The Courage to Imagine

Roni Natov is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA. A multi-award winning teacher and scholar, she is the founding editor of The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literature and her previous publications include The Poetics of Childhood (2005).

Acknowledgments

1. Landscapes of Childhood
Pastoral: the forest, the sky, and the river
Internal Landscapes, Private Spaces

2. The Construction of the Creative Child

3. The Freedom to Imagine: Childhood Creativity and Socialization in the Work of William Steig

4. Imagining Difference and Diversity
The Picture Book and Life Story
Difference and the Species
The Young Adult Novel and the Cultural “Other”

5. Re-Imagining Fear and Trauma
Bearing Witness
Art, Creativity, and Agency
Fear and Denial
The Role of Nature in Healing from Sexual Trauma
The Trauma of Death: the Ultimate Loss
Contextualizing Trauma: Beyond Individual Trauma
- The Culture of Bullying
- The Culture of Racism
- The Culture of Domestic Violence

6. New Heroes: New Visions of Childhood
Setting the Stage: Alice, Jim Hawkins, Huck, and Dorothy
New Heroes:
- Girl Power: Pippi and Matilda
- Children’s Ways of Knowing: Louise Erdrich’s Historical Fiction
- The Child Writer Hero: Mina
- Challenging Political and Social Institutions: King Matt and Totto-Chan
- Stories of Community: a New Heroic

7. Imagine Empathy: Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

8. New Ways of Imagining the Picture Book: States of Mind, States of Feeling
Shaun Tan
Brian Selznick
Peter Sis

Epilogue: Surviving Childhood

Notes
Works Consulted
Permissions
Index