"Better Times Are Coming Now": Wartime Dreams and Disenchantment in "Rufus M."

Autor/in	Mills, Claudia
Titel	"Better Times Are Coming Now": Wartime Dreams and Disenchantment in "Rufus M."
Quelle	In: Children's Literature in Education, 48 (2017) 2, S.103-118 (16 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0045-6713
DOI	10.1007/s10583-016-9288-0
Schlagwörter	Childrens Literature; War; World History; Literary Criticism; Propaganda + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? 'Children''s literature'; Kinderliteratur; Krieg; Weltgeschichte; Literaturkritik
Abstract	Written and published during World War II, Eleanor Estes's "Rufus M". (1943) is set during the time of American involvement in World War I, the war of the author's own childhood. Despite the fact that the book was named a Newbery Honor title, many critics have found it unsatisfyingly unstructured and episodic. I argue, however, that the book is far more unified in its construction than these critics recognize and deserves study as a revelatory title about how the First World War was presented to young readers during the Second World War. In his dauntless determination to support the war effort, young Rufus shows himself to be an iconic home-front hero of precisely the sort encouraged by the United States propaganda machine. But read carefully, the book has such an air of pervasive melancholy and contains so many scenes of disappointed hopes and disillusioned dreams that it can be read as encoding doubts about the first war's legacy. Despite Estes's clearly intended attempt to provide hope for young readers, the reality of World War I's ultimate failure haunts "Rufus M." as a sort of pentimento, a darker set of images revealed beneath the text's surface optimism. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01