MPhil in Education Critical Approaches to Children

This thematic route concentrates on a wide range of fiction for children, including the classics , texts for very young readers, international literature and novels for young adults. Close textual study and the history of children's literature are embedded within the route, on which students will also be expected to engage with some of the key debates in the field and to consider a range of theoretical perspectives from Romanticism to reader-response theory; gender issues to posthumanism; historical studies to new historicim; sociocultural viewpoints to semiotics as well as examining critically views of young readers and their reading choices. The course is organised to include four modules: Texts, Contexts and Childhood; Perspective on Children's Literature; Visual Texts; and Texts and Readers.