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Children, Literature, and the Bomb

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Albert E. Stone
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Extract

If hiroshima as fact and metaphor marks a turning point of modern secular and spiritual history, what has this fact meant to American children and youth? The thinkable event with the unthinkable implications has, for four decades and more, offered unique challenges and opportunities to all sorts of writers working in popular and esoteric forms with adult audiences. One of the least esoteric but most neglected of these literary forms is children's books, written and illustrated, for the very young and for adolescents. As with works for adults, writings for children are rich sources of cultural information on and attitudes about the nuclear age. They create, vicariously but affectively, informative and imaginative encounters with earthshaking events and their aftershocks long antedating young consciousnesses but present in children's lives as adult conversations, media messsages, and significant silences. Such books often build early imaginal memories on which adult thought and feeling about the Bomb are deeply based.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 19 , October 1994 , pp. 189 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

NOTES

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