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Greenwell, Amanda M. The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature. Children’s Literature Association Series. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2024. Added by: joachim (2/13/25, 4:29 PM) Last edited by: joachim (2/13/25, 4:54 PM) |
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| Resource type: Book Language: en: English DOI: 10.2307/jj.23276103 ID no. (ISBN etc.): 9781496854544 BibTeX citation key: Greenwell2024 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: "American Born Chinese", Narratology, USA, Visual Culture, Yang. Gene Luen Creators: Greenwell Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi (Jackson) |
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The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, and more, Amanda M. Greenwell focuses on children and their literal acts of looking. Detailing how these acts of looking direct the reader, she posits that the sightlines of children serve as signals to renegotiate hegemonic ideologies of race, ethnicity, creed, class, and gender. In her analysis, Greenwell shows how acts of looking constitute a flexible and effective narrative strategy, capable of operating across multiple points of view, focalizations, audiences, and forms. Weaving together scholarship on the US child, visual culture studies, narrative theory, and other critical traditions, The Child Gaze explores the ways in which child acts of looking compel readers to look at and with a child character, whose gaze encourages critiques of privileged visions of national identity. Chapters investigate how child acts of looking allow texts to redraw circles of inclusion around the locus of the child gaze and mobilize childhood as a site of resistance. The powerful child gaze can thus disrupt dominant scripts of power, widening the lens through which belonging in the US can be understood. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Power and Possibilities of Centering Child Sight Lines Notes |