Wonderland: 100 Years of Children's Literature

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label Diverse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Cristian Ion
From fairytales, fantasies and fables to adventure stories and nonsense rhymes, this course explores 100 years of children's literature from the 20th century to the present day.With active discussions and debates about the uses of children's literature, we will focus on modern and contemporary British prose authors, including J.M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, J. R. R. Tolkien, Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling, while acknowledging influential 18th and 19th century texts and the new genre of fan fiction.

As well as engaging and lively lectures and seminars, you will view original manuscripts in London's rich archives, visit museums, and investigate how the capital's sites and spaces have inspired the creation of imaginative worlds. The course will develop your knowledge of a variety of interpretative approaches, including psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender theory, narratology and new historicism.

You will also have the chance to devise and perform your own children's stories.Exploring a rich history of children's literature in the UK, you will grapple with questions of readership (who is children's literature for?), ideology, education, intertextuality, illustration, performance and adaptation. Adding a historical dimension, you will also explore how new technologies, war, political and cultural changes, environmental concerns, and modern/postmodern literary trends have impacted upon the writing and reading of stories.

Period
28-07-2014 - 15-08-2014 (3 weeks)

Target group
The course is not just for students of English literature and/or history but also for people with a scholarly interest in reading children's literature and/or a creative interest in writing children's literature.

Course aim
By the end of this course you will:

- Gain a breadth of knowledge of modern and contemporary British children's literature, and an ability to situate key texts within a historical context;

- Develop critical tools with which to interpret the literature;



- Attain greater sensitivity to the political and ethical issues at stake when reading and writing children's literature;

- Acquire a sense of the differences between the capacities of the media used in the composition of children's literature, and the ways in which they relate to one another: texts, images, sound, film and digital media;

- Gain experience of using museum archives, and of analysing museum collections.

- Gain awareness of the industries attached to children's literature, and the importance of the genre to London's cultural heritage.

Credits
0.0 ECTS credits

Course fee
GBP 1430: tuition fee only

Course leader
Joshua Davies

King's College London
Address: Strand, London
Postal code: WC2R 2LS
City: London
Country: United Kingdom
Website: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/summerschool
E-mail: summerschool@kcl.ac.uk
Phone: +44 20 7848 1533