Ways of imagining with children’s nature nonfiction (WONDER)

A traditional view is that nonfiction conveys information; to feed their imaginative faculties, children are expected to read fiction instead. As artistic nonfiction blooms worldwide, we ask how contemporary children’s nature books guide children’s imagining and what it means to imagine when texts are fact-driven and heavily illustrated. Combining expertise in children’s reader response, children’s literature theory, and language, WONDER aims to: 1. Digitally analyse a multimodal corpus of acclaimed Czech children’s nature books, based on components of imagining derived from literary studies and other research. 2. Conduct creative focus groups with children. 3. Conduct interviews with selected authors. 4. Conduct linguistic analyses and revise our initial findings bottom-up. Our top-down components are ‘life-text links,’ ‘defamiliarisation,’ and ‘possibility thinking.’ We will contribute to literary studies writ large, develop a procedure for digitised word & image analysis including linguistic markers, and produce child-centred conclusions transferable to publishing and education.

Project team of FSV UK (1)

Mgr. Markéta Supa, M.A., Ph.D.

Co-investigator at FSV

+420 222 112 296  |  +420 608 828 053

marketa.supa@fsv.cuni.cz  |  marketa.zezulkova@fsv.cuni.cz