Landscape and social values in popular children's literature: Nancy Drew mysteries

Brooker-Gross, Susan R.

doi:10.1080/00221348108980236

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Starting with early discussions of literary geography published in the Geographical Review (Anon 1924, 1938) that focused on the ‘highly developed geographical instinct’ of some authors and the subsequent value of their literary descriptions of local place and region, such a narrative would be able, in one plot thread, to trace this approach through to the present day. There has been a steady stream of articles, for example, in the Journal of Geography laying out the value of literary texts in teaching geographical themes and regions (see, for example, Brooker‐Gross 1981; Elbow and Martinson 1980; Gesler 2004; Hathaway 1993; Hoy and Elbow 1976; Lamme 1977; Marchetti 1993; Mitchell 1998). Similarly, in his 1998 discussion of regional writers of Eastern Ontario who ‘allow a better understanding of landscape and inscapes of this particular place’ (p. 29), Osborne (1996) pushed back against the move to shift attention away from ‘the authorial imagination’, noting that ‘for me, authors continue to be the primary guarantors of meaning’ (p. 38).…”

Section: Speaking Across Boundariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Text as It Happens: Literary Geography

Hones

2008

Geography Compass

108

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This article reviews the current situation in geographical work with fiction in the context of an explicitly spatial view of the writing-reading nexus as a contextualized and always emerging geographical event. It argues that this way of conceptualizing the text events of both narrative fiction and academic knowledge production provides a way of understanding and dealing with incompatible literary interpretations and also with irreconcilable approaches to literary geography. This openness to multiplicity develops from the point that text events are not only relational by nature and generated within social contexts in the initial encounter of author, text, and reader, but also only become publicly accessible when subsequently articulated within the mediating context of a particular social situation. The article proposes that literary geography as a collective endeavor can be developed and consolidated through an appreciation of the varying contexts within which geographically oriented work with fiction is performed and articulated.1302 Text as it happens: literary geography

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Section: Speaking Across Boundariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Text as It Happens: Literary Geography

Hones

2008

Geography Compass

108

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“…However, inspired by studies that encourage a geographical view to the art of reading (See Keighren, 2006;Livingstone, 2005;Hones, 2008), this analysis shifts attention to children's books as entry-points to discuss spaces as this receives little attention in the literature, not least the trivial spaces (See discussion in Theoretical Framework). Studies looking at the crossroads of literature and geography typically include grand spatialities found in adventure stories (Hones andEndo, 2006), world-building (Kitchin andKneale, 2002;Kneale, 2006), 'place-defining' novels (Shortridge, 1991), or introduction to geography and regions (Brooker-Gross, 1981;Gesler, 2004). However, the COVID-19 pandemic context calls for attention to everyday spaces because it is a crisis related to distance and mobility-spatial matters.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s spaces in pages: Examining spatiality in COVID-19-themed children’s books

Andal

2022

Journal of Early Childhood Literacy

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This article examines spatiality in selected children’s books about COVID-19. Spatiality is an important lens because the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis related to distancing and mobility restrictions—spatial matters. Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities was adopted as a framework to how children’s books present community belongingness within the spatial restrictions imposed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a content analysis of pandemic-related children’s books published in early 2020 ( n = 51), this paper explores the sense of community in three everyday spaces: ‘inside’ (home), ‘outside’ (outdoors), and ‘in-betweens’ (windows and digital space). Findings reveal a two-fold observation: (1) children’s books show how the ‘normal’ in everyday space is disrupted; and (2) layers of imagined communities manifest within the everyday spaces depicted in the books examined. These findings offer insights that while children’s literature and geography are different disciplines, there is much to be explored about spaces in children’s lives from writers and illustrators of children’s books. Likewise, a geographical lens can substantiate discussions in children’s literature by unpacking relationships of characters based on the spaces they occupy. With these in mind, it is hoped that conversations about spatial discourses in children’s books flourish from this initial exploration.

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“…Another book examines the degree to which children's literature in the U.S. reflects racism and racist attitudes (Klein 1985). The landscape presented in several U.S. children's books has been analyzed from a geographical perspective (Brooker-Gross 1981), and a dissertation has discussed socialization for work and leisure in U.S. children's literature (Kingsbury 1973). The values presented in U.S. children's theatre have also been subject to critical examination (Perlstein and Laurino 1980).…”

Section: Children's Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Child is 'Father' to the Manager: Images of Organizations in U.S. Children's Literature

Ingersoll

Adams

1992

Organization Studies

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Since ancient times, literature has served as a medium for instructing youth in the manners and morals of society, and for instructing them on the major problems of adult life. The books young people read, therefore, often provide reflections of what society assumes to be valuable, and of the standards it holds.' Abstract A person's approach to organizational life is grounded in an elaborate and largely unarticulated meaning map, which provides tools for analysing situations, beliefs about how things ought to be done and rationales for those beliefs. This meaning map is socially constructed. We argue in this article that children's literature is a part of this process of social construction, and that these stories in the United States are reflective of one of the dominant strands of the U.S. national culture, namely, technical rationality. We analyse thematically a set of twenty-nine children's stories, and discuss the repeating themes which emerged from that analysis. The implications for the study of organizations are discussed.

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Landscape and social values in popular children's literature: Nancy Drew mysteries

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

Text as It Happens: Literary Geography

Text as It Happens: Literary Geography

Children’s spaces in pages: Examining spatiality in COVID-19-themed children’s books

The Child is 'Father' to the Manager: Images of Organizations in U.S. Children's Literature

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