'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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Contents indexed selectively.
'Books with evil children as main protagonists can be disturbing, even more so when they appear in literature targeted at children and young adults. Very often these evil characters provide an emotional counterpoint to positively represented characters and generate antipathetic feelings. The main protagonist in Liar is Micah Wilkins, who lives with her family in New York. Told from her point of view, the story moves between the present, which focuses on her everyday life at high school, and the past, which relates Micah's family history and how she met her boyfriend. As with the acquisition of empathy, cognitive psychologists distinguish at least four developmental stages. Cognitive empathy is the capacity to understand another's mental state or perspective. Lying is closely connected to moral issues and ethical debates focusing on whether all lying is wrong, as in the case of prosocial lies, such as polite lies and white lies.'
'One of the key functions of literature and film is to represent and evoke emotion. Unlike conventional narrative approaches common to novels and films that rely on narrative action and dialogue to evoke emotion, picture books offer a different affect through minimal dialogue or description, aesthetics, and stylistic inventiveness. The concept of non-place offers an additional means for exploring how places and spaces in picture books embody some of the characteristics that Augé describes. Writers for young people often promote emotional engagement with characters and place by orienting their readers in both real and imaginary spaces, creating geographies of emotion.'
