You're Only Young Twice: Children's Literature and Film - Hardcover

Morris, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252025326 ISBN 13: 9780252025327

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2000

Synopsis

Original and thought-provoking, You're Only Young Twice reveals the complexities that underlie even the sparest picture book text and the lessons that reside in even the most familiar family movie plots.

Moving from classic texts (The Secret Garden, Goodnight Moon) to ephemera (the Hardy Boys, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter series), from the printed page to the silver screen (Willie Wonka, Jumanji, 101 Dalmatians, Beethoven), Tim Morris employs his experience as a parent and teacher to interrogate children's culture and reveal its conflicting messages.

Books and films for children--favorites accepted as wholesome fare for impressionable young minds --do not always teach straightforward lessons. Instead, they reflect the anxieties of the times and the desires of adults. At the heart of many a children's classic lies power, often expressed through racism, sexism, or violence. Under Morris's gaze, revered animal stories like Black Beauty turn into litanies of abuse; fantasies of childhood like Big are revealed as patriarchal struggles.

You're Only Young Twice redirects the focus on children's literature, asking not "What messages should children receive?" but "What messages do adults actually send?" For example, Morris recounts his own childhood confusion upon viewing Peter Pan, with its queenish, inept pirate and a grown woman (Mary Martin) in tights who pretends to be a crowing boy.
Morris shatters our long-held assumptions and challenges our best intentions, demonstrating how children's literature and films lay bare a troubled and troubling worldview.

About this title

Review:

"[Morris] offers a series of pleasant, readable accounts of his encounters with such classics as Black Beauty, The Secret Garden, Jumanji and Peter Pan. Grounding his analyses in trips to the video store and reading aloud to his son, Morris makes the question of whether Dr. Seuss's 'oobleck' is really Lacan's objet petit a lot less scary than it sounds." -- Publisher's Weekly "Informed and entertaining." -- Lucy Rollin, South Carolina Review ADVANCE PRAISE "In a book as accessible as the literature and film he explores, Tim Morris journeys through secret gardens of high and low culture for kids. His witty, sensible blend of critical scholarship and personal observation gives us a fresh view of selected children's 'classics'--those narrative survivors that grownups sometimes call treasure and sometimes call trash." -- Betsy Hearne, author of Choosing Books for Children and Seven Brave Women

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0252025326
• ISBN 13: 9780252025327
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200