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As the popularity of William Bennett's Book of Virtues attests, parents are turning more and more to children's literature to help instill values in their kids. Now, in this elegantly written and passionate book, Vigen Guroian provides the perfect complement to books such as Bennett's, offering ...

As the popularity of William Bennett's Book of Virtues attests, parents are turning more and more to children's literature to help instill values in their kids. Now, in this elegantly written and passionate book, Vigen Guroian provides the perfect complement to books such as Bennett's, offering parents and teachers a much-needed roadmap to some of our finest children's stories. Guroian illuminates the complex ways in which fairy tales and fantasies educate the moral imagination from earliest childhood. Examining a wide range of stories--from "Pinocchio" and "The Little Mermaid" to "Charlotte's Web," "The Velveteen Rabbit," "The Wind in the Willows," and the "Chronicles of Narnia"--he argues that these tales capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, in which characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong, or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds. Character and the virtues are depicted compellingly in these stories; the virtues glimmer as if in a looking glass, and wickedness and deception are unmasked of their pretensions to goodness and truth. We are made to face the unvarnished truth about ourselves, and what kind of people we want to be. Throughout, Guroian highlights the classical moral virtues such as courage, goodness, and honesty, especially as they are understood in traditional Christianity. At the same time, he so persuasively evokes the enduring charm of these familiar works that many readers will be inspired to reread their favorites and explore those they may have missed.

Children's literature has in the past received little serious linguistic analysis despite its widely acknowledged influence on the development and socialisation of young people. In this important and timely study Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer examine the work of some of our most popular ...

Children's literature has in the past received little serious linguistic analysis despite its widely acknowledged influence on the development and socialisation of young people. In this important and timely study Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer examine the work of some of our most popular children's writers from this and the last century in order to expose the persuasive power of language.At the heart of their analysis lie two surveys of children's favourite reading; the first carried out in 1888, the other a hundred years later by the authors themselves. By computer analysing the vocabulary and grammar patterns in the most popular children's text of each period, the authors examine the ways in which children's writers use language to inculcate a particular world view in the minds of the young readers. Looking at the work of nineteenth century English writers of juvenile fiction, Knowles and Malmkjaer expose the colonial and class assumptions on which the books were predicated. In the modern 'teen' novel and the work of Roald Dahl the authors find contemporary attempts to control children within socially established frameworks. Other authors considered include Oscar Wilde, E. Nesbit, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl .In providing tangible demonstrations of the ways in which writers employ the resources offered by language to reinforce cultural assumptions, Language and Control in Children's Literature is an invaluable book for anyone concerned with children and what they read, whether parent, teacher or student of language and literature.