the tale of two bad mice by beatrix potter

Yet we know little about the ways that the target consumers-very young girls-actually enact princess media messages during play. At the same time, literacy studies have alerted us to the gendered and consumerist ideological messages in these identity-shaping princess texts (Mackey 2010 Marshall and Sensoy 2011 Saltmarsh 2009).

For young preschool girls today, these literary repertoires often connect to their deep knowledge of princess characters and stories in popular culture (Sekeres 2009 Wohlwend 2009).

Educational research in the past decade shows benefits to literacy learning when teachers build upon young children’s diverse strengths and popular media interests that show up so often in their play (Dyson 2003 Marsh et al. Children’s extensive engagements with princess culture have sparked controversy over the potential identity-shaping effects of popular media on young girls, evident in high levels of public debate in social media spheres around recent mass-market books, including, My Princess Boy (Kilodavis and DeSimone 2010) and Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (Orenstein 2011). Forman-Brunell (Eds.), Princess cultures: Mediating girls’ imaginations and identities (pp. Playing to belong: Princesses and peer cultures in preschool. Such texts demonstrate not only that the doll and the agency it generates can be employed to interrogate and manipulate social hierarchies but also that fantasies of subversion registered through the miniature and the gigantic had imaginative currency powerful enough to cross the boundaries of genre. Doll narratives written for children, in particular Clara Bradford's Ethel's Adventures in the Doll Country (1880) and Julia Pardoe's Lady Arabella, or, The Adventures of a Doll (1856), as well as adult literature, in particular Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), illustrate how authors use distortions of size and animation to subvert or sustain relationships between the poor and the privileged, the weak and the powerful, the small and the enormous. This essay argues that fiction written for both adults and children in the nineteenth century recognizes that dolls can perform work that is much more complicated - and sometimes more subversive - than imagined by Victorians who upheld the toys as training wheels for motherhood.

The tale of two bad mice by beatrix potter