Blog Post 2
For my second blog post I would like to discuss how children’s literature has evolved over time and why it did so. I think it is interesting to like into how things have evolved over time. Children’s books started to be published in the 17th century as this coincided with improved literacy rates. There have been many changes since that time. At the beginning “Most of the early books for children were didactic rather than artistic, meant to teach letter sounds and words or to improve the child’s moral and spiritual life.” There has been a gradual shift away from this type of book although there are still some out there. Another change that took place was the introduction of the picture books in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The last large change that has happened which we talked about in this class was the rise of literature that had to do with minorities. Before this happened, most children’s literature was seen from a mostly white prospective but the rise in minority literature allowed for people to read something different and be exposed to different cultures that they had not been exposed to before hand and it allows for topics that most people want to sweep under the rug to be discussed through a different medium. “We tend to see children’s literature as providing imaginative spaces for children, but are often short-sighted about the long and didactic history of the genre” which is why I find it so fascinating how the narrative of children’s literature has changed over time.