Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature

Bringing together children’s literature scholars from China and the United States, this collection provides an introduction to the scope and goals of a field characterized by active but also distinctive scholarship in two countries with very different rhetorical traditions. The volume’s five sections highlight the differences between and overlapping concerns of Chinese and American scholars, as they examine children’s literature with respect to cultural metaphors and motifs, historical movements, authorship, didacticism, important themes, and the current status of and future directions for literature and criticism. Wide-ranging and admirably ambitious in its encouragement of communication between scholars from two major nations, Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature serves as a model for examining how and why children’s literature, more than many literary forms, circulates internationally.

Introduction, Claudia Nelson, Rebecca Morris; Section I Theorizing Children’s Literature: Journey as Metaphor and Motif; Chapter 1 Images of Growth: Embodied Metaphors in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Roberta Seelinger Trites; Chapter 2 Identifying the “Motif” in a Country’s Image of Children: Research on Children’s Issues in the Ming Dynasty, a Cultural Critique and Interpretation of Formulated Developmental Strategies, Ban Ma, Lin Aimei; Section II Chinese Children’s Literature and the May Fourth Movement; Chapter 3 On the Image of Children and the Three Stages of Transformation in 100 Years of Chinese Children’s Literature, Wang Quangen, Jiang Qian; Chapter 4 The Originality of Lu Xun’s Views of Children and China’s Modern Image of Children, Xu Yan, Chi Xin; Chapter 5 The Discovery of Children: The Origins of Zhou Zuoren’s Thoughts on “Humane Literature”, Zhu Ziqiang, Xu Derong; Section III Studies of American Authorship; Chapter 6 Love and Death in Clovernook: Alice Cary’s Children of the Ohio Frontier, Dennis Berthold; Chapter 7 Interpreting Elizabeth Foreman Lewis’s Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze, Kenneth Kidd; Chapter 8 Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain: Imaging the American Child through a British Lens, Robert Boenig; Section IV A History of Didactic Children’s Literature; Chapter 9 The Multiple Facets and Contemporary Mission of the Images of Children in Chinese Children’s Literature, Tang Sulan, Wang Xiaohui; Chapter 10 Images of Children and Views of Children’s Literature in Contemporary China, Chen Hui, Chi Xin; Chapter 11 Children’s Disposition and Children’s Views, Cao Wenxuan, Liang Hong; Chapter 12 Representing Boys and Girls in the 1912 Book of Knowledge, Claudia Nelson; Chapter 13 “Black and Beautiful and Bruised Like Me”: Contrasts and the Black Aesthetic in Picture Books of Langston Hughes, Michelle H. Martin; Chapter 14 Remembering the Civil Rights Movement in Photographic Texts for Children, Katharine Capshaw; Section V Themes in Children’s Literature; Chapter 15 Wimpy Boys and Spunky Girls: Beverly Cleary’s Template for the Gendered Child in Postwar American Children’s Literature, Claudia Mills; Chapter 16 The Commercial Cultural Spirit and the Contemporary Image of Children: A Discussion of the Artistic Innovation of China’s Contemporary Children’s Literature, Fang Weiping, Li Jie; Chapter 17 Retelling the First World War as Alternate History and Technological Fantasy in American Children’s Literature, Lynne Vallone; Chapter 18 Back to Basic Points and Seeking a Turning Point: The Multidimensional Construction of Adolescent Identity in American Realistic Novels for Young Adults, Tan Fengxia, Taoyang; Chapter 19 Coda, Mei Zihan, Wang Chengcheng;

Claudia Nelson is Professor of English and Rebecca Morris is completing her PhD in English at Texas A&M University.