Assignment

        Write a review of a work of literary criticism, such as you might do for an academic journal. I'll post it on the web so that all your classmates can benefit from it. So, when you turn it in, please submit two copies. (1) Give a hard copy to me. (2) Post a copy to the "Book Review" section of our class in K-State OnLine.

Some Reviews by Yours Truly

        These are intended to serve as examples. Please note. These links are accessible only via K-State; if you're not logged in on campus, find these via K-State Libraries' Find e-journal.

• Review of Julia L. Mickenberg's Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States.  Children's Literature Association Quarterly 32.1 (2007): 80-82. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/childrens_literature_association_quarterly/v032/32.1nel.html>. (Available to subscribers of Project Muse.)
• Review of The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley. American Historical Review 109.5 (Dec. 2004): 1587-88. <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/109.5/br_65.html>.

Due dates

• Full schedule of due dates.

The reviews will be due a week before the presentations. Reviewers will choose a book that will be useful to their presentation. There are two benefits of this approach. First, if you are reviewing a book that ties in with your presentation, then one assignment will help you with the other. Second, staggering the due dates over the course of the semester gives everyone a chance to process each review and, perhaps, to consider reading or consulting the book for their term papers.

Books

• Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
• Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York and London: Verso, 1996).
• Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth Byron Kidd, eds., Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (Wayne State UP, 2004).
• Judy Kaplan & Linn Shapiro, eds., Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
• Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002).
• Herbert Kohl, Should We Burn Babar? Essays on Children's Literature and the Power of Stories (New York: The New Press, 1995).
• James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: The New Press, 1995).
• Leonard S. Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (Beacon Hill, 1992. Quill, 1999).
• Michelle Martin, Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002 (Routlgedge, 2004).
• Paul C. Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
• Katharine Capshaw Smith, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).
• Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (New York: Methuen, 1988).