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Homelessness In Children’s Stories
Home-away-home. That’s the classic pattern of a children’s story. When we’re talking about stories in general, we might say the Odyssean Mythic pattern. A hero goes on a journey, meets a variety of opponents and allies along the way, then either returns home or finds a new one. Unfortunately, not all young people have a solid home base. Fortunately, there…
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Excess, Hyperbole and Pestilence In Illustration
We love stories of excess. examples of excess and visual hyperbole can be seen all across children’s literature. Literally any item can be turned into a visual gag by creating a large number of it.
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Creepiness In Art And Storytelling
We know when something is creepy. But how to define it? On The Nature of Creepiness is a study by McAndrew and Koehnke, who realised there had never been an empirical study on what humans find creepy. The results were ‘consistent with the hypothesis that being “creeped out” is an evolved adaptive emotional response to ambiguity about the presence of…
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Amatonormativity and Storytelling
There are far too many absolute cinnamon rolls who are unhappily alone, and waaaaaaaay too many selfish jerks celebrating golden wedding anniversaries and stinking up R/relationships to ever conclude that romantic love is distributed fairly according to merit. Captain Awkward I recently realized a that character in a show I like was changed to be in love with another character,…
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Women and Shoplifting in Fiction
Watch enough TV and you’ll likely draw the conclusion that women, especially housewives with significant personal problems commonly relieve psychological pain by shoplifting. It’s rare to find men shoplifting for the buzz. Also in fiction, teenage girls shoplift as a hazing ritual, and to own prized items (mostly body adornment items) they couldn’t otherwise afford. How does this compare to…
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Fully Anthropomorphised Cats In Art
Animals in picture books exist on a continuum between fully animal and fully human. To sit at the anthropomorphised end of that spectrum, the animal in question: wears clothes walks around on its hind legs talks displays human-like emotions lives in a house Beatrix Potter had a massive influence on illustrators all through the 20th century. Any animal dressed in…
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Symbolism Of The Colour Blue
In the “Odyssey”, Homer famously describes the “wine-dark sea.” Well, that’s poetic, isn’t it? But there’s a reason he didn’t just call the ocean blue. There was no term for ‘blue’ in Ancient Greece. People from antiquity didn’t consider blue a separate colour significant enough to name. It’s difficult to find a word that meant ‘blue’ way back in time.…
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The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame Analysis
A man in the shape of a Mole’s body feels a yearning which can only be fulfilled by entering the most transgressive parts of his own psychology, externally represented by the Wild Wood. On his journey, he meets other men, each driven by their own secret (and not so secret) passions.
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Types of Repetition in Storytelling
Repetition is sometimes accidental when it pops up in first drafts, but deliberate repetition is important when telling a story. The trick is knowing when to repeat yourself, and why you’re doing it.
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Making Use Of Cognitive Biases In Storytelling
Cognitive biases are at play when an audience interprets any work of art. Storytellers can make use of them, and regularly do.
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What do birds symbolize in literature?
Birds are much older than we are — living dinosaurs. Across cultures, birds function as smart collaborators with humans. We now know how smart (some) birds really are, but we have long had a sense of their canniness. The smartest bird in the world is currently thought to be the New Zealand Kea, which isn’t so great if you live in New Zealand and the kea is chewing the bits of rubber off your car.
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Dad Jokes, Puns and Related Words
PUNS Puns are often simple wordplay for comedic or rhetorical effect. DAD JOKES Puns are at the heart of “Dad Jokes”, though in Dad Jokes, the “dad” generally pretends he doesn’t understand the speaker’s intended meaning. The Dad feigns stupidity, the Victim knows he’s only playing stupid, and the joke succeeds if it elicits a groan from the Victim. The…
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Narrative Structure of a Miracle Story
LITTLEWOOD’S LAW Around once per month, each of us experiences a “miracle” (an event with odds of one in a million). Across the world miracles are literally happening all the time, but because there are so many of them we perceive them as mundane. @G_S_Bhogal No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle. Margaret Atwood DEFINITION…
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Fire in Art and Storytelling
Effulgent: (literary) shining brightly; radiant Lambent: (literary) (of light or fire) glowing, gleaming, or flickering with a soft radiance. Lucent: (literary) glowing with or giving off light. Refulgent: (literary) shining very brightly
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Zog by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Zog (2010) is a picture book by best-selling British team Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Zog is regularly held up as a great feminist story for young readers. Zog interests me as an excellent example of a children’s story which looks feminist at first glance.
