The adolescent novel of ideas

Peter Hollindale first developed critical interests in children's literature during postgraduate teacher training at the University of Bristol, where he was taught by Margaret Meek. After teaching for several years in secondary schools he was appointed to the University of York, where he is senior lecturer in English and educational studies. He now teaches an undergraduate special paper on children's literature in the Department of English there. His bookChoosing Books for Children, a guide for parents, was published in 1974, and he has since written extensively on children's literature in academic and professional journals. His article “Ideology and the Children's Book,” which appeared inSignal 55, received the Children's Literature Association Prize for the best essay in the field of children's literature published in 1988. In recent years he has worked closely on J. M. Barrie. His edition of the “Peter Pan” prose texts was published by Oxford University Press in 1991, andPeter Pan and Other Plays appears from the same publisher in 1995. He is interested in reworkings and adaptations of classic children's texts for film and television, and his study of Steven Spielberg'sHook was published inSignal 72 in 1993. For Thimble Press he is currently completingSigns of Childness: A Short Philosophy of Children's Literature. He has contributed a number of articles toCLE, the most recent being “Westall's Kingdom” in the 1994 Autumn issue.     

Trends in children's fiction in the United Kingdom during the 1980s

Through her work onChildren's Books of the Year Julia Eccleshare has a unique overview of the development of fiction written for children during the 1980s.CLE invited her to detect trends in the writing and publishing of children's books during the past decade.Julia Eccleshare is a freelance editor, advisor to publishers, and reviewer of children's books for national newspapers. She has written or edited some 15 books, includingTreasure Islands: The Woman's Hour Guide to Children's Reading: BBC 1988.     

War and peace in the early elementary classroom

She has previously published inCLE and other journals, and has published two children's books,Sea, Salt, and Air, a picture book, andWhen the Frost is Gone, a preadolescent novel     

The writer and the reader inCarrie's War

Barbara Freedman has for several years been a combination children's librarian/branch library manager. She authors theDraw Me a Story series of draw and tell story collections, as well as articles on children's literature and programming, and conducts workshops on children's programming techniques.     

A dialectical approach to the study of war in children's books

She has published several articles and has written two children's books, a preadolescent novel (forthcoming) and a picture book,Salt, Sea and Air (Macmillan, 1993).     

Inescapable Bodies, Disquieting Perception: Why Adults Seek to Tame and Harness Swift's Excremental Satire in Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travelsis a complex, uninhibited, savage satire that concludes with the narrator's descent into madness—hardly a likely candidate for children's reading. In the nearly three hundred years since it was first published, however,Gulliver's Travelshas become associated with children's literature, though it is usually abridged, bowdlerized, and/or totally transformed. This essay examines changes commonly made to the text and concludes that these changes reveal how adults wield the tools of revision and abridgement in order to maintain an adult–child dichotomy characterized by power differentials.     

Stretching the blanket: Legal reforms affecting child witnesses

The author presents an overview of the changes in the rules of evidence that now govern criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse and civil proceedings. The United States Supreme Court has issued six decisions that profoundly affect the receipt of children's testimony and expert testimony assaying the reliability of children's reported experiences. These cases as well as the Michaels prosecution in New Jersey have been catalysts for reform, exposing the pretrial investigative processes as the critical determinant of the reliability of trial evidence from children. She concludes that the next frontier is the application of social science research to the shaping of legislative standards and administrative guidelines aimed at minimizing the contamination of children's testimony during the pretrial staging of litigation.     

“Stop! You didn't read who wrote It!”: The concept of author

Virginia Lowe has lectured in both children's and English literature at several Australian teachers' colleges and is currently a school librarian. She has published a monograph,Adult Book Child, and several articles on books and young children.     

“A condition of complete simplicity”: The toy as child inThe Mouse and His Child

Geraldine DeLuca teaches children's literature and other courses at Brooklyn College. She is one of the editors ofThe Lion and the Unicorn and has published many articles on literature for children and young adults.     

Literary critic versus expert commentator: The case of katharine tozer'sMumfie marches on

Nicholas Tucker taught English in comprehensive schools in London before qualifying as an educational psychologist. He is now a lecturer in developmental psychology at the University of Sussex, with a special interest both in children's reactions to literature and in the history and present-day status of childhood itself. He has written five books for children as well as books about children's literature, includingThe Child and the Book: A Literary and Psychological Exploration, reissued in 1990 by Cambridge University Press in their new Canto “Classics” series.     

