Dissertations of Note
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Bade is concerned about literacy development among children who are just beginning to read, how to increase the time they spend with books, and how to improve their attitudes toward reading. She found that "the checkout process [at libraries] as well as choosing books provides young children with experiences that contribute to [their] motivation to develop into active, engaged or lifelong readers."
Having asked what fiction reading means to middle school boys, Bardsley finds that students view reading as an important ingredient of their being students. Unfortunately, what she also finds is that "school district policies, teachers' preferences, grading practices and outside commitments" all limited and put constraints on students' ability to read what they wanted to read, as well as when and how much.
Bereska asks whether or not there is a "crisis in masculinity" in contemporary young adult literature, and determines that the structure of books for adolescent males has not changed in the past fifty years. Its components, "emotional expression, aggression, collectivity, adventure, athleticism, morality, hierarchy, and competition-as well as the conditions within which masculinity is realized (embodiment, heterosexuality, and No Sissy Stuff), are stable in the novels" from 1940 to 1997.
In a dissertation that deals with Christina Rossetti, Jean Ingelow, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens, Brock-Servais takes issue with some of the "commonplaces" of Romantic literature in which childhood is seen as a "haven from the anxieties and appetites of adulthood." She believes that Victorians "only overtly" celebrated the potential freedoms of childhood in literature for adults. Her writers "all found ways of commenting on and sympathizing with the constraint of the impossible idealization of the child, and displaced the resulting complexities with the fairy realm."
Bunnell analyzes seven contemporary retellings of traditional folk tales in an effort to determine what stylistic and dictional choices authors make to create good literature. Her ultimate goal is "to guide teachers and others who share folk literature with children to identify quality folkloric material for use in the classroom and elsewhere."
Using Lukens's and Cline's A Critical Handbook of Literature for Young Adults as a model for evaluating plot, character, setting, point of view, style, tone, and theme, Chance asks, "What are the literary characteristics of young adult novels chosen and read by young adults?" She finds that "becoming self-aware and responsible" is the most common theme in young adult novels; that humor is present in more than half of them; that most novels are "character-driven;" that the majority have a serious tone; and that "the focus on character matches Carlsen's developmental stages as outlined in Books and the Teenage Reader 2d edition."
Churchill examines the work that modernist and "crossover" writers Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot did for children "in the context of nineteenth-and twentieth-century children's poetry and against the background of their writing for adults." Among other things, she found that "Robert's traditional pastoral, Eliot's mock heroic, and Stein's...
