ERIC Number: EJ754664
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007
Pages: 19
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1468-7984
EISSN: N/A
Picturing Economic Childhoods: Agency, Inevitability and Social Class in Children's Picture Books
Saltmarsh, Sue
Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, v7 n1 p95-113 2007
This article considers ideological, pedagogical and constitutive functions of children's picture books, with particular emphasis on the ways in which texts construct children and childhood in economic terms. Through an analysis of Lauren Childs' "Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent" and Anthony Browne's "Voices in the Park", the article interrogates the ways in which these texts' depictions of individuals and families function to locate children and childhood as central to notions of individual, family and social economies. Drawing on insights from feminist poststructuralist research concerned with the textual production of gendered subjectivities, I consider how gendered notions of childhood agency and the inevitability of social class location are implicated in the production of subject positions that are defined by the navigation of socioeconomic circumstances. The argument is made that the subjective, relational, and social processes associated with picture book reading map onto and (re)produce discourses of children and childhood as explicitly economic categories.
Descriptors: Social Class, Picture Books, Emergent Literacy, Childrens Literature, Textbook Evaluation, Textbook Standards, Content Analysis, Reader Text Relationship, Literary Criticism, Ideology, Consumer Economics, Social Sciences
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Early Childhood Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A