Style articles from September 2001

Style archives from September 2001

Conventions of children's literature: then and now.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... As odd as it may seem, one of the most persistent questions posed by scholars of children's and young adult literature is what constitutes our field of inquiry. What exactly defines children's literature? What marks a work as specifically for...

Enfranchising the child: picture books, primacy, and discourse.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Imagine a discourse between the arts in which the conventions of what we might call "ordinary" cognition do not apply, on a site of intense lobbying neither tethered by history or cultural integrity, nor, frequently, concerned with social...

Partners in crime: E. Nesbit and the art of thieving.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... Catching a burglar in the act of creeping into her family's nursery, the youngest heroine of E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) "kn[ows] better" than to succumb to fear (192). For Jane, despite her youth, "had read a great many nice...

The changing aesthetics of character in children's fiction.
September 22, 2001... Character and characterization are such an obvious part of fiction that they are very seldom discussed in critical works. Despite the postmodern and poststructural denigration of characters, however, they are still central in fiction;...

Animal carnivals: a Bakhtinian reading of C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew and P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... In the past two decades, the work of Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has become increasingly important to the criticism of children's literature. Caryl Emerson, one of his translators and editors, argues that Westerners most admire Bakhtin's...

The Harry Potter novels as a test case for adolescent literature.
September 22, 2001... When I first read J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997), I did not understand its mass appeal. It is clever and charming, but it is also episodically plotted, relatively predictable, derivative of Baum, Lewis, and Dahl,...

Mel Glenn and Arnold Adoff: the poetics of power in the adolescent voice-lyric.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... In Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, Charles Altieri labels the most prevalent mode of adult poetry written today "the scenic style" (11). Altieri characterizes this mode, also called the poetics of "voice" or the...

"So stretched out huge in length": reading the extended simile.
September 22, 2001... One of the distinctive features of simile is that it can be extended beyond the dimensions of trope into the relatively autonomous mini-genre of its Homeric form. Thus, a study of the extended simile may offer some insights into the...

From invention to convention: a critical view of the evolution of the aside in French neoclassical drama.
September 22, 2001... 1 The first documented definition of the aside as a dramatic technique, and not just as an occasional stage direction, is usually credited to the French scholar Henri-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardiere, who in his 1640 book La Poetique, written...

Raymond carver's "epiphanic moments".
September 22, 2001... Criticism on Raymond Carver is marked by an astonishing absence of consensus. Indeed, like no other author of the so-called minimalist movement, Carver has been coopted by the various critical schools as a conveniently elastic foil to...

The whole story. (Review Essay).(Book Review)
September 22, 2001... Dianne L. Vipond, ed. Conversations with John Fowles. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. Pp. xix + 237. $45.00 cloth; $18.00 paper. Mark Currie. Postmodern Narrative Theory. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. Pp. vlii + 151. $19.95 paper. At...

Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2001... Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, eds. Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. ix + 231 pp. $57.50 cloth; $18.50 paper. Novel criticism went postal in the 1980s and 1990s....

New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2001... Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman, eds. New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. xiii + 398 pp. $73.50 cloth; $24.05 paper. Problems of narrative perspective have exercised theorists of narrative, not to...

Books Received.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2001... Benabou, Marcel. Dump This Book While You Still Can! Trans. Steven Rendall. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001. $50.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. Orig. pub. 1992. Berke, Nancy. Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Margaret Walker....