Animality and Children's Literature and Film - (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature) by A Ratelle (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Over the past decade, animal/child relations have become the central focus of children's and young adult studies. Scholars to date, however, have continued to read the animal as a symbol of the human, or as a medium authors have used for didactic ends. This common assumption has resulted in framework that has ignored the rights and agency of not only animals, but children themselves. Children are asked both implicitly and explicitly to identify with animals, but then to position themselves as distinctly human through the mode of their interactions with both lived animals and those depicted in literature and film. By examining culturally significant and widely popular works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to configure human identity. Animality and Children's Literature and Film explores the question of identity formation - child/adult, animal/human - and investigates the overlapping, double-sided rhetorics addressing children, childhood and animals. In her analysis, Amy Ratelle draws upon popular and beloved children's texts, from Black Beauty and Charlotte's Web to contemporary films to reflect on the ways in which literature geared toward a child audience reflects and contributes to the cultural tensions created by the oscillation between upholding and undermining the divisions between the human and the animal"--

Book Synopsis

Examining culturally significant works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to this end.

Review Quotes

"Ratelle's book is the first comprehensive study of animals and the ways in which their narrative construction can offer revealing insights into human life and society. ... A significant achievement of Animality and Children's Literature and Film is that it sheds much-needed light on a topic that has so far evaded critical attention and will hopefully pave the way for more studies in the future." (Victoria Flanagan, International Research in Children's Literature, Vol. 9 (1), July, 2016)

"Ratelle's work is highly lucid, elegantly written, and that it offers a source of intrigu-ing examples and compassionate analyses and deconstructions of the animal-human divide in literary and cinematic classics ... . Amy Ratelle's valuable study compellingly excavates this historical development, but above all it demonstrates how literature and film for children havebeen and still are central to it." (Pia Maria Ahlbäck, Journal of Childrens Literature Research, Vol. 38, 2015)

About the Author

Amy Ratelle is currently the Research Coordinator for the Semaphore Research Cluster on Mobile and Pervasive Computing, at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is also a Co-Investigator at Ryerson University's Children's Literature Archive. She has degrees in Film Studies from Ryerson University (BFA), and Carleton University (MA).