Talking Animals in Children's Literature:  Winnie-the-Pooh as a Pioneer

張貼日期：Jan 22, 2014 12:58:23 PM

Talking Animals in Children's Literature:

Winnie-the-Pooh as a Pioneer

Julia Liu   Lucy Shen

Advisor: Dr. Hsian-li Chou

Introduction

     Children's Literature is becoming more and more important in today's society.  "Talking animals", characters once taboo in literature, are now widely accepted as a means of teaching and entertaining young children. Interestingly, these anthropomorphic characters connect with children and become more beloved than human or child characters. Now with our new technology, even films are being made regarding talking animals. Our paper will try and answer questions related to this topic, such as the motive of a writer to write talking animal stories for children, when the idea for such writing began, why these stories are popular with children, whether they have any teaching value, and how they influence culture today. We decided to use the most popular and representative work as an example to explore our questions regarding the popularity and importance of talking animal stories, and so we chose Winnie-the-Pooh to sufficiently express that talking animal stories have a great importance to the modern world and are beneficial to children in their rites of passage into the adult world, a world that is reflected within these beloved works.