The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture (Children’s Literature and Culture (Hardcover))

Product Description

The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture brings together essays that offer compelling analyses of children’s bodies as they read and are read, as they interact with literature and other cultural artifacts, and as they are constructed in literature and popular culture. The chapters examine the ideology behind the cultural constructions of the child’s body and the impact they have on society, and how the child’s body becomes a carrier of cultural ideology within the cultural imagination. They also consider the portrayal of children’s bodies in terms of the seeming dichotomies between healthy-vs-unhealthy bodies as well as able-bodied-vs-disabled, and examines flesh-and-blood bodies that engage with literary texts and other media. The contributors bring perspectives from anthropology, communication, education, literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, physical education, and religious studies. With wide and astute coverage of disparate literary and cultural texts, and lively scholarly discussions in the introductions to the collection and to each section, this book makes a long-needed contribution to discussions of the body and the child.

Review

“Overall, the work presented in this volume provides readers with a wide range of perspectives and theories around the body and embodiment as it relates to the (mostly older) child in popular culture―offering scholars of child studies, children’s literature, and education a foundational collection through which to explore the interrelated, fluid boundaries of child, body, and text.”
Caroline Hamilton-McKenna, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

About the Author

Roxanne Harde is Professor of English and Associate Dean (Research) at the Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta.

Lydia Kokkola is Head of English and Education at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.