Browse Exhibits (6 total)
Agency, Violence, and Death in Interactive Children's Literature
This exhibit explores some of the interactive children’s books available in the Baldwin Library housed at the University of Florida, and focuses on how their interactive aspects affect the agency the child reader has while interacting with the chosen media. The exhibit is split into two main categories: ‘Subversive Movable Books’ consisting of ‘creepy’ children’s books with pop-ups, volvelles, transformations, and pull-tabs involving death and violence rather plainly, and ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Books’ with novels comprised of player-driven choices which shape the story, some which result in violent deaths of the reader. We focused on how death and violence were portrayed. With the movable books, death and violence were actions that the child reader could do, and as such death was treated with levity. With CYOA books death and violence were mostly actions that happened to the reader, and were used as deterrents from unwanted actions, but also had aspects of humor associated. Reflecting on the different types of interactive children’s books and the varying levels of agency granted to the reader, the division of power between the author and the child can vary. While the interactions in all of these books do grant some form of agency to the child, it doesn’t ultimately grant complete power to either the adult or the child. While viewing the exhibit, please reflect on how the interactivity of these books, and the type of interactivity associated with death and violence, can influence the child reader’s view and comfort with violence and death.
Cradle Near the Grave: Emotional Responses to Death
This is an exhibit about the affect of death through works of children's literature from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature at the University of Florida. Perceiving death can come with an array of different emotions. For children who are learning about and encountering death for the first time these emotions are highlighted. Both childhood and death cover discourses that carry tensions because of a societal view that children should be pure and innocent. When children experience and contemplate death – a concept and experience that society has proclaimed to be dark, forbidden, and impure – they push against societal doctrines. Emotions that children feel in the forbidden space of death then become another place for critical analysis. What are the emotions that children feel on the intersection of death and childhood? This exhibit ponders this question. In this exhibit we take on the task of analyzing the different emotions that children feel when they come into contact with death and metaphors for death. Grief and acceptance, fear and anxieties, and comfort and joy are emotional spaces that children find themselves in when confronted with death. These emotional spaces that reside in death are tools that give children (which are precious to society and should remain so) agency in a place that is forbidden and denied. The University of Florida Smathers library is home to the Baldwin special collections library. There the children’s archive allows for an in depth analysis of our themed exhibit. Texts from the Baldwin used to analyze these emotional experiences include Harry and Hopper, That Place, Just a Minute, If Nathan Were Here, My Father’s Arms are a Boat, and The Dark. These texts were chosen because they colorfully illustrate as well as narrate the emotions children feel when they come into contact with death.
Death in the Margins
This exhibit examines death and marginalization within children's literature available in the Baldwin Library at the University of Florida. It is broken down into four sections: Class, Race, Disability, and Gender. Within those categories the tropes and themes of death and marginalization are examined in both quantative and qualitative fashions, the goal of which is to show that patterns exist within the literature, as well as to explain why that may be.
Edward Gorey: Intended Audience and Frankness in Death
Edward Gorey, with his macabre and humorous take on death and children and the relationship between the two, is the center of this exhibit. Throughout his career, Gorey played with and subverted what defined children’s literature and picture books, pushing the boundaries that had been set in place by the industry as to what was appropriate topic matter for children. Gorey is always angling for an emotional response from both his child and adult readers, and death has been a taboo hot-button topic for the past century-and-a-half. Gorey’s absurd treatment of death is what lead to the creation of this exhibit. His darkly humorous writing and even more darkly humorous illustrations led us to thoroughly explore some of our favorites of his works and the blunt, irreverent way that he treats death. The works showcased in this exhibit include The Wuggly Ump, The Dwindling Party, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and The Fatal Lozenge, an Alphabet. These texts were chosen for their technical skill as well as the degrees to which they push the boundaries of the audience to which they are marketed.
Good Grief: Overcoming Mourning in Children's Literature
This exhibit takes a close look at child grief and the grieving process as seen in several children’s literature works. Specifically, this exhibit will introduce works from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature that surround the topics of pet death, adult death, and the experience of orphans following the death of their parents – focusing on these three areas help to demonstrate the ways literature changes to suit each circumstance and also show a progression of how grief is addressed in simple relationships between pets and children to more complex relationships between adults and children. The first section of the exhibit, “Encountering Death: Pet Death Literature,” largely focuses on the initial reactions of children to the idea of death, the role of adults in handling child grief, and the ways in which the grieving process can differ from among children. The second section, “Mourning the Dead: Adult Death in Children’s Literature,” addresses the depictions of grieving when an adult/parent dies in children's literature and connects it to further thematic suggestions. Lastly, “Moving On: Fostered Literature,” focuses on children that are deprived of their parent or parents by death, and how literature can subconsciously ease the emotional disturbances that accompany the grieving process. The books included in this exhibit show the therapeutic qualities of literature and its ability to comfort the grieving child, but they also consider the hidden messages that certain grieving stories may relay to young children. Visitors of this exhibit will be challenged to think about the positive and negative attributes that each work may display when addressing the area of grief and question the perception of grief throughout the stories presented. Visitors will also learn about the factors that affect a child’s understanding of death and the grieving process in children’s literature.
The Eternal Child: Creation of Fantastic Spaces
The figure of the eternal child presents a unique opportunity to examine the change in societal views on death and adult-child dynamics. We did this through examining this figure in various pieces of literature throughout different time periods, and we focused on the ways in which the eternal child aids in creating fantastic spaces. The creation of fantastic spaces was seen as a way of separating adult from child, but this usage became blurred in several of our texts. Through our studies, we saw a marked shift in values and interactions from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Beginning in our nineteenth century text, literature revealed a complete separation between childhood and adulthood through death. This death served to preserve a child in his/her purest form. The child remained in an idealized fantasy space, protecting him/her from the constraints and struggles that come with adulthood. However, our early twentieth century text showed increased concern for children’s wellbeing. The emergence of imaginary lands allowed children to escape the adult realm, suggesting a greater willingness of the adult to eternally separate from the child. Continuing further through this century, we find a bridge between ideas of the earlier centuries and our twenty-first century text. Imaginary lands continue to persist; however, the creation of this separate space is no longer the result of the eternal child. Instead, the eternal child functions to express idealized values for children and allows the fantasy space to continue after the child. In our twenty-first century texts, we saw decreased usage of the eternal child, but the rise of a temporary eternal child. This suggested a decreased ability for the adult to part from the child through death. Overall, this change in separation of the child and adult figures through time seems indicative of changing values towards death and the child figure.