This case study examined how a 14-year-old youth and eighth-grade student named Kendra (pseudonym) mobilized restorying to (re)center her experiences in horror fiction. I asked how she conceptualized horror and monstrosity in a 6-week English language arts unit, and how she (re)centered her life experiences within horror fiction through restorying…

This study examined the development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional narratives using a storytelling/story-acting practice where children told stories to and for their friends. Evaluative language orients the audience to the teller's cognitive and emotional engagement with a story's events and characters, and we hypothesized…

Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" (2009) charts the story of Nobody Owens, a boy who is adopted by supernatural entities in the local graveyard after his family is murdered. This article draws on the notion of the "construed reader," and combines two cognitive stylistic frameworks to analyse the opening section of the novel.…

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's iconic photograph has taken on mythical proportions since his death. Though his image has ironically been exploited by the apparatus of capitalism against which he fought, his translation into a symbol has assured that his foothold within popular culture remains largely unassailable. While recent films and…

O'Connor, an author of realistic fiction for children, shares her attempts to strike a balance between carefree, uncensored, authentic, realistic writing and age-appropriate writing. Of course, complicating that balancing act is the fact that what seems age-appropriate to her might not seem so to everyone. O'Connor suggests that while it may be…

This paper explains how first-year composition students wrote business sales letters about short fiction and then revised those letters into full-fledged literary essays that analyzed the stories. By completing these two writings back-to-back (that is, experiencing the metagenres between business writing and literary analysis), students not only…

Describes a "dialogic" (Bakhtin, 1981) writing workshop that is responsive to the social priorities of children and that reconsiders dilemmas within an alternative framework. Notes that the experiences and tests of two writers in third grade highlight the way identity and sense of self can be developed and explored in a writing community that…

Tests widely-held associations among script types, genres, writers, and target readers via statistical analysis in popular Japanese fiction. Subjects texts to lexical analysis to see whether choice of vocabulary can account for variability in script selection. Finds that Japanese writers fashion their script type choices to specific contexts, as…

Presents a transcript of an interview with successful young adult author Jerry Spinelli. Describes the techniques and writing strategies used by Spinelli. Discusses ways of generating stories, and the author's concept of his audience. (HB)

Discusses the relationship between the prominence of themes of the literate gentry woman in Chinese fiction and the rise of women poets. Examines later Japanese fiction to find influences of the woman reader and of earlier Chinese works. Explores the scholar-beauty novels, women as warriors, female martyrdom, and the equating of virtue with…