At Arm’s Length
158 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
4 diagrams
Paperback
Release Date:28 Jun 2021
ISBN:9781496834591
Hardcover
Release Date:28 Jun 2021
ISBN:9781496834584
At Arm’s Length
A Rhetoric of Character in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
By Mike Cadden
University Press of Mississippi
. provides a broad analysis of stories for the young child and young adult, in book, film, and television. Throughout, Cadden touches on important topics in children’s literature studies, including the role of safety in children’s media, as well as character in multicultural and diverse literature. In addition to treating “traditional” works, he analyzes special cases—forms, including picture books, verse novels, and graphic novels, and modes like comedy, romance, and tragedy.
The book is insightful and easy to read. Revisiting stories of childhood through Cadden's lens is exciting.
At Arm’s Length presents its central device of the dial of character modulation so persuasively and enjoyably that readers will find their fingers twitching to spin it themselves into a host of fruitful discussions of how we understand character in children’s and young adult literature.
Cadden's work provides a valuable structure for exploring issues central to the study of children’s and young adult literature: authorial power and ethical implications of representation. . . . Most rewardingly, Cadden succeeds in defining how character operates in children’s and young adult fiction in a way that sets it apart from other forms of literature.
In At Arm’s Length, Cadden has provided a strong, original work that will help scholars articulate with precision how authors manipulate distance in children’s texts. Cadden offers a useful tool for a close reading of characters as devices, a perspective sorely lacking in contemporary criticism in the field.
. and Teaching Young Adult Literature.
