Author: Rebecca Resinski

“Imagined Futures” was the theme for the 2017 Children’s Literature Association conference. I presented “When Beauty and the Beast Read Latin and Greek: Reading the Past Toward the Future in Robin McKinley’s Beauty, Donna Jo Napoli’s Beast, and Jennifer Donnelly’s Lost in a Book.” (Click on the paper title for a PDF of the talk.) When I submitted my abstract for the conference, I mentioned only McKinley and Napoli’s novels, but I ended up treating Donnelly’s as well, so I’ve altered the title to include it formally here.

In 2016 the theme for the Children’s Literature Association conference was “Animation.” I presented “Midas and the Value of Animate Others,” which treats Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wonder Book, a Midas picturebook by Charlotte Craft and Kinuko Y. Craft, Neal Shusterman’s Eyes of Kid Midas, and the comic book series The Midas Flesh by Ryan North et al. (Click on the paper title for a PDF of the talk.)

In 2015 I presented “Midas in Massachusetts:  Hawthorne, Dickinson, and the Aesthetics of the Golden Touch” at the conference of the Classical Association of the Midwest and South. (Click on the paper title for a PDF of the talk.) I was glad to treat Hawthorne and Dickinson alongside one another, bringing children’s literature into conversation not only with Classics but also with literature for “grown-ups.”