Children's Literature
| Juvenile Collection | Book Kits & Big Books | Caldecott & Newbery Award Books |
Children's Literature is often defined as material written or produced for the information or entertainment of children and young adults. It includes all literary, artistic genres and physical formats. -- Children's Literature, Library of Congress"What is children's and young adult literature? A basic definition might state that it is books written for this particular audience; we might also add that it includes books that children and young adults enjoy and have made their own." -- Cullinan & Galda’s Literature and the Child (p. 8).
Looking @ Genres in Children's Literature
Below is a chart from Cullinan and Galda's Literature and the Child; it provides brief discriptions of several children and young adult literature genre's (Cullinan & Galda, p. 8). When searching for children's books in the AU Library Catalog, records may include a number of these catagories as subject "genre/form."
This LibGuide is a starting point for locating children's literature genre within the library's juvenile collection.
| Category | Brief Description: Genres in children's and Young Adult Literature |
| Picture Books | Interdependence of art and text. Story of Concept presented through combination of text and illustration. Classification based on format, not genre. All genres appear in picture books. |
| Poetry & Verse | Condensed language, imagery. Distilled, rhythmic expression of imaginative thoughts and perceptions. |
| Folklore | Literary heritage of humankind. Traditional stories, myths, legends, nursery rhymes, and songs from the past. Oral tradition; no known author. |
| Fantasy | Imaginative worlds, make-believe. Stories set in places that do not exist, about people and creatures that could not exist, or events that could not happen. |
| Science Fiction | Based on extending physical laws and scientific principles to their logical outcomes. Stories about what might occur in the future. |
| Realistic Fiction | "What if" stories, illusion of reality. Events could happen in real world, characters seem real; contemporary setting. |
| Historical Fiction | Set in the past, could have happened. Story reconstructs events of past age, things that could have or did occur. |
| Biography | Plot and theme based on person's life. An account of a person's life, or part of a life history; letters, memoirs, diaries, journals, autobiographies. |
|
Nonfiction |
Facts about the real world. Informational books that explain a subject or concept. |
Cullinan, B.E. and Galda, L. (2002). Cullinan and Galda’s literature and the child (p. 8). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
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