In this new collection, children's literature scholars from twelve different countries contribute to the ongoing debate on the importance of picturebook research, focusing on aesthetic and cognitive aspects of picture books. Contributors take interdisciplinary approaches that integrate different disciplines such as literary studies, art history, linguistics, narratology, cognitive psychology, sociology, memory studies, and picture theory. Topics discussed include intervisuality, twist endings, autobiographical narration, and metaliterary awareness in picturebooks. The essays also examine the narrative challenges of first-person narratives, ellipsis, frame breaking, and mindscape as new paradigms in picturebook research. Tying picturebook studies to studies in childhood, multimodality, and literacy, this anthology is representative of the different opportunities for research in this emerging field.

Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series has enjoyed astounding commercial success, not just with adolescents as originally intended but with a wide and diverse audience, yet the cultural and literary contributions of these novels have been largely overlooked. This dynamic volume reveals how the "Twilight "series has fundamentally altered our interpretations of vampires. These essays bring together a broad range of perspectives on the vampire series, from gender issues to the genre of Gothic fiction to environmental concerns. Ultimately, this compelling collection provides insights on how we can better "read" popular culture and loosen the restrictive boundaries between pleasure and intellectual pursuit along the way.

Stories are told today through many formats and young interpreters bring multimedia experience to bear on every narrative format they encounter. In this book, twelve young people read a novel, watch a film and play a video game from beginning to end. Their responses inform a new framework of contemporary themes of narrative comprehension.

Although there have been numerous books written about the fictional character, Nancy Drew, this book includes as analysis of Nancy Drew as a proto-feminist role model for young women in the twenty-first century. I have chosen to focus on the initial iteration of the Nancy Drew character, which was first introduced in 1929: Nancy Drew as an intelligent, independent young woman who reflected the world of her cohort as well as the adult world of criminality. In addition, this book examines the societal context in which this book was first introduced, and lends a perspective as to why the Nancy Drew series became so popular. As a lecturer in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a scholar in women's history in the United States, as well as a life-long fan of Nancy Drew, I am uniquely qualified to write this book. As mentioned previously, much has been written about Nancy Drew, the author of the series, Carolyn Keene, and publisher of the series, Edward Stratemeyer and his Stratemeyer Syndicate; however, the conversation regarding Nancy Drew as a feminist role model is one that needs to be continued, especially within the context of the #Me Too Movement. Since the most recent volume about Nancy Drew was published in 2008, this volume will serve as a more recent contribution to the conversation, one that can take place within the classroom in the form of a textbook and source guide.

A close colleague of Tolkein for many years, Zettersten offers here a personally informed analysis of his fiction. In light of his unusual life experience and enthusiasm for the study of languages, Zettersten finds in Tolkein's fiction the same animating passions that drove that great author as a youth, a soldier, a linguist, and an Oxford Don.

Children's literature can be a powerful way to encourage and empower EFL students but is less commonly used in the classroom than adult literature. This text provides a comprehensive introduction to children's and young adult literature in EFL teaching. It demonstrates the complexity of children's literature and how it can encourage an active community of second language readers: with multilayered picturebooks, fairy tales, graphic novels and radical young adult fiction. It examines the opportunities of children's literature in EFL teacher education, including: the intertexuality of children's literature as a gate-opener for canonised adult literature; the rich patterning of children's literature supporting Creative Writing; the potential of interactive drama projects. Close readings of texts at the centre of contemporary literary scholarship, yet largely unknown in the EFL world, provide an invaluable guide for teacher educators and student teachers, including works by David Almond, Anthony Browne, Philip Pullman and J.K.Rowling. Introducing a range of genres and their significance for EFL teaching, this study makes an important new approach accessible for EFL teachers, student teachers and teacher educators.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy.

In the spirit of their last collaboration, Apartheid and Racism in South African Children's Literature, 1985-1995, Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann once again come together to expose the neo-imperialist overtones of contemporary children's fiction about Africa. Examining the portrayal of African social customs, religious philosophies, and political structures in fiction for young people, Maddy and MacCann reveal the Western biases that often infuse stories by well-known Western authors. In the book's introductory section, Maddy and MacCann offer historical information concerning Western notions of Africa as "primitive," and then present background information about the complexity of feminism in Africa and about the ongoing institutionalization of racism. The main body of the study contains critiques of the novels or short stories of eleven well-known writers, including Isabel Allende and Nancy Farmer--all demonstrating that children's literature continues to mis-represent conditions and social relations in Africa. The study concludes with a look at those short stories of Beverley Naidoo which bring insight and historical accuracy to South African conflicts and emerging solutions. Educators, literature professors, publishers, professors of Diaspora and African studies, and students of the mass media will find Maddy and MacCann's critique of racism in the representation of Africa to be indispensible to students of multicultural literature.

