Madeleine L’Engle and Children's Capacity to Handle "Darker Matters"

Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time shares many of my views on the value of unsettling elements in children's literature.

Notes

 "fear of trampling on someone else’s toes, that was, alas, the way of the world"
-Madeleine L’Engle

"point of this parable" (Illocution)
"We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them."
-Madeleine L’Engle

A good quote on censorship vs. discernment:
"The exercise of personal taste is not the same thing as imposing personal opinion."
-Madeleine L’Engle

"Fortunately, nobody ever told me that stories were untrue, or should be outgrown, and then as now they nourished me and kept me willing to ask the unanswerable questions."
-Madeleine L’Engle


Popova, Maria. "Dare to Disturb the Universe: Madeleine L’Engle on Creativity, Censorship, Writing, and the Duty of Children’s Books" Brain Pickings. n.p., Brain Pickings. n.p., Web. 19 Oct 2015. Web. 08 Aug 2016. https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/10/dare-to-be-creative-madeleine-l-engle/
(The Publication date is unlisted, but the web address suggests either April the 10th 2014 or October the 4th 2014)

Anti-Fairy Tales

"The anti-fairy tale has long existed as a shadow of the traditional fairy tale genre. First categorized as the ‘antimärchen’ in Andre Jolles’ seminal Einfache Formen (c.1930), the anti-tale was found to be contemporaneous with even the oldest known examples of fairy tale collections. Rarely an outward opposition to the traditional form itself, the anti-tale takes aspects of the fairy tale genre and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirizes elements of them to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. Red Riding Hood may elope with the wolf. Or Bluebeard’s wife is not interested in his secret chamber. Snow White’s stepmother gives her own account of events and Cinderella does not exactly find the prince charming."

http://www.sussexfolktalecentre.org/2010/06/30/anti-tales-the-uses-of-disenchantment-symposium/
22 essays on the use of  disenchantment
http://www.academia.edu/2574146/Anti_Tales_The_Uses_of_Disenchantment


System of classification for fairy-tales

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson_classification_systems

Piaget (Context)

Jean Piaget's Genetic Epistemology study played a big part in child psychology around the middle of the 20th century as a foundation for understanding the development of knowledge in children... Not sure how this relates yet, but his ideas influenced just about every aspect of child psychology, and I should be able to talk about if it comes up.

Piaget on Piaget
Wikipedia

Looking at Character Archetypes (Narrative/Social Context)

Looking at Character Archetypes
http://www.soulcraft.co/essays/the_12_common_archetypes.html
http://www.uiltexas.org/files/capitalconference/Twelve_Character_Archetypes.pdf