Portal:Children's literature

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Introduction

A mother reads to her children, depicted by Jessie Willcox Smith in a cover illustration of a volume of fairy tales written in the mid to late 19th century.

Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are enjoyed by children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader.

Children's literature can be traced to stories and songs, part of a wider oral tradition, that 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. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is known as the "Golden Age of Children's Literature", because many classic children's books were published then.

Selected article

Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness is the only complete work of children's literature by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It begins with a frame story, which sketches out the education of two young girls by their maternal teacher Mrs. Mason, proceeded by a series of didactic tales. The book was first published by Joseph Johnson in 1788; a second, illustrated edition, with engravings by William Blake, was released in 1791 and remained in print for around a quarter of a century. Wollstonecraft employs the burgeoning genre of children's literature to promote the education of women and an emerging middle-class ideology. She argues that women can be rational adults if they are educated properly as children (not a widely-held belief in the 18th century) and contends that the nascent middle-class ethos is superior to the court culture represented by fairy tales and to the values of chance and luck found in chapbook stories for the poor.

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Selected biography

Terry Pratchett is an English novelist, known for his frequently comical work in the fantasy genre. He is best known for his popular and long-running Discworld series of comic fantasy novels. Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971, and since his first Discworld novel (The Colour of Magic) was published in 1983, he has written two books a year on average. Pratchett is also known for close collaboration on adaptations of his books. Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s, and as of December 2007 has sold more than 55 million books worldwide, with translations made into 36 languages. He is currently the second most-read writer in the UK, and seventh most-read non-US author in the US. In 2001 he won the Carnegie Medal for his children's novel The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents.

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In this month

4 January 1705 – Death of Madame d'Aulnoy (pictured), who invented the term contes de fée (fairy tale)
12 January – Japanese anime series The Story of Pollyanna, Girl of Love, based on Eleanor H. Porter's 1913 novel Pollyanna, begins airing on Fuji TV
14 January 1886 – Birth of Hugh Lofting, author of the Doctor Dolittle books
25 January 1885 – Birth of Hakushū Kitahara, a popular Japanese poet who collected nursery rhymes
30 January 1977 – The first episode of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries airs on ABC, featuring teenage detectives Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys

More anniversaries...

Selected quote

Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds.Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that. So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the pea was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it. There, that is a true story.

— Hans Christian Andersen, The Princess and the Pea

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Selected images

A mother reads to her children, depicted by Jessie Willcox Smith in a cover illustration of a volume of fairy tales written in the mid to late 19th century.
The Story of Mankind (1921) by Hendrik van Loon, 1st Newbery Award winner
Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm (left) and Jakob Grimm (right) from an 1855 painting by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann
Postal stamp of Russia celebrating children's books.
A Tagore illustration of a Hindu myth
1900 edition of the controversial The Story of Little Black Sambo
The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) is a canonical piece of children's literature and one of the best-selling books ever published.
An early Mexican hornbook pictured in Tuer's History of the Horn-Book, 1896.
Walter Crane's chromolithograph illustration for The Frog Prince, 1874.
Roald Dahl
J. K. Rowling, 2010
The New England Primer
A late 18th-century reprint of Orbis Pictus by Comenius, the first children's picture book.

Did you know...

...that Pigeon Post (pictured), winner of the first ever Carnegie Medal for children's literature, is the only Swallows and Amazons book that does not feature some sort of sailing adventure?
...that Polly Horvath's award-winning 2001 children's novel Everything on a Waffle tells the story of Primrose Squarp, an 11-year old girl whose parents are lost in a typhoon?
... that children's book author and illustrator Christopher Manson uses traditional hand tools to create the pine woodcuts that decorate his books?