From nursery rhymes to childlore: orality and ideology

  • Catalina Millán Scheiding Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus

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.

Author Biography

Catalina Millán Scheiding, Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus
Catalina Millán Scheiding, PhD is an assistant professor at the Liberal Arts Department at Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus in Spain. She specializes in language learning, children’s literature and fantasy. She also works as a literary and audiovisual translator and is a spoken word poet. Her current scholarship focuses on nursery rhymes in translation and language acquisition through formulaic sequences. 
Published
2019-12-18
Issue
Vol. 22 No. 1 (2019)
Section
The Tortoise's Tale
Essays and articles published in The Looking Glass may be reproduced for non-profit use by any educational or public institution; letters to the editor and on-site comments made by our readers may not be used without the expressed permission of that individual. Any commercial use of this journal, in whole or in part, by any means, is prohibited. Authors of accepted articles assign to The Looking Glass the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently available electronically. They retain the copyright and, 90 days after initial publication, may republish it in any form they wish as long as The Looking Glass is acknowledged as the original source.