This article uses the Japanese television anime series "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" (2011) as a case study through which to problematise the relationship between two prominent traditions within children's literature criticism: narratology, with its vocabulary of implied readers and textual address; and reception studies, which typically…

Teaching and reading literature are commonly viewed as contributing to the cultivation of empathy. This article presents critical and pedagogical approaches to test this view and suggests a distinction between low-level, simple empathy inspired by the reading and teaching of "The Tortilla Curtain" and a more complex, self-critical…

School stories in contemporary China, which target a pre- and early-adolescent readership, frequently evoke representations of girlhood and boyhood in normative gender terms. The present article considers issues of femininity and gender in "Tomboy Dai An" ("Jia Xiaozi Dai An"), one among a series of commercially successful…

Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Nathan Hale's graphic novel set "Rapunzel's Revenge" (2008) and "Calamity Jack" (2010) features fractured fairy tales that take up the issue of 'the damsel in distress,' questioning and complicating traditional gender roles in fairy tales. Throughout both graphic novels Rapunzel's character…

The study aims to demonstrate the negative treatment of women and the purpose behind this treatment in selected short stories by Katherine Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway. Mansfield depicted her female characters as paralysed, invisible women or victims. She concentrated on representing the systematic and determined victimisation of women in a…

Films of the "perestroika" period (1986-1991) related to school/university theme showed that: - the educational / upbringing process has lost the previous strict storylines and in many respects has lost its communist landmarks;--both school and university have acute problem areas (crisis, disappointment and fatigue, professional…

The present article sheds new light on trauma as a devastating phenomenon respecting the construction of male and female characters' identities and reveals reconstruction of male and female identities in Virginia Woolf's (1882-1941) "The Waves" (1931). Trauma is defined as an unexpected event that leaves the most terrible marks on the…

Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series (2005-2008) and Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" series (2008-2010) have been hugely successful and influential texts, both as best-selling literary works and as action movie franchises. (To avoid confusion, "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games" in this essay refer to the…

This essay examines how Virginia Woolf uses writing as a tool to locate sites of negations, such as women's exclusion from places of power and knowledge, and to expose negative essentializing that permeates patriarchal structure in "A Room of One's Own." Whereas scholarship on the book has explored a wide range of issues including sex,…

Indian women have always been viewed as the object of desire. In the advent of Technological Advancement women are still thought of as inferior to men. Though there is an increase in the literacy rate of the girl child, it does not imply the emancipation of the girl child. Women are bound by the social customs and traditions. In this sense women…

Men appear to interpret people's behaviors more sexually than do women. This finding, which has been replicated in scores of studies using a variety of methodological approaches, has been linked to important social concerns, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. This article provides a critical review of the published literature on…

This article investigates mental representations of literary characters and their relations with other aspects of response to literature and age, gender, and expertise. A Saga chapter and the beginning of a contemporary novel were presented to 16 participants from each of three age groups (13 years, 17 years, adults) equally divided by gender and…

In articulating global and local forms of sexuality and its impact on how people conceptualise conceptualised LGBT issues in education, the author explores three timely texts: (1) Dennis Altman's "Global Sex" (2000); (2) Vanessa Baird's "The No-Nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity" (2001); and (3) an edited volume by Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia…