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In the late Qing Dynasty, religious periodicals by Western missionaries were made legal in China, and subsequently became an important manner of their missionary cause. Among them, Child's Paper 小孩月报 (1875–1881) by John Marshall Willoughby Farnham, a Protestant missionary from the United States, endeavoured to convert child readers by carrying children's stories of moral and emotional education. By concentrating on the educational elements of Child's Paper, this article inspects how conversion was achieved via the intertextual interpretation of Christian doctrines within these educational elements. Specifically, how the image of little Christians and urchins, respectively, represents salvation and redemption in Christian morals. This article holds that the missionaries' stress on the authority of Christian discourse in the education of Chinese children makes evident an increasing emphasis on the reformative effects of Christianity on Chinese children. Moreover, the conversion-education efforts by missionaries also construed helping Chinese children gain a cross-cultural perspective on Western religion, and arguably inspired later Chinese intellectuals' to create newspapers for the purpose of the pre-primary education of Chinese children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a multi-layered cross-genre corpus, annotated for coreference resolution, causal relations, and temporal relations, comprising a variety of genres, from news articles and children's stories to Reddit posts. Our results reveal distinctive genre-specific characteristics at each layer of annotation, highlighting unique challenges for both annotators and machine learning models. Children's stories feature linear temporal structures and clear causal relations. In contrast, news articles employ non-linear temporal sequences with minimal use of explicit causal or conditional language and few first-person pronouns. Lastly, Reddit posts are author-centered explanations of ongoing situations, with occasional meta-textual reference. Our annotation schemes are adapted from existing work to better suit a broader range of text types. We argue that our multi-layered cross-genre corpus not only reveals genre-specific semantic characteristics but also indicates a rich contextual interplay between the various layers of semantic information. Our MLCG corpus is shared under the open-source Apache 2.0 license. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 1952 essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children", C. S. Lewis discusses three approaches to writing children's literature and defends "that particular type of children's story which is dearest to my own taste, the fantasy or fairy tale" from the charge that it is "childish". In this paper, I define Christian apologetics as "the art and science of persuasively communicating and advocating Christian spirituality across spiritualties, through the responsible use of rhetoric, as being objectively beautiful, good and true/reasonable" and see how Lewis' advice about the rhetoric of children's stories can be generalized and applied to the discipline of Christian apologetics. In particular, many atheists charge Christian Spirituality with being childish. For example, British atheist Richard Dawkins says that religious people "have their Bronze Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking" (Dawkins, Scientific American). Describing his own childhood, Dawkins says: "I think I did believe it up to the age of eight or nine, when preachers said if you really, really pray for something it can happen. Even moving mountains, I believed it could really happen... I grew up. I put away childish things." (Dawkins, "Claims Fairy Tales Are Harmful To Children") In this paper I explore how the dialectical moves made by Lewis in "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" can shape a rational response to such rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose to investigate one common adult representation of childhood that will serve both to reflect on and to problematize current and varied representations. As such, our object of study will always be a representation and not a substantialist definition. We propose to analyze the adult concept "child" from a critical perspective by reviewing it through a historical lens--that is, as it is expressed in the political and educational world of 19th century Chile, which, in turn, we can glimpse in the historical writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. To carry out this journey, we propose three guiding thematic axes: 1) how all school apparatuses embody, configure and assume a certain identifiable representation of "child' and childhood; 2) an analysis of the characteristics and objectives of the 19th century Chilean school apparatus, particularly in its function as a government device, or dispositif; 3) just how that dispositif becomes visible to inquiry in the historical record, particularly in what it can reveal to us about the image or images of childhood held by adults. To be understood by adults as a boy or a girl in Chile during that period is communicated in the historical record through a myriad of diverse sources, each requiring consideration in its context. Magazines, syllabaries, school textbooks and children's stories configure different perspectives on and attitudes toward childhood, which in turn are associated with the social origin of these documents and the purposes they embody. The images, ideas and signs of interaction that appear in these school documents act cumulatively to reveal a cultural image of "child" and aid us in understanding the political and socio-cultural significance attributed to that period in the human life-cycle. And while we cannot claim to have identified how all adults of 19th century Chile understood and represented childhood, such documents do offer insights into the beliefs and assumptions of the political and ruling classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the role of anthropomorphism in TV cartoons, considering how it works to uphold gender stereotypes in children's stories. Instead of neutralizing problematic gender issues, anthropomorphism pedagogically reproduces interpretation models concerning what it means to "be a woman." To do so, the article discusses the role of anthropomorphism in TV cartoons and then analyzes the construction of characters from PAW Patrol, which, in Brazil, underwent a temporary change of subtitles