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More Than Fairy Tales: The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Brilliance of Children’s Literature
C.S. Lewis, the author of the well-loved Chronicles of Narnia, once said that “a children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” There are books that we fall in love with during childhood, which, upon returning to, seem almost lifeless compared to the shining stories from our memories. Discovering that a book you once loved does not hold the same lustre it did for you as a child feels like shedding another layer of yourself as you grow further and further away from the person you used to be. Those books return to their shelves, and are forgotten in the passage…
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A Little Wonder for a Frantic Soul: Faye Hanson’s Picture Book “The Wonder”
After I read The Wonder, which is written and wonderfully (pun intended) illustrated by Faye Hanson, the word “wonder” has spiralled into a complex living, breathing creature which harbours unfathomable potential under its layers of fur.
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Betwixt and between psychoanalysis and liminal theory: A liminal approach to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
Within the liminal phase, Coraline finds herself in what Turner coins as “a ‘moment in and out of time’” (The Ritual Process 96), in which spatio-temporal boundaries and the constraints of state no longer apply when there are no boundaries or states to be had in the first place.
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Children’s Literature Isn’t Just for Kids
Confession time: I’ve read more Harry Potter books than I have Shakespeare dramas. Yes, I know, truly shameful stuff for an English Lit major. But despite my supposed status as an adult, I’m still a total sucker for children’s literature. Children’s literature is an expansive and flexible genre that can be prescribed to many different works. What counts as children’s lit depends on how you define the genre, and how you define “children” and “literature”. You could argue Harry Potter, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Coraline” fall under that category. And then you have outliers like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which for all purposes appears to be children’s literature…
