Aesthetic Approaches to Children's Literature: An Introduction - Paperback

by Maria Nikolajeva (Author)

This work provides students of children's literature with a comprehensible and easy-to-use analytical tool kit, showing through concrete demonstration how each tool might best be used to examine aesthetic rather than educational approaches to children's literature. Contemporary literary theories discussed include semiotics, hermeneutics, structuralism, narratology, psychoanalysis, reader-response, feminist, and postcolonial theory, each adjusted to suit the specifics of children's literature.

Author Biography

Maria Nikolajeva is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University (Sweden) and associate professor of comparative literature at Åbo Akademi University (Finland). She has been member of the North American Children's Literature Association since 1985 and has served on its International Committee. She is also the author of From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children's Literature (Scarecrow, 2000) and The Rhetoric of Character in Children's Literature (Scarecrow, 2002).