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…
Boys studying for GCSEs were more likely than girls to read print products such as comics, with 38% saying they read newspapers at least once a month compared with 30% of girls of the same age. The Guardian In illustrations, men typically read newspapers. Women either read magazines, or busy themselves serving breakfast. The following…
Dogs (and wolves and foxes) are popular choices for protagonists in this sort of story, I suppose because dogs are inclined to get themselves into trouble. (Our own border collie is no exception.) But here we have a wide selection of animal spanning the categories of birds, insects and lesser-known mammals. This kind of story…
‘Ludic’ or ‘absorbed’ reading is a virtually trance-like state in which readers willingly become oblivious to the world around them. The term as used here comes from Hugh Crago and Victor Nell. This is by no means a universal phenomenon — some readers read like this, others can’t. I have always felt that the art…
American methods of child-rearing were far more lenient than in Britain. Although American ladies’ journals began to promote slenderness and weight control for women in the 1890s, it wasn’t considered necessary to restrict the diet of children. Medical experts advised parents to make sure their children — particularly boys — were not underweight. Between-meal snacks…
How was childhood different in 18th and 19th century England? The following points describe middle and upper class family life at that time. Children of the rural labouring classes relied for reading material on cheap chapbooks Chapbooks were passed from family to family School library books were all of the “goody goody, Sunday-school prize type”…
Best Loved Books
Best Selling Children’s Books In Britain A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-pooh stories in the 1920s Peter Pan, which few children find readable today, was the first novel in which ordinary children enter a magic world and have an adventure there – something that readers of Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and His Dark…
chick-lit: a sometimes derogatory term for literature aimed at women, about single women in their twenties who are looking for love trick-lit: “Trick Lit is the term [Seth Godin invented] for a chick lit novel that pretends to be something else, hoping to rope people in with an interesting premise. 30 pages later, you discover…
Who Wants To Be A Poodle I Don’t is my favourite Lauren Child picture book. I can see it being used in the classroom to teach the concept of the leitmotif, among other things.
Layers and Merging Create lots of layers, periodically grouping and merging before the doc gets too cumbersome. When flattening, always ‘save as’ each version. Regular saving as (rather than just hitting save) will help you out if your software crashes and corrupts upon re-opening. You can flatten an old version and use as a reference…
Comedies have subcategories. One of those categories is the ‘transgression comedy’. The IT Crowd is a good example of a transgression comedy. About A Boy is another. Screenwriting experts usually give the example of Tootsie as the perfect example of this form, but I’m no particular fan of that film. It hasn’t aged well. It needs to be…
Combining my study of film, novels, children’s literature and lyrical short stories, I’ve come up with a nine part story structure. Other cultures historically carve up stories differently. For instance, East Asian audiences expect different things from story, and also differ in the amount of work they expect to put in. Not all stories are…
Ah, composition. How things are arranged on the page… or on the screen. I have written before about how picture books have a lot in common with film, and that study of one equals study of the other.