English Literature A '07

Name : Rizwan Darmawan

SID : 0708041

Class : Non-edu A 2007

Valuing Children’s Literature (based on Children’s Literature in the Elementary School by S. Huck, Susan Helper, and Janet Hickman)

According to Charlotte S. Huck, Susan Helper, and Janet Hickman in their book Children’s Literature in the Elementary School, Children’s books have to be referred to the way how children think. Children love imagination and joyful exuberance and they rarely think about their childhood. Children’s books should shows good things that happen in life. When a book close the door of hope, that means it has left the realm of childhood.

A good children’s literature must provides personal and educational value. There are six personal values; providing enjoyment, reinforcing narrative as a way of thinking, developing the imagination, offering vicarious experience, developing insight into human behavior, and presenting the universality of experience, whereas the educational value consists of language development, literature and reading, literature and writing, literature and critical thinking, literature across the curriculum, and introducing our literary heritage. Beside those two values, it also has to be added by traditional criteria (plot, setting, theme, characterization, style, point of view, and format) and special criteria (for instance, historical fiction needs added criteria for authenticity of setting).

Today, there are so many children reading adult’s literature. It is caused by the difference between children’s literature and adult’s literature is hard to find. In Children’s Literature in the Elementary School the writers note at least seven characteristics of those two kinds of literature.

Children’s Literature:

1. Reading by children

2. Limited by the experience and understanding of children

3. Does not show the feeling of nostalgia

4. Filled with childlike imagination and joyful exuberance

5. Showing good things that happen in life

6. Has the child’s eye at the center

7. Less frank

Adult’s Literature:

1. Reading by adults

2. Showing the emotion of an adult such as despair and cynicism

3. Sometimes it tells about life experience in the past

4. Less imagination

5. Might tell bad things in life

6. Seeing life like an adult does

7. Much frank

Here are some examples of children’s literature and adult’s literature:

Children’s literature:

• Adventure of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
• The Advebture of Tom Sawyer - MarkTwain
• Aesop's Fable - William Caxton
• Alice's Adventure in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol
• Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
• At the Back of North Wind - George McDonald

Adult’s literature:

• Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando
• George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
• DH Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Margaret Atwood -The Handmaid's Tale
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• Karl May – Winnetou