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The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe Storytelling
So much has been said about Narnia already. Can I add a single thing to the corpus by blogging about storytelling techniques in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? Probably not, but my 10-year-old is studying this novel at school. She’s home sick today. I know the rest of her class is watching the […]
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Gross-out Children’s Books
What Are Gross-out Books? Gross-out books are frequently classed as ‘trash‘ and rarely win the big awards, perhaps partly because they sell so well. Gross-out books fall into the category of ‘carnivalesque‘. In academic terms, these gross-out books might be called ‘carnivalesque-grotesque’. Carnivalesque-grotesque narratives directly address the personal and sociocultural anxieties induced by knowledge of […]
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Harry The Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham Analysis
Harry The Dirty Dog (1956) is a good example of what Bakhtin termed ‘the material bodily principle‘ — the human body and its concerns with food and drink (commonly in hyperbolic forms of gluttony and deprivation), sexuality (usually displaced into questions of undress) and excretion (usually displaced into opportunities for getting dirty). This book is also […]