The Courage to Imagine: The Child Hero in Children's Literature [Paperback]

The act of imagining lies at the very heart of children's engagements with literature and with the plots and characters they encounter in their favorite stories.The Courage to Imagineis a landmark new study of that fundamental act of imagining. Roni Natov focuses on the ways in which children's imaginative engagement with the child hero figure can open them up to other people's experiences, developing empathy across lines of race, gender and sexuality, as well as helping them to confront and handle traumatic experience safely. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches from the psychological to the cultural and reading a multicultural spectrum of authors, including works by Maya Angelou, Louise Erdrich, Neil Gaiman and Brian Selznick, this is a groundbreaking examination of the nature of imagining for children and re-imagining for the adult writer and illustrator.Roni Natovis Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA. A multi-award winning teacher and scholar, she is the founding editor ofThe Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literatureand her previous publications includeThe Poetics of Childhood(2005).

Natov pulls from a variety of children's and young adult books, including Dahl'sMatilda, Myers'Monster, and Selznick'sThe Inventions of Hugo Cabret, to explore how diversity and difference, trauma, empathy, politics, and identity in literature can encourage young readers to engage with experiences both similar to and different from their own. The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Roni Natov'sThe Courage to Imagine: The Child Hero in Children's Literatureis a splendid study of the vital role imagination plays in contemporary international children's literature. Given the vast socio-political changes in childhood that often create anxiety and ambiguity, Natov argues that children need a serious literature that will encouragel3Æ