Module Information

The module will add diversification to the portfolio of options within the department.

In The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Carter G. Woodson asserts that 'there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom'. By suggesting the formative influence of children's culture on social relations, Woodson highlights an idea that courses through the body of children's literature. Whether writing in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, authors infuse texts with the hope that through childhood, that potent period in the individual's development, sensibilities can be transformed. Telling stories to a young audience can become the conduit for social and political change. A primary factor that distinguishes children's literature from adult literature is its complexly layered audience, for children's literature reaches various adult mediators as well as child readers. Children's literature also becomes a particularly intense site of ideological and political contest. Reversals of power in particular have always had special force in works for children. This module examines the uniqueness of children's literature, from classic realist texts to contemporary fantasy, and explores the thematic crossover between adult and child literature, and the forms of children's literature in which identity-formation takes centre stage, such as fictional and non-fictional autobiography, coming of age stories and the bildungsroman.