| Description |
viii, 305 pages ; 22 cm |
| Contents |
A Time to Be Born, and a Time to Diep1 -- An Excursus on Significant Meals -- Secret Gardens, Enchanted Places -- Paradise Lost and Regained -- The Sacral Time -- Collective Experience, Adult View -- The Domestic Story as Utopia -- Noisy Village--The Swedish Arcadia -- Children, Animals, and Toys -- Gastronomic Utopias -- Social Utopias -- A Destroyed Paradise -- A Utopia of Mites -- The Omnipotent Child -- Trolls in the Baltic Woods -- Children in Power--King Matt -- The Haunting of Time -- Puer Aeternus -- Land of (Condensed) Milk and Honey -- Midnight Gardens, Magic Wells -- A Wise Progenitrix or a Seductive Witch? -- A Grown-Up's Nostalgia -- Picnic in the Unknown, or There and Back Again -- You Are Dead. Press Escape to Play Again -- Awfully Big Adventure -- A Variety of Picnics -- Where Have All the Young Girls Gone? -- A Girl in Disguise -- Travellers in Time--A Female Initiation -- An Essential Link in Some Unknown Context -- Breaking Away -- The Promise of Happiness? -- Toward Linearity -- Meeting Shadows -- Mother's Bread -- Bridges into Adulthood -- Beyond the Point of No Return -- Deeper and Deeper into Dark Mysteries of Life -- Feasts of Life and Death -- Mission Complete--Mission Failed -- From Idyll to Collapse -- In the Enchanted Place -- Quest for Self-Knowledge -- Meeting with Death -- Breaking Away -- Disintegration -- Except Ye Be Converted, and Become As Little Children |
| Summary |
Nikolajeva examines the depiction of time in literature for children, identifying a continuum of texts ranging from those that depict non-linear time, typical of archaic, or mythical, thought, to those that express linearity, typical of contemporary mainstream literature. She argues that literature is a deconstruction, a displacement, of myth, and that it depicts a symbolic coming-of-age process rather than a strictly representational reflection of a concrete "reality." The texts are categorized by the degree to which the coming-of-age process is accomplished; the movement is from an initial condition of primary harmony (Arcadia, Paradise, Utopia) through different stages toward either a successful or a failed passage. This study encompasses a number of children's novels from different epochs and countries: Scandinavian, British, American, Canadian, Australian, South African, and East European |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-293) and indexes |
| Subject |
Children's literature -- History and criticism.
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Children -- Books and reading.
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Time in literature.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| LC no. |
99055126 |
| ISBN |
0810837137 (alk. paper) |
|
9780810837133 (alk. paper) |
|
0810849526 |
|
9780810849525 |
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