Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels

by Roberta S. Trites

Overview

The Sleeping Beauty in Roberta Seelinger Trites' intriguing text is no silent snoozer passively waiting for Prince Charming to energize her life. Instead she wakes up all by herself and sets out to redefine the meaning of “happily ever after.” Trites investigates the many ways that Sleeping Beauty's newfound voice has joined other strong female voices in feminist children's novels to generate equal potentials for all children.

Waking Sleeping Beauty explores issues of voice in a wide range of children's novels, including books by Virginia Hamilton, Patricia MacLachlan, and Cynthia Voight as well as many multicultural and international books. Far from being a limiting genre that praises females at the expense of males, the feminist children's novel seeks to communicate an inclusive vision of politics, gender, age, race, and class. By revising former stereotypes of children's literature and replacing them with more complete images of females in children's books, Trites encourages those involved with children's literature—teachers, students, writers, publishers, critics, librarian, booksellers, and parents—to be aware of the myriad possibilities of feminist expression.

Roberta Trites focuses on the positive aspects of feminism: on the ways females interact through family and community relationships, on the ways females have revised patriarchal images, and on the ways female writers use fictional constructs to transmit their ideologies to readers. She thus provides a framework that allows everyone who enters a classroom with a children's book in hand to recognize and communicate—with an optimistic, reality-based sense of “happily ever after”—the politics and the potential of that book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587292392
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	06/01/1997
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	364 KB

About the Author

 Roberta Seelinger Trites is a professor of English at Illinois State University. The author of Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa, 2000), which won the 2002 Children’s Literature Association Book Award, and Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels (Iowa, 1997), which won an American Library Association Choice Award in 1997, she is currently president of the Children’s Literature Association.

Table of Contents

Table of contents: 

1. Defining the Feminist Children's Novel

2. Subverting Stereotypes: Rejecting Traditional Gender Roles

3. Subjectivity as a Gender Issue: Metaphors and Intertextuality

4. Transforming Feminine Silence: Pro/claiming Female Voices

5. Re/constructing the Female Writer: Subjectivity in the Feminist Kunstlerroman

6. Female Interdependency: Literal and Metaphoric Sisterhood

7. Refuting Freud: Mother/Daughter Relationships

8. Metafiction and the Politics of Identity: Narrativity, Subjectivity, and Community

9. Afterword: Feminist Pedagogy and Children's Literature