Roald Dahl is one of the world's best-loved authors. More than twenty years after his death, his books are still highly popular with children and have inspired numerous feature films - yet he remains a controversial figure. This volume, the first collection of academic essays ever to be devoted to Dahl's work, brings together a team of well-known scholars of children's literature to explore the man, his books for children, and his complex attitudes towards various key subjects. Including essays on education, crime, Dahl's humour, his long-term collaboration with the artist Quentin Blake, and film adaptations, this fascinating collection offers a unique insight into the writer and his world.

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

Despite the fame Ted Hughes's poetry has achieved, there has been surprisingly little critical writing on his children's literature. This book identifies the importance of Hughes's children's writing from an ecocritical perspective and argues that the healing function that Hughes ascribes to nature in his children's literature is closely linked to the development of his own sense of environmental responsibility. This book will be the first sustained examination of Hughes's greening in relation to his writing for children, providing a detailed reading of Hughes's children's literature through his poetry, prose and drama as well as his critical essays and letters. In addition, it also explores how Hughes's children's writing is a window to the poet's own emotional struggles, as well as his environmental consciousness and concern to reconnect a society that has become alienated from nature. This book will be of great interest to not only those studying Ted Hughes, but also students and scholars of environment and literature, ecocriticism, children's literature and twentieth-century literature.

This is the first extended text-based analysis of the social and political implications of the "Harry Potter" phenomenon. Arguments are primarily based on close readings of the first four "Harry Potter" books and the first two films - in other words, a 'text-to-world' method is followed. This study does not assume that the phenomenon concerns children alone, or should be lightly dismissed as a matter of pure entertainment. The amount of money, media coverage, and ideological unease involved indicates otherwise. The first part provides a survey of responses (both of general readers and critics) to the "Harry Potter" books. Some of the methodological decisions underlying this study itself are also explained here. The second part examines the presentation of certain themes, including gender, race and desire, in the "Harry Potter" books, with a view to understanding how these may impinge on social and political concerns of our world.

Choona, a young Cherokee boy, goes down the river in a canoe with his grandfather and learns many useful things which he will use throughout his life.

Offers new insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on a wide range of international picture books for children published between 1963 and 2008. Its chapters include metafiction; disruption to narrative conventions; interrogation of 'truths'; historiographic metafiction; difference and ex-centricity; globalisation and media.

Find the right books to prepare persuasive, inspiring book talks with this successor to Introducing Books, Introducing More Books and Introducing Bookplots 3. Middleplots 4 details 80 books grouped under 8 subject areas such as Adventure and Mystery Stories and contains special cumulative indexes to the titles profiled in earlier editions.

Alice to the Lighthouse is the first and only full-length study of the relation between children's literature and writing for adults. Lewis Carroll's Alice books created a revolution in writing for and about children which had repercussions not only for subsequent children's writers - such as Stevenson, Kipling, Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mark Twain - but for Virginia Woolf and her generation. Virginia Woolf's celebration of writing as play rather than preaching is the twin of the Post-Impressionist art championed by Roger Fry. Dusinberre connects books for children in the late nineteenth century with developments in education and psychology, all of which feed into the modernism of the early twentieth century.

Since the eighteenth century, toys have had an important place in European and American stories written for children and adults, often taking on a secret, sensual, even carnivalesque life of their own. In this ground-breaking work, Lois Rostow Kuznets studies the role of toy characters in works ranging from older classics like Pinocchio, Winnie the Pooh, and The Velveteen Rabbit, through modern texts like The Mouse and His Child and the popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, to the latest science fiction featuring robots and cyborgs. Using a variety of intertextual critical approaches, including feminist theory, neo-Freudian Winnicott play analysis, structuralism, and neo-Marxism, Kuznets focuses on how toy characters, like children's play, can be associated with deep human needs, desires, and fears. Anxiety about being "real" - an autonomous subject rather than an object - permeates many of the texts Kuznets analyzes. Toy fantasies also raise existential issues of power: what it means either to dominate or to be dominated by more powerful beings, and what dangers might lie in the transformation of a toy into a living being - an act of human creativity that represents a challenge to divine creation. Kuznets concludes that although many of these texts subvert conformity on an individual level, they also tend to evoke a romantic nostalgia that supports the underlying values and hierarchies of a patriarchal society.

This book is designed to challenge the view that children's literature is innately conservative - that it lags behind writing for adults. By looking at a range of texts, past and present, it shows that children's literature is in fact a playground in which radical and innovative texts are devised. Developments in children's literature have not gone uncontested, particularly when a controversial children's book also wins a major literary prize. But to date there has been no focused examination of how far conventional boundaries have been breached in children's literature, or what it means that the boundaries between writing for adults and children are increasingly blurred. Neither has the cultural debt owed to children's literature as a source of innovation and assimilation of new ideas in writing, illustration and narrative experimentation been acknowledged. Radical Children's Literature begins this process by exploring how writing for children redirects the way in which genres, texts and new technologies interact creatively with childhood and youth culture.

