Babies In Literature

[Giraldo Allain]

Bythe time babies reach their first birthday, they will have learned all the sounds needed to speak their native language. The more stories you read aloud, the more words your baby will hear and the better they'll be able to talk.

Hearing words helps to build a rich network of words in a baby's brain. Kids whose parents talk and read to them often know more words by age 2 than children who have not been read to. And kids who are read to during their early years are more likely to learn to read at the right time.

Young babies may not know what the pictures in a book mean, but they can focus on them, especially faces, bright colors, and different patterns. When you read or sing lullabies and nursery rhymes, you can entertain and soothe your infant.

It's also good to read at other points in the day. Choose times when your baby is dry, fed, and alert. Books also come in handy when you're stuck waiting, so have some in the diaper bag to fill time sitting at the doctor's office or standing in line at the grocery store.

Books for babies should have simple, repetitive, and familiar text and clear pictures. During the first few months of life, your child just likes to hear your voice. So you can read almost anything, especially books with a sing-song or rhyming text. As your baby gets more interested in looking at things, choose books with simple pictures against solid backgrounds.

As your baby begins to grab, you can read vinyl or cloth books that have faces, bright colors, and shapes. When your baby begins to respond to what's inside the books, add board books with pictures of babies or familiar objects like toys. When your baby starts to do things like sit up in the bathtub or eat finger foods, find simple stories about daily routines like bedtime or bathtime. When your child starts talking, choose books that let babies repeat simple words or phrases.

One of the best ways to make sure that your little one grows up to be a reader is to have books around your house. When your baby is old enough to crawl over to a basket of toys and pick one out, make sure some books are in the mix.

Besides the books you own, you also can borrow from the library. Many libraries have story time for babies too. Don't forget to pick up a book for yourself while you're there. Reading for fun is another way you can be your baby's reading role model.

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The Children's Literature Research Collections, home of the Kerlan Collection, holds books, manuscripts, illustrations, comic books, story papers, and other materials related to the creation of historical and modern children's literature, including manuscripts and original artwork. Find information on upcoming Kerlan events on our events page.

Learn about the many exciting collections housed at the CLRC, including the world-famous flagship Kerlan Collection, the Hess Collection (containing story papers, dime novels, and pulps), the Borger Comic Book Collection, and others.

For more information on finding materials in the Children's Literature Research Collections, including a list of archival collection guides for materials held in the Kerlan Collection, visit the search our collections page.

The books of my childhood, though, kept the boundary between the material and the magical thin. Youth protected my credulity: my ability to believe in the seen and the unseen, in the world beyond the book and the world within the book. When I open those same books now, I believe all over again. I retreat through a portal into the unseen, I meet old friends, and I witness old wonders.

Childhood is guarded by the hope and audacity to believe in things which people, individual experience, and rationality will gradually make difficult to maintain. This willingness to believe is a way of seeing, which our society allows as long as we are young. It is an unbridled way of looking at the world which we are encouraged to recant as we mature.

Because God belongs to the immaterial, art has, by default, sustained my perception of the sacred unseen and the divine. Literature, museums, music, and the creative process have, as thin places, bridged my adult faith with the unbridled believing of my youth. They have formed the mason jars of my faith, preserving it after I began to believe critically.

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

Anastasia Hacopian is an American freelance journalist who followed love to the Netherlands ten years ago. She studied German language and literature in Berkeley and Berlin, where she finished her doctorate on Franz Kafka. She now writes for Dutch newspapers, Medium, and her website, anastasiahacopian.com about art, faith, multiculturalism, and motherhood. You can follow her on twitter at @ahacopian.

Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader, from picture books for the very young to young adult fiction.

Children's literature can be traced to traditional stories like fairy tales, that have only been identified as children's literature in the eighteenth century, and songs, part of a wider oral tradition, that adults shared with children before publishing existed. The development of early children's literature, before printing was invented, is difficult to trace. Even after printing became widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created for adults and later adapted for a younger audience. Since the fifteenth century much literature has been aimed specifically at children, often with a moral or religious message. Children's literature has been shaped by religious sources, like Puritan traditions, or by more philosophical and scientific standpoints with the influences of Charles Darwin and John Locke.[2] The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are known as the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" because many classic children's books were published then.

In the nineteenth century, a few children's titles became famous as classroom reading texts. Among these were the fables of Aesop and Jean de la Fontaine and Charles Perraults's 1697 Tales of Mother Goose.[20] The popularity of these texts led to the creation of a number of nineteenth-century fantasy and fairy tales for children which featured magic objects and talking animals.[20]

Another influence on this shift in attitudes came from Puritanism, which stressed the importance of individual salvation. Puritans were concerned with the spiritual welfare of their children, and there was a large growth in the publication of "good godly books" aimed squarely at children.[11] Some of the most popular works were by James Janeway, but the most enduring book from this movement, still read today, especially in modernised versions, is The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan.[21]

Hornbooks also appeared in England during this time, teaching children basic information such as the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer.[22] These were brought from England to the American colonies in the mid-seventeenth century.

The modern children's book emerged in mid-18th-century England.[26] A growing polite middle-class and the influence of Lockean theories of childhood innocence combined to create the beginnings of childhood as a concept. In an article for the British Library, professor MO Grenby writes, "in the 1740s, a cluster of London publishers began to produce new books designed to instruct and delight young readers. Thomas Boreman was one. Another was Mary Cooper, whose two-volume Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book (1744) is the first known nursery rhyme collection. But the most celebrated of these pioneers is John Newbery, whose first book for the entertainment of children was A Little Pretty Pocket-Book."[27]

In Switzerland, Johann David Wyss published The Swiss Family Robinson in 1812, with the aim of teaching children about family values, good husbandry, the uses of the natural world and self-reliance. The book became popular across Europe after it was translated into French by Isabelle de Montolieu.

E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" was published in 1816 in a German collection of stories for children, Kinder-Mrchen.[37] It is the first modern short story to introduce bizarre, odd and grotesque elements in children's literature and thereby anticipates Lewis Carroll's tale, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.[38] There are not only parallels concerning the content (the weird adventures of a young girl in a fantasy land), but also the origin of the tales as both are dedicated and given to a daughter of the author's friends.

Literature for children had developed as a separate category of literature especially in the Victorian era, with some works becoming internationally known, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Another classic of the period is Anna Sewell's animal novel Black Beauty (1877). At the end of the Victorian era and leading into the Edwardian era, author and illustrator Beatrix Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter went on to produce 23 children's books and become very wealthy. A pioneer of character merchandising, in 1903 she patented a Peter Rabbit doll, making Peter the first licensed character.[42][43] Michael O. Tunnell and James S. Jacobs, professors of children's literature at Brigham Young University, write, "Potter was the first to use pictures as well as words to tell the story, incorporating coloured illustration with text, page for page."[44]

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