Reviews for Modern American Poetry

The average rating for Modern American Poetry based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-30 00:00:00 Brett Nunley Quotes: Mystery in Children's Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural: an Introduction (Adrienne E. Gavin & Christopher Routledge) Perhaps because adulthood is a mystery To children and childhood has become a mystery to adults and neither can ever 'solve' the other state, mystery has a particularly strong presence in children's texts. Despite this presence, however, mystery has had surprisingly little critical attention paid to it in connection with children's literature; this book seeks to redress that lack by examining the ways in which mystery is used in children's literature (2). We see mystery writing as falling into two categories: the "rational" in which mysteries are solved to the satisfaction of a character's and/or reader's intellect, causing the mystery to disappear, and the "supernatural" in which mysteries are generally resolved to the satisfaction of a character's or reader's instincts and in which the mystery remains. Rational mysteries involve explanation of the mystery; supernatural mysteries involve acceptance of mystery as an inexplicable element of human life (2). Tom's Midnight Garden'becomes a catalyst for later children's fictions in which mystery becomes unsolvable. (4) *Nancy's Ancestors: the Mystery of Imaginative Female Power in The Secret Garden and A Little Princess A Little Princess and The Secret Garden provide an important backdrop for later novels with more transgressive heroines like Nancy Drew. The commonalities between these two sets of books suggest, first that Burnett's novels set the stage for later developments in the feminist undertones of girls' literature; second, that they support the possibility that encounters with mystery enable the development of a feminist viewpoint (33). As the eventual result of these imaginative acts, mysteries get resolved; more significantly, however, the imaginative process models an image of autonomy which may very well be what continues to draw young readers to modern-day mysteries or fantasy stories (34). The quest for authority and self-expression is inherently imbued with mystery for Burnett's heroines, simply because they are heroines instead of heroes. According to patriarchal assumptions of the time, the idea of agency for girls would be an oxymoron, a mystery without a solution. As Deborah Gorham tells us, Victorian notions of parenting dictated that boys should assert themselves while girls should remain passive (Victorian Girl, 75). Gorham also describes the Victorian system of child-rearing as dependent on organization and structure: 'the perception of the child as naturally sinful was nearly always accompanied by a belief that the patriarchal model for family organization was the only correct one. According to that model, a family functions properly only if it possesses a hierarchy of authority' (76). Girls received messages encouraging their subordination from widely differing sources. (35)

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-10 00:00:00 Patrick Silverthorne This collection of essays on the general topic of mystery in children's literature covers a wide variety of issues. The contributors are based in the US, the UK, and Australia and focus on English-language (or translated) texts, some for younger children, some for teens. The editors point out that the word "mystery" is more narrowly associated with detective fiction in US usage than elsewhere. Some of the essays do consider that meaning, especially in connection with the Nancy Drew series--along those lines, Troy Boone draws interesting parallels among Nancy Drew, the 1920s Girl Scout Handbook, and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Detective. Using the wider meaning, Valerie Krips considers how Philippa Pearce involves child characters in mysteries of the past in ways that confirm Pierre Nora's ideas about the breakdown of collective memory. Even more theoretically, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum discuss the "horror chronotope" in Australian children's fiction, seeing too little Australian content. There are other interesting essays as well, too many to mention here--