Curricula in literature have traditionally focused on the writings of the West. The influx of immigrants from Eastern and Southeastern Asia, and more recently from Pacific countries and islands, has brought to our schools children who deserve to be introduced to their own literary heritage. So too, as American society gains more members from Oceanic cultures, it is important that Americans of European ancestry become better acquainted with the literature of the Pacific. This bibliography includes annotated entries written in English for children's and young adult literature concerning the cultures of Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, Australia, and New Zealand. The volume begins with an introductory overview of Oceania's geographical features, people, and customs. The chapters that follow are devoted to specific regions of Oceania, and each includes an overview of the literature, an annotated list of books for children and young adults, and an annotated bibliography of secondary sources for adults. Within each bibliography, entries are organized alphabetically by author.

Lists sources of biographical information for individuals of interest to young readers.

In this pioneering work about the precursor to the comic book, Kelly Boyd traces the evolution of the boys' story paper and its impact on the imaginative world of working-class readers. From the penny dreadful and the <I>Boy's Own Paper</I> to the tales of Billy Bunter and Sexton Blake, this cultural form shaped ideas about gender, race, class, and empire in response to social change.

An entertaining guide for building safe and fun forts - outside, inside, at the beach, and in snow country. Ages 8-14.

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.

How do you select the best recent works of fiction, oral tradition, and poetry about African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American Indian experiences and traditions from the profusion of titles being published today? This annotated bibliography of titles for children and young adults published from 1985 through the end of 1993--with 60% published since 1990--provides a one-stop selection tool. Appraisals of 559 titles, as well as information about an additional 188 recent books and 90 earlier ones of importance, are provided.

Each entry features a plot summary incorporating themes, critical comments with a judgment of the book's value as an example of its genre, suggestions of other books by that writer, and related books of importance. The authors, who are recognized authorities in children's literature, and an advistory board of librarians and teachers, each of whom specializes in the literature of a particular ethnic group, have provided insightful critical appraisals and expertise and guidance in the selection of titles. Helpful subject, grade-level, author, title, and illustrator indexes are organized for ease of use. Titles in the grade-level and subject indexes are also identified by ethnic group.

Honorary Chief of the Black Creek Cherokee of Florida, river-rafter, and backwoods guide, Willy Whitefeather has lived in the wilderness for many years. When he found almost all of the how-to-survive-in-the-woods books were written for grown-ups, he sat down and wrote this book for his grandchildren and for kids everywhere so they could learn how to "make it back safe".

This engaging study examines diverse genders and sexualities in a wide range of contemporary fiction for children and young people. Mallans insights into key dilemmas arising from the texts treatment of romance, beauty, cyberbodies, queer, and comedy are provocative and trustworthy, and deliver exciting theoretical and social perspectives.

First published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Being literate increases a person's chances of enjoying good mental health, but many of today's teenagers come from backgrounds or circumstances that interfere with their literacy development. This unique resource for teachers, librarians, counselors and parents combines the expertise of two professionals: literacy experts and therapists. Together they provide guidance, through the examination and analysis of characters in young adult literature, to those working with troubled teens. Thereby helping professionals and parents gain insight into the inner workings of teenagers and encourage them to deal with their family issues and emotional problems while improving their reading and writing skills.

A young adult literature expert and a therapist, including such authors as Chris Crutcher and Anne LeMieux, team up for each chapter. They provide possible treatment options for young adult protagonists in popular novels that address issues associated with families. These issues include divorce, parental illness, alcoholism, foster care, eating disorders, gay and lesbian teenagers, and suicide. Readers are provided with the insight into helping teenagers with similar problems, and with the tools to get teenagers reading and addressing their problems. Extensive annotated bibliographies in each chapter help the reader choose the best sources for each particular case.

Reissuing works originally published between 1981 and 2000 this set offers an outstanding small collection of scholarship. It includes volumes on Victorian fiction for children, boys' school stories, heroes in children's literature, boyhood and children's literature as art and how criticism developed for the genre.

Children's literature is a rapidly expanding field of research which presents students and researchers with a number of practical and intellectual challenges. This research handbook is the first devoted to the specialist skills and complexities of studying children's literature at university level. Bringing together the expertise of leading international scholars, it combines practical advice with in-depth discussion of critical approaches. Wide- ranging in approach, "Children's Literature Studies: A Research Handbook: " * Considers 'children's literature' in its fullest sense, examining visual texts (such as picturebooks), films, computer games and other 'transformed' texts, as well as more traditional modes of writing for children* Offers a step-by-step guide to devising, starting and carrying out a research project (such as a dissertation or thesis), and advice on what kinds of research it is possible and profitable to undertake* Surveys the different methodologies and theoretical approaches used by children's literature scholars* Includes case studies, questions and exercises to reinforce ideas discussed in each chapter* Provides lists of further reading and a specialist glossary that will remain a useful reference resource. This handbook will be an essential companion for those studying children's literature, whether as undergraduates, postgraduates, or beyond.