Carnivals, the Carnivalesque, The Magic Puddin', and David Almond's Wild Girl, Wild Boy: Toward a Theorizing of Children's Plays

This article seeks to extend current children's literature criticism into children's plays and children's theatre. The article uses Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding as a prose introduction to an idea of a theatrical carnivalesque. Building on the practical experience of being involved in a large program of original drama for children, written and produced within the university context, it develops a theory of plays-as-the-performance-of-texts, relating this to the current debate on performance and performativity. It adopts the idea of performativity as performative belonging and identifies some distinguishing characteristics of children's plays. Applying some of these ideas to David Almond's Wild Girl, Wild Boy, it notes the idea of moral psychic reorganisation as part of the essence of carnival.     

Socioeconomic status, parental investments, and the cognitive and behavioral outcomes of low-income children from immigrant and native households

The current study examines the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on preschool children's cognitive and behavioral outcomes and if these relations are mediated by the quality of children's home environment and moderated by family nativity status. Data come from 1459 low-income families (n = 257 and 1202 immigrant and native families, respectively). Results indicated that among both immigrant and native households, maternal education, as compared to household income or welfare receipt, was the strongest predictor of a composite of SES. Path analyses estimated direct and indirect effects of SES and revealed greater similarity than difference in the processes by which SES influences immigrant and native children's preschool outcomes. Language/literacy stimulation and maternal supportiveness mediated the relations of SES to children's cognitive outcomes among both immigrant and native families. In contrast, parenting stress mediated the effects of SES on children's aggressive behavior among native, but not immigrant, households.     

Selected bibliography of research on programming at the Children's Television Workshop

This article is an annotated bibliography of 36 formative, summative, and theoretical research studies on the four educational children's television series the Children's Television Workshop has produced since 1969:Sesame Street, The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, andSquare One TV.     

The mad tea party maxim: Or how books don't always mean what the writer intended

Natalie Babbitt is the award-winning author of such popular children's books asTuck Everlasting, The Devil's Storybook, andThe Search for Delicious, as well as many articles and reviews on children's literature. Ms. Babbitt presented this paper as the keynote address at the Annual Reading and Writing Conference for Teachers, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, October 1987.     

The virtues of improbability: Joan Aiken

David Rees has written over 20 novels for children and young adults, includingThe Exeter Blitz (Carnegie Medal, 1978),The Green Bough of Liberty (Other Award, 1980), andThe Flying Island, just published. He has also taught at Exeter University and at California State University, San Jose. Rees has published two collections of critical essays on children's writers,The Marble in the Water andPainted Desert, Green Shade, and is currently at work on a third collection.     

“Will the real dragon please stand up?” Convention and parody in children's stories

Jon C. Stott is Professor of English at the University of Alberta, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in children's literature. He is the author ofChildren's Literature from A to Z, and many other books and articles on children's literature.     

“The Wonder-Dog”: the collected children's stories of Richard Hughes

This article reviews the collected children's stories of Richard Hughes published under the titleThe Wonder-Dog in the UK in July 1977 by Chatto and Windus and in the USA in the autumn of 1977 by Greenwillow Books.Geoffrey Parker has taught English in schools and in colleges of education.     

The journey through the “space in the text” toWhere the Wild Things Are

Ann Moseley is associate professor of literature and languages at East Texas State University and has presented and published articles on children's literature, Western American literature, and composition. She is the author ofOle Rølvaag (Boise State U.P., 1987) and co-author ofContexts: Writing and Reading (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985, 1988).     

Deconstructing Burglars: Formal analysis as a Pedagogic Jemmy

There is an increasing interest in attempts to find a mode of discussion appropriate for young children's books. The article which follows offers a close consideration ofBurglar Bill by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Readers might find it helpful to have a copy of the picture book at hand, if possible, as they read Andrew Stibb's article. Andrew Stibbs, after many years in various secondary schools, is now a senior lecturer in education at the University of Leeds, where he specializes in English in education. He has written extensively on assessing English, on children's literature, on teaching poetry and literature in general, and—more recently—on the applications of literary theory to English in schools.     

Cooperation and instruction in practical problem solving. Differences in interaction styles of mother-child dyads as related to socio-economic background and cognitive development

This article addresses the role of parents and children in the social construction of children's cognitive competence. A discussion of four approaches (i.e. Sigel, Wertsch, Wood, Diaz et al.) leads to the hypothesis that both the level of instruction content and the degree of cooperation in joint problem solving interactions with adults are related to children's cognitive development. This was tested in a study of 40 mothers and three-year-old children solving a practical problem. Coding videotaped interactions on a content and cooperation dimension yielded moderate to strong correlations with family's socio-economic status and children's cognitive level.