Work Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Department

Berklee Valencia; First Year Abroad; Study Abroad

Keywords

Children's Literature; Folklore; Nursery Rhymes

Abstract

When approaching nursery rhymes, they appear as a concrete, limited and cohesive collection shared by all English-speaking countries packaged in colorful books or fun, animated Youtube channels. Yet they have truly been something that was alive: a group of productions that changed and increased throughout time, drawn from and shared with different languages and cultures, accommodated or purged, considered to hide secret meanings and, subsequently, fossilized in print. They pre-date literary culture although, since society has become literary, nursery rhymes have been generally approached either from the folkloric ethnography field through a collection and analysis of rhymes, their variations and their influences; or as a means to an end, taking into account their possible usage in phonological awareness, literacy and first and second language acquisition. Few have intended to answer what exactly nursery rhymes are, how they work and why it is that they have existed for so long. Understanding nursery rhymes offers essential knowledge of their position in children’s literature, children’s agency and the shared discourse between adults and children. It also illustrates how the relationship between adults, infants, communication and connection has preserved its essential features.

To better approach these points, one must first answer the question ‘what is a nursery rhyme?’, and it is through deeper insight into what their own taxonomy offers that the true nature of nursery rhymes is apprehended. The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes them as “verse customarily told or sung to small children” while Merriam/Webster gives a similar definition: “a short rhyme for children that often tells a story”. Thus, nursery rhymes need two participants to exist: the child listener and the adult teller. The dual addressee of nursery rhymes seems to follow the idiosyncrasies of children’s literature. But a closer look reveals different information.

Comments

This article was published in The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children's Literature (Vol. 22, No. 1) under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

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