Children’s Literature

Children and youth literature is a lore of many voices and faces, reflecting both episcopal and subversive, conservative and novel. Our department invites the students to delve into the fundamental issues of Western children and youth literature and question the most rooted perceptions of this field of knowledge. What is children’s literature? Is it a modern invention? Who are the addressees of this literature and its subcategories? What is its connection to crossover literature? Does children’s literature has differentiated, fixed, and agreed-upon poetic characteristics? Does it have one recognized history? How does it relate to pedagogy? Does this literature create reality, or does it reflect it? These questions and others open a pathway to discourse and exploration and create fertile confluence between the study of children’s literature and other areas, such as gender and identity discourses. Moreover, in the Israeli context, the department reveals its students to the groundbreaking research of children and youth Mizrachi literature, identifies its existence, conceptualizes and maps it.