“ A Story About Stories”: Rethinking Childhood and Children’s Literature in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Horng, Woan-Jiun
Abstract
Abstract
In this thesis, I plan to discuss Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001), an animal fantasy aimed at a child audience. Pratchett is a well-known writer of comic fantasy, and he has been hailed as a keen satirist. Consistent with Pratchett’s tendency to satirize established concepts and conventions, The Amazing Maurice targets the very genre it belongs to: children’s literature. Therefore, in this paper, I will examine how in the novel, Pratchett critiques and subverts of three aspects of the tradition of children’s literature: the first is Pratchett’s subversion of the representation of childhood in children’s animal fantasy, the second is Pratchett’s use of literary nonsense to reveal the artificiality of language and literary conventions in children’s literature, and the third is Pratchett’s exploration of the process of children’s reading and storytelling.
My discussions in the thesis are based on the premises of childhood studies, especially on its constructivist view of childhood. Construcvists scholars of childhood see childhood not as a biological, essential, and universal phenomenon, but as something constructed according to the historical and cultural context. With this concept in mind, I argue that Pratchett not only critiques the traditional construction of childhood in animal fantasy, but he also reconstructs children as being self-aware and capable of distinguishing between reality and the discourses people construct to structure it. Such a reconstruction of childhood allows Pratchett to justify presenting in a work of children’s literature a detached and critical view on the artificiality of language and literary conventions, as well as the process of children’s reading and storytelling.
Subjects
Terry Pratchett
children’s literature
childhood studies
animal fantasy
nonsense literature
reading
storytelling
Type
thesis
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