Focusing on questions of space and locale in children's literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. The collection is comprised of four sections that take up the space between children and adults, the representation of 'real world' places, fantasy travel and locales, and the physical space of the children's book-as-object. In their essays, the contributors analyze works from a range of sources and traditions by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Maria Edgeworth, Gloria Anzaldua, Jenny Robson, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Knox, and Claude Ponti. While maintaining a focus on how location and spatiality aid in defining the child's relationship to the world, the essays also address themes of borders, displacement, diaspora, exile, fantasy, gender, history, home-leaving and homecoming, hybridity, mapping, and metatextuality. With an epilogue by Philip Pullman in which he discusses his own relationship to image and locale, this collection is also a valuable resource for understanding the work of this celebrated author of children's literature.

This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children's poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises - and why we delight in - its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children's poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of "like sounds," William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children's poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on individual memory. Rather, it is associated through contemporary convergence culture with the commodities of one's youth as they are recycled from one media platform to another. Essays in the volume's first section identify recurrent patterns in the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children's toys and media, providing context for section two's exploration of childhood nostalgia in memorial practices. In these essays, the contributors suggest that childhood toys and media play a role in the construction of s the imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that define nations and nationalism. Eschewing the dichotomy between restorative and reflexive nostalgia, the essays in section three address the ethics of nostalgia in terms of child agency and depictions of childhood. In a departure from the notion that childhood nostalgia is the exclusive prerogative of narrative fiction, section four looks for its traces in the child sciences. Pushing against nostalgia's persistent associations with wishful thinking, false memories, and distortion, this collection suggests nostalgia is never categorically good or bad in itself, but owes its benefits or defects to the ways in which it is brought to bear on the representation of children and childhood.

Author of the enduringly popular Alice books, mathematician, Anglican cleric, and pioneer photographer, Lewis Carroll maintained a lifelong enthusiasm for the theatre. Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage is the first book to focus on Carroll's irresistible fascination with all things theatrical, from childhood charades and marionettes to active involvement in the dramatisation of Alice, influential contributions to the debate on child actors, and the friendship of leading players, especially Ellen Terry. As well as being a key to his complex and enigmatic personality, Carroll's interest in the theatre provides a vivid account of a remarkable era on the stage that encompassed Charles Kean's Shakespeare revivals, the comic genius of Frederick Robson, the heyday of pantomime, Gilbert and Sullivan, opera bouffe, the Terry sisters, Henry Irving, and favourite playwrights Tom Taylor, H. A. Jones, and J. M. Barrie. With attention to the complex motives that compelled Carroll to attend stage performances, Foulkes examines the incomparable record of over forty years as a playgoer that Carroll left for posterity.

In this groundbreaking contribution to Victorian and children's literature studies, Marah Gubar proposes a fundamental reconception of the nineteenth-century attitude toward childhood. The ideology of innocence was much slower to spread than we think, she contends, and the people whom we assume were most committed to it--children's authors and members of the infamous "cult of the child"--were actually deeply ambivalent about this Romantic notion. Rather than wholeheartedly promoting a static ideal of childhood purity, Golden Age children's authors often characterize young people as collaborators who are caught up in the constraints of the culture they inhabit, and yet not inevitably victimized as a result of this contact with adults and their world. Such nuanced meditations on the vexed issue of the child's agency, Gubar suggests, can help contemporary scholars to generate more flexible critical approaches to the study of childhood and children's literature.

Religion is playing an increasingly central role in African political and developmental life. This book offers an empirical and theoretical reflection on the relationships between religion, politics and development in Africa; the meanings of religion in non-Western contexts and the way that is embedded in the everyday life of people in Africa.

