Portal:Children's literature

The Children's Literature Portal

Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. In addition to conventional literary genres, modern children's literature is classified by the intended age of the reader, ranging from picture books for the very young to young adult fiction for those nearing maturity.

Children's literature can be traced to traditional stories like fairy tales, which have only been identified as children's literature since the eighteenth century, and songs, part of a wider oral tradition, which adults shared with children before publishing existed. The development of early children's literature, before printing was invented, is difficult to trace. Even after printing became widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created for adults and later adapted for a younger audience. Since the fifteenth century much literature has been aimed specifically at children, often with a moral or religious message. Children's literature has been shaped by religious sources, like Puritan traditions, or by more philosophical and scientific standpoints with the influences of Charles Darwin and John Locke. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are known as the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" because many classic children's books were published then. (Full article...)

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To Kill a Mockingbird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful upon its release and has become a classic of modern American fiction. The novel is loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers, and a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explained the novel's impact by writing, "[i]n the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism." As a Southern Gothic novel and a bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence, but scholars have also noted that Lee addresses the issues of class tensions, courage and compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in English-speaking countries with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been the target of various campaigns to have it removed from public classrooms.

Selected picture

Aesop's fable of The Fox and the Grapes illustrated by Milo Winter (1919)

In this month

July – Carnegie Medal awarded to the best children's book published in the United Kingdom
July 2000 – A children's literature section is created on The New York Times bestseller list as a result of the popularity of Harry Potter
6 July 1942 – Anne Frank, whose diary became a popular children's work, went into hiding
9 July 1713 – Baptism of John Newbery (work pictured), the first publisher to make children's literature in Britain successful
14 July 1890 – Death of Dhan Gopal Mukerji, whose book Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon won the Newbery Medal in 1928

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Literature • Books • Novels

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Children's literature

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Artemis Fowl • Discworld • Fablehaven • Harry Potter • Inheritance Cycle • Lemony Snicket • Redwall • Oz

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Selected biography

Michael Chabon is a 20th-century American author and "one of the most celebrated writers of his generation," according to the The Virginia Quarterly Review. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when Chabon was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a critically acclaimed novel that The New York Review of Books called his magnum opus; it received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His most recent novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo, Sidewise, and Nebula awards. His work is characterized by complex language, frequent use of metaphor, and an extensive vocabulary, along with numerous recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.

Did you know...

...that linguist Carol Chomsky (pictured) developed the technique of repeated reading, in which children gain fluency by reading along with a recording of a text until they can do so on their own?
...that Ebba Haslund's adolescence novel Nothing Happened was virtually ignored by the press when it was first issued in Norwegian in 1948, but was later regarded as one of her most important books?
... that English dramatist Edward Rose published The Rose Reader, "a new way of teaching to read," that only used words that were spelled as they sounded?

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Children's literature and Young adult literature

Children's literature: Book talk • Children's literature criticism • Children's literature periodicals • International Children's Digital Library • Native Americans in children's literature

Young adult literature: Gay teen fiction • Lesbian teen fiction • List of young adult authors • Young Adult Library Services Association

Associations and awards: Children's Book Council of Australia • CBCA book awards • Governor General's Literary Award for Children's Literature and Illustration • IBBY Canada • American Library Association • Association for Library Service to Children • Newbery Medal • Caldecott Medal • Golden Kite Award • Ezra Jack Keats Book Award • SCBWI • Sibert Medal • Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal • Batchelder Award • Coretta Scott King Award • Belpre Medal • Carnegie Medal • Kate Greenaway Medal • Nestlé Smarties Book Prize • Guardian Award • Hans Christian Andersen Award • Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award • Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators

Lists: List of children's classic books • List of children's literature authors • List of children's non-fiction writers • List of fairy tales • List of illustrators • List of publishers of children's books

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