1st Edition

The Embodied Child Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture

Edited By Roxanne Harde, Lydia Kokkola Copyright 2018
    294 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    294 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    Acknowledgements

    The Embodied Child: An Introduction

    Lydia Kokkola

    Chapter 1. Anne’s Body Has a Mind (and a Soul) of Its Own: Embodiment and the Cartesian Legacy in Anne of Green Gables

    Janet Wesselius

    Section 1: Politicizations

    Chapter 2. Learning Not to Hate What We Are: Black Power, Literature, and the Black Child

    Karen Sands-O’Connor

    Chapter 3. "It’s my skin that’s paid most dearly": Katniss Everdeen and/as the Appalachian Body

    Roxanne Harde

    Chapter 4. Invisibility and (Dis)Embodiment in Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours

    Heather Braun

    Chapter 5. From the Kitchen to the Edges: The Politics of Hair in African American Children’s Picture Books

    Michelle Martin and Rachelle Washington

    Section 2: Corporealities

    Chapter 6. Disciplining Normalcy: What Katy Did and Nineteenth-Century Female Bodies

    Julie Pfeiffer and Darla Schumm

    Chapter 7. Embodying the Healthy, Charitable Child in the Junior Red Cross

    Kristine Moruzi

    Chapter 8. Liberty in the Age of Eugenics: Non-normative Bodies in Fabian Socialist Children’s Fiction

    Amanda Hollander

    Section 3: Reading Bodies

    Chapter 9. Embodied Readings of Blackfoot Place and Identity

    Erin Spring

    Chapter 10. The Flourishing Child: Representations of Embodied Wellbeing in Contemporary Picturebooks

    Adrielle Britten

    Chapter 11. The Child’s Reading Body

    Margaret Mackey

    Chapter 12. Hands on Reading: The Body, the Brain and the Book

    Lydia Kokkola

    Section 4: Commodifications

    Chapter 13. "Little cooks": Food and the Disciplined Body in Nineteenth-Century Stories for Girls

    Samantha Christensen and Roxanne Harde

    Chapter 14. Break Dancing: Reading the Ballerina in To Dance

    Jennifer Miskec

    Chapter 15. Embodied Performances by Lesbian Cheerleaders and Dancers in Glee and Leading Ladies

    Kate Norbury

    Chapter 16. A Dolla Makes Her Holla: The 21st -Century Sexualized, Knowing Child of Reality TV

    Lance Weldy

    Notes on Contributors

    Index

    Biography

    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.

    "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