that changed the genre of two of its six protagonists. It looks into two specific episodes: "Pups Fall Festival" and "Pups Save the Sea Turtles," which first aired in 2015, but were redubbed due to changes in voice actors. The text also analyzes the comments available on the website Reclame Aqui regarding the season. Technical elements (colors, shape, subtitles), together with the characters' behavior, express fundamental aspects for understanding current gender roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates, identifies and analyses the use of fantasy by children's writers. Through the use of content analysis tool under the guidelines provided by Bormann's Fantasy Theme Theory, literary devices used by children's writers in relation to fantasy were identified and analysed. The theory stipulates that sharing of group fantasies creates symbolic convergence. Four tenets of the theory were used to analyse the structure and significance of fantasy in Nyambura Mpesha's children's stories which were published between the years 1997-2005. To achieve this, four selected Kiswahili short stories by the author were studied and analysed. Aspects of literature used by writers in the structuring of fantasy were spelt out. The data was analysed qualitatively. The study highlighted the elements of fantasy and showed how authors entertain and educate children through literary works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the pedagogical experience conducted during 2011-2012 by the author at the Ghent University (Belgium), in which he tried to recover the historical memory through oral history teaching. The search and document analysis in Belgian correspondence files, photographs and drawings, and the use of interviews and life stories of «children» exiled in Ghent during the Spanish Civil War, are the sources used for the study of these childhood stories. This is a historical research shared with students of Pedagogische Wetenschappen (Educational Sciences) that became a real learning experience of historical and educational learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of children's stories share the assumption that stories are told to children to influence their behavior. This paper explores how the analysis of stories can provide insight into social strategies used by people interacting within their cultural context. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, we created multiple versions of an original children's story to explore attitudes of college students toward the form of social interaction known as reciprocal altruism. Some versions portrayed the protagonist of the story as following a tit-for-tat strategy, while in other versions the protagonist was altruistic toward all the other characters regardless of their past behavior. Subjects read one of the versions and rated it in terms of how likely they would be to read it to a child of the appropriate age. The highest rated version involved the protagonist being altruistic even to characters that had cheated in the past. We discuss this finding and suggest future applications of this methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent sociological accounts of children's literature which claim to offer the insights of poststructuralism have in fact much in common with earlier sociological approaches. Both neglect the central role of the relationship between children's fantasies and the literatures they seem to enjoy. This paper, which uses arguments from the Freudian story of sexual difference, offers a preliminary study of two kinds of British comics aimed at girls and at boys. It draws attention to changes that have occurred since a key Lacanian analysis of some girls' comics was published over 10 years ago. It suggests the need for preparatory descriptive accounts and for the importance of developing theories to explain the hold of representations on the imaginations and desired of children so that we might better understand the tenacious hold of a 'sexist' semiology on their psyches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Unlike dogs and horses, who maintain "companion animal" moral status and protections from societal harms, pigs are increasingly being used in medical experimentation for human use, in spite of scientific validation of advanced porcine cognitive and social-emotional abilities (on a par with, if not greater than, other protected mammals). While animal ethicists apply philosophical paradigms in risk-benefit deliberations, this article challenges assumptions about societal/cultural norms of pig commodification and experimentation through application of a literary lens—specifically, how children's coming-of-age stories have demonstrated increased pig moral status vis-à-vis human–nonhuman animal relationships and understandings. Human society must revisit pronouncements of "having no other choice" when it comes to increased promotion and continued acceptance, of medical experimentation, and industrial commodification of pigs. Xenotransplantation trials are especially morally fraught due to the purposeful generation of human–nonhuman chimeras in efforts to produce human organs for transplantation. When considering that artistic and literary artifacts reflect the cultural views and mores of a particular time period, there is a significant misalignment between stories depicting increased moral status of pigs (e.g., vis-à-vis human-porcine relationships) and ongoing practices of pig consumption, commodification, and medical experimentation. In fact, there has been increased industrial farm meat production and biotechnological experimentation. Xenotransplantation trials, for example, are being heralded "the answer" to organ shortages needed for human transplantation, while significant ethical concerns persist. In this paper, I posit that literary reflections add a valuable dimension to animal ethics deliberations, providing a meta-narrative against which to assess normative practices. Beginning with synopses of three books: E.B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952), Robert Newton Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die (1972), and Paul Griffin's Saving Marty (2017), I illustrate a shifting moral status view of human–pig relationships. Next, I discuss personhood attributions through biological, philosophical, and legal frameworks; review benefits and risks of xenotransplantation; reflect on the moral status of non-human animals; and offer concluding thoughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]