ECLIPSE: Exemplary Children's Literature Interface Project for Scholarly Education

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• Learn more about authors, children's books, illustrators, Mother Goose, nursery rhymes, and picture books.

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Project ECLIPSE offers teachers access to the Mother Goose Nursery rhymes, providing the different illustrations which have accompanied each rhyme in a variety of editions by different illustrators. These fascinating illustrations are accompanied by thoughtful questions that encourage the viewer to look more closely at each picture. Teachers can utilize this collection to teach lessons about comparison/contrast and inference. Art teachers can explore with their students the differences in artistic technique and viewer interpretation.

Scholars and students of Children’s Literature can gain access to intellectual resources and digitalized versions of rare objects, including picture book authors’ drafts and original artwork.

Mother Goose: A Scholarly Exploration focuses on the teaching and learning possibilities related to the study of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. Mother Goose is an especially important topic in the study of the history of Children’s Literature because such rhymes are a universal experience of childhood that crosses national, cultural, and gender boundaries. Included are reference materials, interpretations over time and in different cultures, the relationships between these rhymes and social concerns and events, rare Mother Goose woodcuts as well as other exemplary illustrations and texts and visual interpretive analyses of Mother Goose illustrations that facilitate the recognition of specific details within a given image.

The Petra Project is a study of original art for a children’s picture book from the Rutgers Collection of Original Illustrations for Children’s Literature. It documents the experience of Petra Mathers, an author/illustrator, over a ten-year period of writing her children’s book Kisses from Rose Progressing from first draft and sketches to published book, Mathers preserved the various versions of her work which provide insight into all aspects of creation of a picture book. This site enables scholars and students of children’s literature and book illustration to see the nuances of change, both visually and textually, as the manuscript was developed from original idea to published book.