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls' book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls' book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl's essentially good nature neutralize the girl's own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence-a category that continues to engage and perplex us-from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls' book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls. Drawing on best-selling novels in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls reframes our understanding of the history of the girls' book and provides insightful readings of forgotten bestsellers. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl-so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls-remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.

I am not sure I would call myself a scholar, yet I doubt there are many educators in America who have taken Mark Twain's work into the places I have and come out on the other side. In the current political climate, I'm fearful that books that challenge us like Huckleberry Finn-books that are controversial-will be abandoned for fear of that controversy, the idea of upsetting some mom or some well-meaning, ill-informed school board member. Don't teach the best stuff, teach the least offensive, things no one will object to-or remember. But wouldn't Huck's hard-scrabble life fit perfectly at my school? If Huck was alive, wouldn't he go to my school? Wouldn't Huck's life strike a sadly familiar chord with so many of these young people raised by a single mom or a grandma, a Dad unknown or incarcerated, a long, sad trail of trouble stretching in every direction? Wouldn't they find-didn't they need-a moral compass in their own lives to mirror the one in this extraordinary tale of two absolute misfits who cared about each other; one willing to go, as he so movingly says, "to Hell" to help the other?

This landmark volume is the first to bring together leading scholarship on children's and young adult literature from three intersecting disciplines: Education, English, and Library and Information Science. Distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach, it describes and analyzes the different aspects of literary reading, texts, and contexts to illuminate how the book is transformed within and across different academic figurations of reading and interpreting children's literature. Part one considers perspectives on readers and reading literature in home, school, library, and community settings. Part two introduces analytic frames for studying young adult novels, picturebooks, indigenous literature, graphic novels, and other genres. Chapters include commentary on literary experiences and creative production from renowned authors and illustrators. Part three focuses on the social contexts of literary study, with chapters on censorship, awards, marketing, and literary museums. The singular contribution of this Handbook is to lay the groundwork for colleagues across disciplines to redraw the map of their separately figured worlds, thus to enlarge the scope of scholarship and dialogue as well as push ahead into uncharted territory.

The animal stories produced around the turn of the 20th century have maintained a remarkable hold on the imagination of children worldwide. This critical book examines the performance of masculinity in these stories, particularly in light of the waning years of Victoria's reign when changing historical, political and social pressures altered the definition of masculinity. An examination of aestheticism, multicultural religious and spiritual forces, and the role of genre are key to understanding how these authors scripted masculinity onto non-human character. Topics covered include the roles of violence, rebellion, escape, spirituality, social hierarchies and law. A vital addition to the scholarly examination of children's literature.

The Routledge Companion to Children 's Literature is a vibrant and authoritative exploration of children 's literature in all its manifestations. It features a series of essays written by expert contributors who provide an illuminating examination of why children 's literature is the way it is. Topics covered include:

• the history and development of children's literature
• various theoretical approaches used to explore the texts, including narratological methods
• questions of gender and sexuality along with issues of race and ethnicity
• realism and fantasy as two prevailing modes of story-telling
• picture books, comics and graphic novels as well as young adult fiction and the crossover novel
• media adaptations and neglected areas of children 's literature.

The Routledge Companion to Children 's Literature contains suggestions for further reading throughout plus a helpful timeline and a substantial glossary of key terms and names, both established and more cutting-edge. This is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to an increasingly complex and popular discipline.

