How to raise children to be moral, responsible, and productive citizens is one of the most debated issues in society today. In this elegantly written and passionate book, Vigen Guroian argues that our most beloved fairy tales and classic and contemporary fantasy stories written for children have enormous power to awaken the moral imagination.

Jamie and Todd are horrified to learn that the grand plan, which they thought had been defeated, might be about to be implemented in 1775, America. Hector and Catherine have to go back in time and thwart Travis - an agent of the grand plan - who is hell bent on world domination. Jamie and Todd go with Hector and Catherine on a mission to 1775, to prevent a super gun from being used in the battle of bunker hill, during the American war of independence, but they have only days to stop history from being altered.

Judy Blume is one of the most popular authors of children's and young adult fiction in American history. For over 30 years, her books and career have withstood the test of time and she continues to resonate with new generations of young readers. While she is arguably one of the most important authors of the twentieth century, she is also one of the most banned. What is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Blume's career is that despite today's proliferation of cable channels and easy Internet access, books of hers written decades ago about every day life events that all teenagers experience still manage to find themselves at the center of censorship debates. Rather than change her style, the efforts to censor her books turned Blume into an activist and champion for the First Amendment. Inside this biography Kathleen Tracy explores the life and career of Judy Blume, one of the most successful-and most controversial-authors of twentieth century.

In addition to tracing the events of BlooM's life, this engaging biography discusses historic and current censorship issues in classrooms and libraries across the country. Her association with the National Coalition Against Censorship, a group that Blume says changed her life, as did her friendship with the organization's longtime director, Leanne Katz, is examined in detail as well as how libraries, teachers, publishers and grass-roots activists have responded to the ever-growing attempts to censor children's reading material. In-depth chapters are supplemented with a bibliography of print and electronic sources that provide suggested readings for students and general readers alike. Also included is a timeline, photos, and an appendix of free speech resources.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

L.M.Montgomery grew up in Prince Edward Island, a real place of "politics and potatoes." But it's her fictional island, a richly textured imaginative landscape that has captivated a world of readers since 1908, when Anne of Green Gables became the first of Montgomery's long string of bestsellers. In this wide-ranging and highly readable book, Elizabeth Waterston uses the term "magic" to suggest that peculiar, indefinable combination of attributes that unpredictably results in creative genius. Montgomery's intelligence, her drive, and her sense of humour are essential components of this success. Waterston also features what Montgomery called her "dream life," a "strange inner life of fancy which had always existed side by side with my outer life." This special ability to look beyond the veil, to access vibrant inner vistas, produced deceptively layered fictions out of a life that saw not just its share of both fame and ill fortune, but also what Waterston calls "dark passions." A true reader's guide, Magic Island explores the world of L.M. Montgomery in a way never done before. Each chapter of Magic Island discusses a different Montgomery book, following their progression chronologically. Waterston draws parallels between Montgomery's internal "island," her personal life, her professional career, and the characters in her novels. Designed to be read alongside the new biography of Montgomery by Mary Rubio, this is the first book to reinterpret Montgomery's writing in light of important new information about her life. A must-read for any Montgomery fan, Magic Island offers a fresh and insightful look at the world of L.M. Montgomery and the "magic" of artistic creation.

Outside the world of children's literature studies, children's books by authors of well-known texts "for adults" are often forgotten or marginalized. Although many adults today read contemporary children's and young adult fiction for pleasure, others continue to see such texts as unsuitable for older audiences, and they are unlikely to cross-read children's books that were themselves cross-written by authors like Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, Joy Harjo, or Amy Tan. Meanwhile, these literary voices have produced politically vital works of children's literature whose complex themes persist across boundaries of expected audience. These works form part of a larger body of activist writing "for children" that has long challenged preconceived notions about the seriousness of such books and ideas about who, in fact, should read them. They Also Write for Kids: Cross-Writing, Activism, and Children's Literature seeks to draw these cross-writing projects together and bring them to the attention of readers. In doing so, this book invites readers to place children's literature in conversation with works more typically understood as being for adult audiences, read multiethnic US literature alongside texts by global writers, consider children's poetry and nonfiction as well as fiction, and read diachronically as well as cross-culturally. These ways of reading offer points of entry into a world of books that refuse to exclude young audiences in scrutinizing topics that range from US settler colonialism and linguistic prejudice to intersectional forms of gender inequality. The authors included here also employ an intricate array of writing strategies that challenge lingering stereotypes of children's literature as artistically as well as intellectually simplistic. They subversively repurpose tropes and conventions from canonical children's books; embrace an epistemology of children's literature that emphasizes ambiguity and complexity; invite readers to participate in redefining concepts such as "civilization" and cultural belonging; engage in intricate acts of cross-cultural representation; and re-envision their own earlier works in new forms tailored explicitly to younger audiences. Too often disregarded by skeptical adults, these texts offer rich rewards to readers of all ages, and here they are brought to the fore.

Unrecognized in the United States and resisted in many wealthy, industrialized nations, children's rights to participation and self-determination are easily disregarded in the name of protection. In literature, the needs of children are often obscured by protectionist narratives, which redirect attention to parents by mythologizing the supposed innocence, victimization, and vulnerability of children rather than potential agency. In Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children's Rights, author Susan Honeyman traces how the best of intentions to protect children can nonetheless hurt them when leaving them unprepared to act on their own behalf. Honeyman utilizes literary parallels and discursive analysis to highlight the unchecked protectionism that has left minors increasingly isolated in dwindling social units and vulnerable to multiple injustices made possible by eroded or unrecognized participatory rights. Each chapter centers on a perilous pattern in a different context: ""women and children first"" rescue hierarchies, geographic restriction, abandonment, censorship, and illness. Analysis from adventures real and fictionalized will offer the reader high jinx and heroism at sea, the rush of risk, finding new families, resisting censorship through discovering shared political identity, and breaking the pretenses of sentimentality.

