This has been bugging me for years. I've so far held off writing down my rant, but Tristram Hunt et al have pushed me over the edge. I figure that Hunt's suggestion that only select final year undergrads should be allowed to use the British Library (i.e. over 21s) is a question of young people's access to knowledge, and so I'll blog about it here.
Continue reading "educational access and the frappuccino kids" »
A recent article in the Economist (April 5-11 2008) bemoans the decline of the picture book and the status of illustration generally in Britain, after the author's visit Bologna children's book fair. But the piece is concerned solely with fiction…
Continue reading "Non-fiction picture books ignored again" »
I saw an announcement for a kids 'green' book award, and it reminded me of an issue I've been thinking about for a while; namely a recent mini boom in kids eco-crit publishing.
There are some really interesting examples out there. Perhaps the most high-profile is the junior book version of An Inconvenient Truth. How's that for crossing media? Lecture to film to book, and adult to kid. There are also a growing range of guides to saving the world today, and don't get me started on the cultural politics of How To Turn Your Parents Green. There's a basic review of such literature published in Nature last December, and a run down of US equivalents can be found here.
There are tonnes of really interesting questions we could ask about these books and I could be all day writing this post. To start with a single point though, I wonder whether it is useful to class them as 'science' books?
There is a long tradition of children's nature guides, which I guess the non-fiction books could fit into. But there is both an analytical tone, and normative force, to these books which the more traditional 'spot the birdie' publications (rooted in Nature Study or similar) would shy away from. Are they politics then? Maybe. But they suggest themselves as factual information, as much as opinion; so are they science? In terms of the fiction and the fictionally-inclined (a lot are purposely in-between fact/ fiction boundaries), children's literature scholars have long argued pro-nature stories in kids SF generally paints science in a bad light, as if nature and science were somehow opposed. Personally, I think that axis is changing slightly, especially within steam-punkish forms of (tech)nostalgia and in some of the fantasy/science fiction genre fusions from writers like Eoin Colfer. Still, Noga might disagree!
Maybe the business of eco-crit for kids is its own small genre (or section of cross-genres). And I don't think we should get carried away assuming this is especially new - just looking back as far as the early 1990s, who remembers Captain Planet? Not to mention Nature Study (again), the Really Wild Show, David Bellamy...
Just a bit of eye candy to bridge the posting gap! It is Make's visit to the NYC Toy Fair 2008; follow the link for a great overview with emphasis on DIY/kits/make-it-yourself toy variety! Got this shot of the Tinkertoy from their post. It was hard to choose.
