Instructions
Children’s Literature Essay Assignment
For this 5-7 page essay, you will use at least one scholarly article in order to forward an analysis of one of the texts we have read this semester. This means that your essay will do two things:
1. It will provide an overview of and a response to critical perspectives;
2. It will introduce your original analysis. That is, you will either agree with the critical assessments and add to them or disagree and forward alternative understandings.
We have practiced this in class by looking at fairytales and then examining critical responses, including Bettleheim’s reading of “Cinderella” and Banks’ reading of “Beauty and the Beast.”
Here are the tasks you must accomplish:
Select your text. You may write on one of the following;
“Cinderella”
“Beauty and the Beast”
“Little Red Riding Hood”
Alice in Wonderland
The Monster at the End of this Book
The Snowy Day
Knuffle Bunny
Harriet the Spy
The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig
The Big Bad Wolf in My House
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
Where the Wild Things Are (selected book)
Charlotte’s Web
The New Kid
Find critical articles on your text. We will have a class at the library in order to review how to do this;
You will probably choose to use one of the critical articles substantively in the essay. You might use another one only briefly (i.e. providing one quote or idea);
In the essay, introduce your critical article(s), summarizing the authors’ ideas;
Develop your own specific thesis and analyses, using quotations/specific references to the text(s).
selected article: (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41962015)
It might be a good idea to figure out what you want to say about your text before you even start looking for an article to use.
This is not a “research paper.” You should not be providing an overview of the author’s bio or the general reception of the text. The point of this paper is to demonstrate that you not only know how to analyze, but that you are also able to read and understand others’ interpretations as well as use them to supplement your own. Thus, you should either take a stand agreeing, disagreeing, or partly agreeing with the articles you select.
A few notes:
First, we always write about literature in the present tense.
Second, this paper should not rehash the readings we performed in class. Instead, you should develop an original and compelling thesis.
