Analysis of literature for children

People who contributed to the analysis of literature for children
Vladimir Propp	Bruno Bettelheim	Maria Tatar	Kieran Egan
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. Vladimir Propp was born on April 17, 1895 in St. Petersburg to a German family. He attended St. Petersburg University (1913–1918) majoring in Russian and German philology. His Morphology of the Folktale was published in Russian in 1928. Although it represented a breakthrough in both folkloristic and morphology and influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, it was generally unnoticed in the West until it was translated in 1958. His character types are used in media education and can be applied to almost any story be it in literature, theatre, film, television series, games, etc.	Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his work on Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally disturbed children. Bettelheim analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology in The Uses of Enchantment (1976). He discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales at one time considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm. Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially-evolved stories, children would go through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures. In the U.S., Bettelheim won two major awards for The Uses of Enchantment: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award in category Contemporary Thought	Maria Tatar is an American academic whose expertise lies in children's literature, German literature, and folklore. Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. Tatar earned an undergraduate degree from Denison University and a doctoral degree from Princeton University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts Perhaps Tatar's most original contribution to thought about children's stories and what they do to their inhabitants is about how the addicted readers are also learning (most of them) to deal with growing up. The great powers of the mind in the world of children's books are a capacity for wonder, and an insatiable curiosity. The writers feed both with colours never seen on sea or land, with moons and stars and gold and silver and monsters and dangers. But they are also teaching mastery of language which is the stuff of thought and necessary to growing up when the time comes.	Egan was born in 1942 in Clonmel Ireland, though, he was raised and educated in England. He graduated from the University of London with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1966. He subsequently worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Kingston upon Thames. He then moved to the United States and began a Ph.D in the philosophy of education at the Stanford University School of Education. Egan completed his Ph.D at Cornell University in 1972. Kieran Egan is the director of the Imaginative Education Research Group, which was founded by the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. The goal of this group is to improve education on a global scale by developing and proliferating the ideas of Imaginative Education. Kieran Egan has provided educational theorists and educators with something that few others have in the history of educational theorizing – a theory of educational development.  He has located this theory and the need for its vision against a compelling backdrop of conflicting educational visions.  Regardless of the accuracy of Egan’s critique of educational policy conflict, his theory serves simultaneously as both a descriptive and prescriptive account of the development of the “educated” mind. His model attempts to harmonize naturalistic, social, and humanistic conceptions of education by linking a sequence of educational activities that reflect the development of social knowledge to the “natural” knowledge-seeking tendencies of children – tendencies that change with age and maturation.