childrens literature

Folklore, Learning and Literacies

The Annual Conference of the Folklore Society

Friday 24 to Sunday 26 April 2020, London

Lore is learning: folklore is a body of knowledge and a means of transmission. Vernacular knowledge, and vernacular transmission, each rooted in language.

Sherwood Anderson’s 1928 Tar: A Midwest Childhood opens with the title character remembering his childhood and acknowledging that he has, within this narrative, created his childhood midwestern hometown almost entirely from his imagination, “one place all his own, the product of his own fancy” (4). “To tell the truth, Tar was trying,” the narrator promises, “to get at something it was almost impossible to get at in the reality of life,” the inevitable changes that disrupt and discount the intertwined memories of childhood and place (7-8).

Call for Book Chapters on Mythological Equines in Children’s Literature

Vernon Press invites chapter proposals on the theme: Mythological Equines in Children’s Literature for an edited collection of the same name in the series Equine Creations: Imagining Horses in Literature and Film, edited by Rachel L. Carazo (Northwestern State University).

In this year of the centennial of women’s suffrage in the US, the Fuller and Alcott Societies invite your participation in the Thoreau Gathering (July 8-12, 2020 in Concord, MA).  Our focus will be on gender as part of the Gathering’s larger theme of “Thoreau and Diversity: People, Principles, Politics.”  What did Thoreau’s two most famous female contemporaries in the Concord circle have to say to him, to each other, or to their larger worlds about changing the legal and human status of women? 

I invite chapter proposals on Marguerite Henry’s Newbery-winning novel King of the Wind for the first in a series of edited collections about Henry’s individual works, edited by Rachel L. Carazo (Northwestern State University).

All areas of study, with a common goal of representing the cultural, social, philosophical, and material significance of King of the Wind are invited to participate.

While writing my graduate thesis, “Conflicting Views of Culture and Power: The Arab World in Marguerite Henry’s King of the Wind”, Dawn Heinecken also published an article about the absence of scholarship on Henry’s works. These proposed collections therefore seek to increase the scholarship available about Marguerite Henry.