimm-Fairy-Tales-ebook/dp/B00MMX1Z5W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416438807&sr=1-1&keywords=grimm+oliver+loo
This one?
I read the "How to Write Children's Books for Dummies," but I didn't think it was very useful. However, this looks like a good resource and it's at a reasonable discount right now. Good luck!
I haven't read that one, but I did pick up "Harry Potter and History" which was actually quite a good read. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Kind of went through history and talked about how this or that may have influenced these characters, or inspired JKR etc. So if it's from the same series, it could be good!
Now looking at the one I got, it doesn't seem to be the same series. But still: http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-History-Culture-Series/dp/0470574720
Relatively recently, people have begun suggested that The Chronicles of Narnia also take a lot of inspiration from medieval cosmology.
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
amazon.co.uk
amazon.ca
amazon.com.au
amazon.in
amazon.de
amazon.it
amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
amazon.co.jp
amazon.fr
Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
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White supremacy might be over stating it. There are lots of articles talking about this and even a book
Notes
>You've unlocked 'The Original Forty' by J.K. Rowling
>J.K. Rowling shares details of her early notebooks that hold the names of the first forty students she created
>Of all my notebooks, in my most treasured ones, I wrote the names of all the teachers and the names of everyone in Harry’s year with little symbols beside them saying if they’re half-blood, pure-blood, Muggle-born.
>MA:There’s a line in Deathly Hallows when Harry (SU: Yeah.) see someone that he thinks might be Hannah Abbott’s long-lost relatives. What’s her deal? Is she a Muggle-born? Is she- Did she lose her family?
>JKR: Oh, you mean the grave?
>MA:Yeah.
>JKR: No. She’s not Muggle-born. She’s- No, I’m pretty sure Hannah’s a pureblood. I know her mother died.
>MA:In an old documentary, you showed a picture that had like all the family associations, and Hannah appeared to be Muggle-blood in the (JKR: Did she?) fan’s carefully constructed image of that picture.
>JKR: Because I’ll tell you what. If that’s the- I’ve got that notebook, and that’s one of my cornerstone notebooks. In that case, then I’ve been mis-remembering that, because I thought she was pureblood. Hm, interesting.
>MA:Hm.
>JKR: Beause I’ve certainly (MA:Okay.) written about her, and thought about her for years now (MA:Mm-hm.) as pureblood, so that’s interesting. (laughs) Maybe we’ll just split the difference and call her half-blood. (MA and JN laugh) Yeah, that’s how decisions are taken in the fairly random world of J.K. Rowling. (MA and JN laugh)
"PotterCast Interviews J.K. Rowling, part one." PotterCast #130, 17 December 2007
>As you can see, Dean originally joined Harry, Ron, Hermione and Neville for the adventure. As you can see from the written caption, Dean was called "Gary" in those days.
>JKR describing an old sketch posted to her website in 2004
Also free; Heralds of Empire Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade
Just to add some Potter stuff here...
The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us about Moral Choices by Edmund Kern
https://www.amazon.ca/Lexicon-Unauthorized-Fiction-Related-Materials/dp/1571431748
Check and mate.
You could try the Opies.
I would look into Beckett's work. I just picked up two of her books at the library this week, so I haven't read them, but they are about her research on versions of Red Riding Hood. I suspect the bibliographies would be helpful for you.
Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts
Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World: An Anthology of International Retellings
Both are apparently part of a "Series in Fairy-Tale Studies." The back cover of the second has comments from Vanessa Joosen, author of Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings; and Christina Bacchilega, author of Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder.
I've got this in my Amazon wishlist, so I figured I'd check the index and it has quite a bit of stuff listed for "board books". Might be worth looking into.
ISBN: 978-0-470-57472-0, the editor is Nancy R. Reagin (it has many authors as it is a collection of essays). If you're looking in a book store, my friend found it in the 'History' section at a Barns and Noble. Here is the Amazon link for anyone looking to order it online: Harry Potter and History. It was a really good read paralleling the magical world of Harry Potter with actual events, people, places, and things.
*Edit: it looks like it is also available on Kindle. So there is a digital copy out there too for anyone who is reading on a kindle, nook, or something else.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Annotated-Brothers-Grimm-Bicentennial/dp/0393088863/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1411078972&sr=8-15&keywords=grimms+fairy+tales+original
This is the one I currently own.