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

Batman is a comic book superhero co-created by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger, who appears in publications by DC Comics. The character first appeared in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939. Batman's secret identity is Bruce Wayne, a wealthy industrialist, playboy, and philanthropist. Witnessing the murder of his parents as a child, Wayne trains himself both physically and intellectually and dons a bat-themed costume in order to fight crime. Batman operates in the fictional American Gotham City, assisted by various supporting characters including his sidekick Robin and his butler Alfred Pennyworth, and fights an assortment of villains influenced by the characters' roots in film and pulp magazines. Unlike most superheroes, he does not possess any superpowers; he makes use of intellect, detective skills, science and technology, wealth, physical prowess, and intimidation in his war on crime. Batman became a popular character soon after his introduction, and gained his own comic book title, Batman, in 1940. As the decades wore on, differing takes on the character emerged. The late 1960s Batman television series utilized a camp aesthetic associated with the character for years after the show ended. Various creators worked to return the character to his dark roots, culminating in the 1986 miniseries Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by writer-artist Frank Miller. The successes of director Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman and Christopher Nolan's 2005 reboot Batman Begins also helped to reignite popular interest in the character. A cultural icon, Batman has been licensed and adapted into a variety of media, from radio to television and film, and appears on a variety of merchandise sold all over the world.

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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.

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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

"Perhaps," she said, "to be able to learn things quickly isn't everything. To be kind is worth a great deal to other people."

— Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

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Selected images

Postal stamp of Russia celebrating children's books.
A late 18th-century reprint of Orbis Pictus by Comenius, the first children's picture book.
The New England Primer
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
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.
Roald Dahl
A Tagore illustration of a Hindu myth
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.
1900 edition of the controversial The Story of Little Black Sambo
Walter Crane's chromolithograph illustration for The Frog Prince, 1874.
J. K. Rowling, 2010

Did you know...

...that Polycarp was a fictional Cajun character who hosted a local children's TV program in south Louisiana (Louisiana pictured) and lived in the swamp?
...that Norwegian researchers published Gay Kids in November 2008 to educate children about homosexual love?
...that according to Street Gang, a discussion at a dinner party, hosted by Joan Ganz Cooney in 1966, led to the creation of the children's television show, Sesame Street?