Download PDF by Christina Phillips-Mattson: Children's Literature Grows Up: Harry Potter and the

“Children understand so much now,” Peter Pan as soon as advised us. A century later, within the Age of knowledge, they understand much more. So shouldn’t their literature stand up to fulfill them? Isn’t it time for children’s literature to develop up?

First conceived as her doctoral dissertation at Harvard college, with this broad exam of J. okay. Rowling’s sequence, Christina Phillips-Mattson argues that with the Harry Potter books we witness the start of a brand new period of children’s literature. Marking a departure from informal handbooks to the Harry Potter sequence, Phillips-Mattson presents the reader with a scholarly exam of Rowling’s novels—as good as different modern fictions for kids by means of such novelists as Philip Pullman, Lemony Snicket, Catherynne Valente, and Neil Gaiman—that is additionally exciting and obtainable.

In order to illustrate that modern fictions for kids are as complicated, multifaceted, and valuable of great educational inquiry as grownup literature, Phillips-Mattson takes the reader on an exhilarating trip via a hugely distinctive heritage of children’s literature and exhibits us how Rowling’s novels belong to a wealthy and sundry literary culture via putting Harry Potter along Greek mythology, vintage fairy stories, Golden Age texts like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, Jane Austen’s Emma and satisfaction and Prejudice, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury stories. utilizing the feedback of Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, Phillips-Mattson responds to Rowling’s detractors and offers facts of Rowling’s stylistic sophistication and intricate narrative constitution that underwrite the believability of her characters and her fictional global. an interesting, thought-provoking learn for students, lecturers, common readers of children’s literature, and Harry Potter fans, Children’s Literature Grows Up contains attention-grabbing new study on spell language, intertextuality, ethical supplier, and mental realism.