Main description:

This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children's and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children's and young adult literature.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Children's Literature and the Affective Turn: Affect, Emotion, Empathy

Elizabeth Bullen, Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith

Section I: Affect and the Historical Child Reader

Chapter 2: From Virtue Ethics to Emotional Intelligence: Advice from Medieval Parents to Their Children

Juanita Feros Ruys

Chapter 3: Charity, Affect, and Waif Novels

Kristine Moruzi

Chapter 4: 'feeling is believing': Anna Sewell's Black Beauty and the Power of Emotion

Adrienne Gavin

Chapter 5: 'She cannot smile the smile that wells up from the heart': Beauty, Health and Emotion in Six to Sixteen and The Secret Garden

Michelle J. Smith

Section II: Theory of Mind

Chapter 6: Emotions and Ethics: Implications for Children's Literature

Maria Nikolajeva

Chapter 7: Simplified Minds: Empathy and Mind-modelling in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle

Lydia Kokkola

Chapter 8: 'Would I lie to you?': Unreliable Narration and the Emotional Rollercoast in Justine Larbalestier's Liar

Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer

Section III: Place and Space

Chapter 9: Spatialities of Emotion: Place and Non-Place in Children's Picture Books

Kerry Mallan

Chapter 10: Changing Minds and Hearts: Felt Theory and the Carceral Child in Indigenous Canadian Residential School Picture Books

Doris Wolf

Section IV: Emotions of Belonging

Chapter 11: 'Love: it will kill you and save you, both': Love as Rebellion in Recent YA Dystopian Trilogies

Debra Dudek

Chapter 12: At the Risk of 'Feeling Brown' in Gay YA: Machismo, Mariposas, and the Drag of Identity

Jon M. Wargo

Chapter 13: 'Conceal, Don't Feel': Disability, Monstrosity and the Freak in Edward Scissorhands and Frozen

Dylan Holdsworth