From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children's Poetry [Paperback]

The connection between childhood and poetry runs deep. And yet, poetry written for children has been neglected by criticism and resists prevailing theories of children's literature. Drawing on Walter Ong's theory of orality and on Iain McGilChrist's work on brain function, this book develops a new theoretical framework for the study of children's poetry.From Tongue to Textargues that the poem is a multimodal form that exists in the borderlands between the world of experience and the world of language and between orality and literacy  places that children themselves inhabit. Engaging with a wide range of poetry from nursery rhymes and Christina Rossetti to Michael Rosen and Carol Ann Duffy, Debbie Pullinger demonstrates how these 'tactful' works are shaped by the dynamics of orality and textuality.Debbie Pullingeris Research Associate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK.

In a brief closing section, Pullinger returns to the idea of tactful reading to argue that childrens poetry is best understood, not through arms-length theories, but through methodologies that are grounded in commitment, immersion, abandonment, trust & This is an ambitious conclusion to an ambitious study. Its success reflects the authors broad knowledge of contemporary British poetry as well as her willingness to draw from multiple academic perspectives. While the study of childrens literature is flourishing, it remains divided among the disciplines of education, literary criticism, history, and psychology.From Tongue to Textis itself an act of integrated reading that crosses disciplinary lines to make a strong case for the value and complexity of childrens poetry. -The Lion and the Unicorn

This book is a rather thrilling call to take poetry for children seriously  that is, not earnestly, but with an appetite to see its fullest implications. Unafraid to engage with theory, the argument is anything but cerebral. Rather, lf