The Trilogy Paradox: Experiments in Contemporary Children's Book Studies
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
In this study, I take a multi-method approach to investigate contemporary children's fantasy trilogies as a publishing phenomenon. Contemporary book studies is a quickly expanding field, but as yet has not engaged fully with children’s literature as a genre, or children’s books as a major market category. To open this much-needed conversation, I bring together theories of genre, particularly those which speak to contemporary “genre fiction” such as science fiction and fantasy; analysis of the networks and processes that animate the children’s book industry; descriptions of seriality and the trilogy form; and statistical data about juvenile fiction as part of the contemporary book market in Canada. Ultimately, I argue that children’s trilogies are a paradox of contemporary publishing: they are both singular and multiple; both prestigious and highly commercial; and both iconic and fragile of form, with their complete three-part structure susceptible to their own success and expansion. In Chapter Two, I reconstruct an origin story for children's fantasy trilogies from extant histories and surveys of children's literature and fantasy in order to provide a broadly contextualized account of the genre. However, I conclude by acknowledging that this kind of conventional narrative history is always selective and incomplete, necessitating complementary accounts of the emergence of individual texts and genres. Chapters Three and Four, then, tell different origin stories for individual trilogies. Chapter Three focuses on the critical reception of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, arguing that book reviews of each novel emphasize both the autonomy of each installment and the growing sense of the trilogy as a singular unit, which latter conceptualization was eventually to dominate conversation around the trilogy. Chapter Four considers the intersection of celebrity and authorship via Colin Meloy’s The Wildwood Chronicles, arguing that while Meloy’s success in music boosted publicity for his first novel, this effect faded with subsequent novels, turning him from a “celebrity author” to simply an author. Moving away from origin stories and towards a consideration of how children’s fantasy trilogies may be encountered by everyday consumers, Chapter Five contains an extensive analysis of middle-grade books on sale on a single day in three bookstores in Edmonton, Alberta, finding that fantasy novels are not only a popular but the dominant genre of children’s literature, and that series fiction is the most common form of middle-grade novel, while trilogies form an important but not disproportionate fraction of middle-grade fantasy series. This dissertation demonstrates that applying the methods of book history and book studies to contemporary children’s literature can fruitfully unsettle existing narratives about this genre; equally, it shows that foregrounding children’s books within the larger publishing industry is necessary to correct for past oversight of this category within contemporary book studies.
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction distillée sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Apprise à partir de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Gemma. Le mode candidate est l'union des têtes enseignantes seuillées; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont ni des étiquettes humaines ni des étiquettes directes de modèles de pointe.
Scores Codex et Gemma par catégorie
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule tête enseignante, pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».