Read Pam Allyn's posts on the Penguin Blog
The books to read aloud to children at the important moments in their lives.
In "What to Read When," award-winning educator Pam Allyn celebrates the power of reading aloud with children. In many ways, books provide the first opportunity for children to begin to reflectively engage with and understand the world around them. Not only can parents entertain their child and convey the beauty of language through books, they can also share their values and create lasting connections.
Here, Allyn offers parents and caregivers essential advice on choosing appropriate titles for their children--taking into account a child's age, attention ability, gender, and interests-- along with techniques for reading aloud effectively. But what sets this book apart is the extraordinary, annotated list of more than three hundred titles suitable for the pivotal moments in a child's life. With category themes ranging from friendship and journeys to thankfulness, separations, silliness, and spirituality, "What to Read When" is a one-of-a-kind guide to how parents can best inspire children through reading together. In addition, Pam Allyn includes an indispensable "Reader's Ladder" section, with recommendations for children at every stage from birth to age ten. With the author's warm and engaging voice throughout, discussion questions to encourage in-depth conversations, as well as advice on helping kids make the transition to independent reading, this book will help shape thoughtful, creative, and curious children, imparting a love of reading that will last a lifetime.
These Penguin Young Reader's Books are referenced in "What to Read When"
"Sylvia Jean: Drama Queen " by Lisa Campbell Ernst (Penguin Young Reader's Group: 2005)"Two Is For Twins," by Wendy Cheyette Lewison, illustrations by Hiroe Nakata (Penguin Young Readers: 2006)"Remember Grandma? " by Laura Langston (Penguin Group (USA): May 2004)"Soul Looks Back in Wonder" compiled by Tom Feelings (Puffin Books)"Time of Wonder " by Robert McCloskey (Penguin Books USA, Incorporated: December 1957)"When I was Young in the Mountains"by Cynthia Rylant illustrated by Diane Goode (Penguin Young Readers Group: January 1993)"Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs" by Tomie DePaola (Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, Inc.:1973)"Good Night, Good Knight" by Shelly Moore Thomas, illustrations by Jennifer Plecas (Penguin Young Readers Group: 2002)

This book demonstrates how contemporary children's texts draw on utopian and dystopian tropes in their projections of possible futures. The authors explore the ways in which children's texts respond to social change and global politics. The book argues that children's texts are crucially implicated in shaping the values of their readers.

Children's texts are highly responsive to social change and to global politics, and are implicated in shaping the values of children and young people. "New World Orders," now in paperback for the first time, shows how texts for children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic and political movements of the last fifteen years. With a focus on international children's texts produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures to child readers. The book considers what these texts have to say about globalization, neocolonialism, environmental issues, pressures on families and communities, and the idea of the posthuman. This fascinating volume is the first thorough study of how children's books imagine and propose possible worlds and societies.

This book offers a new history of the fairy tale, revealing the creative role of periodical publication in shaping this popular genre. Sumpter explores the fairy tale's reinvention for (and by) diverse readerships in unexpected contexts, including debates over evolution, colonialism, socialism, gender and sexuality and decadence.

In this book, Ewers provides students and professors with a new system of categorization for a differentiated description of children's literature. In the early 1970s, Swedish children's literature scholar Gote Kingberg worked to establish a system of scientific terminology for international use, but these terms are now somewhat antiquated. This book offers a much-needed update, systematically analyzing the field and articulating its key definitions, terms, and concepts.

International in scope, this study touches on subjects including the distribution of primers and textbooks, the means by which children's books are evaluated and classified, and the ways in which children's literature can find an adult audience. Also discussed are the system of symbols, norms, concepts, and discourses that have evolved during the past two centuries, leading to an investigation of how authors and publishers have endeavored to make literature "appropriate" for children and of what it means to accommodate children's needs, wishes, and values. Throughout, Ewers provides concrete examples and clear definitions of terms so that any scholar interested in children's literature will find this book approachable, insightful, and one that crosses cultural boundaries.

Can fairy tales subvert consumerism? Can fantasy and children's literature counter the homogenizing influence of globalization? Can storytellers retain their authenticity in the age of consumerism? These are some of the critical questions raised by Jack Zipes, the celebrated scholar of fairy tales and children's literature. In this book, Zipes argues that, despite a dangerous reconfiguration of children as consumers in the civilizing process, children's literature, fairy tales, and storytelling possess a uniquely powerful (even fantastic)capacity to resist the "relentless progress" of negative trends in culture. He also argues that these tales and stories may lose their power if they are too diluted by commercialism and merchandising.

Stories have been used for centuries as a way to teach children (and adults) how to see the world, as well as their place within it. In Relentless Progress, Zipes looks at the surprising ways that stories have influenced people within contemporary culture and vice versa. Among the many topics explored here are the dumbing down of books for children, the marketing of childhood, the changing shape of feminist fairy tales, and why American and British children aren t exposed to more non-western fairy tales. From picture books to graphic novels, from children s films to video games, from Grimm s fairy tales to the multimedia Harry Potter phenomenon, Zipes demonstrates that while children s stories have changed greatly in recent years, much about these stories have remained the same despite their contemporary, high-tech repackaging.

Relentless Progress offers remarkable insight into why classic folklore and fairy tales should remain an important part of the lives of children in today s digital culture.