This is an original, scholarly yet accessible contribution to the field of children's fiction. It focuses on gender in relation to children's fiction and the role that language plays in this relationship. Girls' and boys' reading itself is looked at, as well as the books that they encounter including the Harry Potter series, Louis Sachar's prizewinning Holes, fairy tales and school reading schemes. The book treats fiction as fiction, using as its guiding principles the multimodality of much childrens fiction; that fiction is almost always dialogic; that the feminist movement has had considerable influence on textual representations of women, men, boys and girls and that language (including what the characters say, and how, and what is said about them) is a key to the different readings of fictional texts. This will be a valuable resource for researchers in and students of linguistics, language studies and English literature.

Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold the Pacific War as fought by "Frogs" and "Toads," humanoid creatures brutally committed to a kill-or-be-killed struggle. The history of American youth depends primarily on adult reminiscences of their own childhoods, adult testimony to the lives of youth around them, or surmises based on at best a few creative artifacts. The survival then of such a large collection of adolescent comic strips from America's small-town Midwest is remarkable. Michael Kugler reproduces the never-before-published comics of his father's adolescent imagination as a microhistory of American youth in that formative era. Also included in Into the Jungle! A Boy's Comic Strip History of World War II are the likely comic book models for these stories and inspiration from news coverage in newspapers, radio, movies, and newsreels. Kugler emphasizes how US propaganda intended to inspire patriotic support for the war gave this young artist a license for his imagined violence. In a context of progressive American educational reform, these violent comic stories, often in settings modeled on the artist's small Nebraska town, suggests a form of adolescent rebellion against moral conventions consistent with comic art's reputation for "outsider" or countercultural expressions. Kugler also argues that these comics provide evidence for the transition in American taste from war stories to the horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kugler's thorough analysis of his father's adolescent art explains how a small-town boy from the plains distilled the popular culture of his day for an imagined war he could fight on his audacious, even shocking terms.

Contributions by Beverly Lyon Clark, Christine Doyle, Gregory Eiselein, John Matteson, Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Anne K. Phillips, Daniel Shealy, and Roberta Seelinger Trites As the golden age of children's literature dawned in America in the mid-1860s, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a work that many scholars view as one of the first realistic novels for young people, soon became a classic. Never out of print, Alcott's tale of four sisters growing up in nineteenth-century New England has been published in more than fifty countries around the world. Over the century and a half since its publication, the novel has grown into a cherished book for girls and boys alike. Readers as diverse as Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J. K. Rowling have declared it a favorite. Little Women at 150, a collection of eight original essays by scholars whose research and writings over the past twenty years have helped elevate Alcott's reputation in the academic community, examines anew the enduring popularity of the novel and explores the myriad complexities of Alcott's most famous work. Examining key issues about philanthropy, class, feminism, Marxism, Transcendentalism, canon formation, domestic labor, marriage, and Australian literature, Little Women at 150 presents new perspectives on one of the United States' most enduring novels. A historical and critical introduction discusses the creation and publication of the novel, briefly traces the scholarly critical response, and demonstrates how these new essays show us that Little Women and its illustrations still have riches to reveal to its readers in the twenty-first century.

Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What makes for a good "coming out" story? Will increased queer representation in young people's media teach adolescents the right lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason considers these questions through a range of popular media, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture - queer visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the promise that "It Gets Better" and the threat that it might not - challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people's media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes that we see "queer YA" as a body of transmedia texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect - specifically, anxiety - instead of content.

Young adult (or YA) literature and publishing are not simply flourishing. They represent perhaps the fastest-growing field of all. With graphic novels and so-called crossover works like the Harry Potter series selling in the tens of millions, the field of YA literature is one of the most dynamic and exciting in the U.S. and Canada. YA is increasingly an international phenomenon as well. "The Continuum Encyclopedia of Young Adult Literature" is the only reference guide to this phenomenon in any language. It is a collaborative effort by 200 authorities who contribute some 650 original, signed entries. These key contributors include: Michael Cart, Ken Donelson, Danny Fingeroth Ted Hipple, Teri Lesesne, Alleen Nilsen, Hazel Rochman, Stephanie Svirin, and many others. (Some are subjects of entries themselves.) Among the authors and educators written about are: Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, Chris Crutcher, Will Eisner, James Cross Giblin, Karen Hesse, S. E. Hinton, Robert Lipsyte, Lois Lowry, Linda Sue Park, Gary Paulsen, Richard Peck, Philip Pullman, Louise Rosenblatt, J. K. Rowling, Art Spiegelman, Dorothy Strickland, J. R. R. Tolkien, and many others. A considerable effort is made to include authors and graphic-novel artists who are not found in any other reference work on adult or children's literature. Another special feature is the topical article. These often include up-and-coming figures that are not covered in their own entry. There are 75 topical articles, including African American Literature; Asian American Literature; Australian Literature; Canadian Literature; "Crossovers"; "Death and Dying"; "Fantasy"; "Feminist Fairy Tales"; "The Graphic Novel"; Harry Potter - "Not Just for Kids Anymore"; Horror; Latina/Latino Literature; "The Lord of the Rings" and "Beyond"; New Zealand Literature; Science Fiction and Crossovers; Superheroes of the 1960s and Stan Lee; Witches and Dragons; Tween and Teen; Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; and others. For easy reference, "The Continuum Encyclopedia of Young Adult Literature" features an appendix listing major-award winners as well as an index of names cross-referenced to entries where applicable.