Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-5ngxj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-04-22T08:09:46.744Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Autonomy and Authorship: Storytelling in Children's Picture Books

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Louise Collins
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Diana Tietjens Meyers and Margaret Urban Walker argue that women's autonomy is impaired by mainstream representations that offer us impoverished resources to tell our own stories. Mainstream picture books apprentice young readers in norms of representation. Two popular picture books about child storytellers present competing views of a child's authority to tell his or her own story. Hence, they offer rival models of the development of autonomy: neo-liberal versus relational. Feminist critics should attend to such implicit models and the hidden assumptions they represent in children's books.

Information

Type
Original Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 25 , Issue 1: Special Issue: FEAST I: Current Work in Feminist Ethics and Social Theory , Winter 2010 , pp. 174 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Baier, Annette. 1985. Cartesian persons. In Postures of the mind: Essays on mind and morals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 74–92.Google Scholar
Bennett, William. 1993. The book of virtues: A treasury of great moral stories. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Benson, Paul. 1990. Feminist second thoughts about free agency. Hypatia 5 (3): 47–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benson, Paul. 1994. Free agency and self worth. Journal of Philosophy 91 (12): 650–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brison, Susan J. 2003. Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Carroll, Noel. 1998. Art, narrative, and moral understanding. In Aesthetics and ethics: Essays at the intersection, ed. Levinson, Jerrold. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, pp. 26–160.Google Scholar
Commire, Anne, ed. 1983. Something about the author, Vol. 30. Detroit: Gale Research Company.Google Scholar
Davies, Bronwyn. 2003. Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender. rev. ed. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
Eaton, A.W. 2003. Where ethics and aesthetics meet: Titian's Rape of Europa. Hypatia 18 (4): 159–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eaton, A.W. 2007. A sensible antiporn feminism. Ethics 117 (4): 674–715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hedblad, Alan, ed. 1999. Something about the author, Vol. 102. Detroit: Gale.Google Scholar
Hooks, Bell. 2000. Feminism is for everyone. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, Judith. 1996. The philosopher's child. In Children's rights re‐visioned: Philosophical readings, ed. Ladd, Rosalind Ekman. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, pp. 15–28.Google Scholar
Hunt, Peter, ed. 1995. Children's literature: An illustrated history. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 26–160.Google Scholar
Johnson, Crockett. 1955. Harold and the purple crayon. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1964. Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. Trans. H. J. Paton. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Kennedy, David. 1995. Review of Gareth Matthews, The philosophy of childhood. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 12 (2): 41–4.Google Scholar
Lawson, Robert. 1940. They were strong and good. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Lionni, Leo. 1964. Tico and the golden wings. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Lionni, Leo. 1967. Swimmy. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1988. Francis Biddle's sister: Pornography, civil rights, and speech. In Feminism unmodified: Discourses on life and law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 163–97.Google Scholar
MacLeod, Anne Scott. 1995. Children's literature in America from the Puritan beginnings to 1870. In Children's literature: An illustrated history, ed. Hunt, Peter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 102–29.Google Scholar
Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 2002. Gender in the mirror: Cultural imagery and women's agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nel, Philip. 2001. Never overlook the art of the seemingly simple: Crockett Johnson and the politics of the purple crayon. In Children's Literature, Vol. 29. ed. Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox and Pfeiffer, Julie. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 142–74.Google Scholar
Nel, Philip. 2004. Crockett Johnson and the purple crayon. Comic Art 5:2–20.Google Scholar
Nel, Philip.The Crockett Johnson Homepage. Available at http://www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/purple/ (accessed May 28, 2008).Google Scholar
Nelson, Hilde Lindemann. 2001. Damaged identities, narrative repair. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Nodelman, Perry. 1988. Words about pictures: The narrative art of children's picture books. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Nodelman, Perry, and Reimer, Mavis. 2003. The pleasures of children's literature. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Paley, Vivian Gussin. 1997. The girl with the brown crayon: How children use stories to shape their lives. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pateman, Carole. 1988. The sexual contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline. 1984. The case of Peter Pan or, the impossibility of children's fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sendak, Maurice. 1963. Where the wild things are. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Sendak, Maurice. 1988. Caldecott and Co.: Notes on books and pictures. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Shel. 1964. The giving tree. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Silvey, Anita. 1995. Children's books and their creators: An invitation to the feast of twentieth‐century children's literature. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co.Google Scholar
Steig, William. 1965. Sylvester and the magic pebble. New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1992. Atomism. In Communitarianism and individualism, ed. Avinieri, Shlomo and De‐Shalit, Avner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 29–50.Google Scholar
Walker, Margaret Urban. 1998. Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
White, E.B. 1952. Charlotte's web. Illustrated by Garth Williams. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Williams, Vera B. 1986. Cherries and cherry pits. New York: Greenwillow Books.Google Scholar