A Literature of Questions : Nonfiction for the Critical Child

Nonfiction books for children—from biographies and historical accounts of communities and events to works on science and social justice—have traditionally been most highly valued by educators and parents for their factual accuracy. This approach, however, misses an opportunity for young readers to participate in the generation and testing of information. In A Literature of Questions , Joe Sutliff Sanders offers an innovative theoretical approach to children’s nonfiction that goes beyond an assessment of a work’s veracity to develop a book’s equivocation as a basis for interpretation. Addressing how such works are either vulnerable or resistant to critical engagement, Sanders pays special attention to the attributes that nonfiction shares with other forms of literature, including voice and character, and those that play a special role in the genre, such as peritexts and photography. The first book-length work to theorize children’s nonfiction as nonfiction from a literary perspective, A Literature of Questions carefully explains how the genre speaks in unique ways to its young readers and how it invites them to the project of understanding. At the same time, it clearly lays out a series of techniques for analysis, which it then applies and nuances through extensive close readings and case studies of books published over the past half century, including recent award-winning books such as Tanya Lee Stone’s Almost Astronauts: Thirteen Women Who Dared to Dream and We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson. By looking at a text’s willingness or reluctance to let children interrogate its information and ideological context, Sanders reveals how nonfiction can make young readers part of the project of learning rather than passive recipients of information. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 INTRODUCTION: The Literary Study of Children’s introduction Nonfiction 10 1 Beyond Authority: Questioning the Literature of Facts 42 2 Voice and the Seamless Narrative of Knowledge 56 3 Nonfiction’s Unfinished Characters: The People Who Are Wrong, Flawed, and Incomplete 86 4 Inquiry at and in the Margins: How Peritexts Encourage Critical Reading 116 5 Seeing Photographs: Breaking the Authority of Nonfiction’s Favorite Medium 142 6 The Pursuit of Reliability in Almost Astronauts 186 7 The Empathy of Critical Engagement: Emotion and Sentimentality in Children’s Nonfiction 208 CONCLUSION: Critical Engagement’s Moral Imperative 232 Acknowledgments 242 Notes 246 Bibliography 256 Index 270 A 270 B 271 C 272 D 273 E 274 F 274 G 275 H 275 I 276 J 276 K 276 L 277 M 277 N 278 O 278 P 278 Q 279 R 279 S 280 T 281 U 282 V 282 W 282 Y 283 Z 283 In A Literature of Questions, Joe Sutliff Sanders offers an innovative approach to children's nonfiction that goes beyond an assessment of a work's veracity to develop a book's equivocation as a basis for interpretation. Addressing how such writing is either vulnerable or resistant to critical engagement, Sander pays attention to the attributes that nonfiction shares with other forms of literature, including voice and character, as well as special features of the genre, such as peritexts and photography. The first book to theorize children's nonfiction from a literary perspective, Sanders reveals how nonfiction can make young readers active learners rather than passive recipients of information. -- from back cover Nonfiction books for children - from biographies and historical accounts of communities and events to works on science and social justice - have traditionally been most highly valued by educators and parents for their factual accuracy. This approach, however, misses an opportunity for young readers to participate in the generation and testing of information. In 'A Literature of Questions', Joe Sutliff Sanders offers an innovative theoretical approach to children's nonfiction that goes beyond an assessment of a work's veracity to develop a book's equivocation as a basis for interpretation