Peter Hunt argues that 'while (children's) books reflect the Essay

Peter Hunt argues that 'while (children's) books reflect the underlying preoccupations of a culture, the most notable ones also - Essay Example The emergence of newer varieties of fictional historicism is related, partly, with the attempt to regain cultural representation for adolescents, blacks, and minority groups. As a result, these social objectives are connected to the recovery of mistreated literary works, such as those that have never been regarded deserving of scholarly attention (Ringrose 2009). As Peter Hunt argues, literary works for children that are constantly recognised are those that undermine or challenge adult perceptions and beliefs of the period in which they are written. Thus, revolutionary children’s literature ridicules adults and adult-recognised organisations like the school and the church. By challenging the adult world and giving importance to a world where in children build their own values, these literary works are usually contentious and controversial. In this literature, most significantly, children have control, such as control over their own identities, their environments, and adults (R ingrose 2009). However, due to the diversity within the cultural framework of children’s literature, it is hard to oversimplify the components which inspire these works in children’s literature. ... Narrated through the perspectives of various characters, the story manages to maintain an unbiased and impartial standpoint on the lifestyle and culture of the teenage addicts and their different, mainly failed, efforts to stop the drug addiction. The series of events which encompass Tar and Gemma in the novel reveal the period’s fear of the influences of modern society on childhood values. The conflict in human relations, mainly depicted in Gemma’s family, seem to intimidate Romantic notions of childhood. The child, separated from the nuclear family’s ideals and the faiths of established religion, dominated by worldly interests and the explosion of sexualised, ‘impure’ depictions of the body, has become a menacing, irrepressible force (Flewit 2009). Adolescents, such as Burgess’s characters, can be offenders or drug addicts and, per se, represent a society which is wild and unruly. Although there is a growth in children’s literature, l ike Junk, which discusses these issues, they are frequently criticised for their hard realism, illustrating further current anxieties that children will become ruined adolescents. The moralising preoccupation of Junk that takes on a direct relationship between children’s literature and deviant behaviour discards the effort, on Burgess’s part, to encourage children to think and act independently. It is the difficult topic of sex and vice in children’s literature which has been the most challenging for grownups. The Other Side of the Truth by Beverly Naidoo Beverly Naidoo strives to make sense of the impacts of apartheid through the story of Sade and Femi Solaja in The Other Side of the Truth. The core notion of this