This compelling New Casebook is the first essay collection devoted to the work of groundbreaking American author Robert Cormier. Written by a team of international children's literature experts, the volume offers a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to the range of Cormier's controversial young adult novels. The newly-commissioned essays explore the author's earlier best-known writings for teenagers as well as his later less critically examined texts, focussing on key issues such as adolescence, identity, bullying and child corruption. Recognizing Cormier's achievement, this long-overdue critical resource is essential reading for anyone with an interest in his influential work and lasting impact on young adult fiction.

The act of imagining lies at the very heart of children's engagements with literature and with the plots and characters they encounter in their favorite stories. The Courage to Imagine is a landmark new study of that fundamental act of imagining. Roni Natov focuses on the ways in which children's imaginative engagement with the child hero figure can open them up to other people's experiences, developing empathy across lines of race, gender and sexuality, as well as helping them to confront and handle traumatic experience safely. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches from the psychological to the cultural and reading a multicultural spectrum of authors, including works by Maya Angelou, Louise Erdrich, Neil Gaiman and Brian Selznick, this is a groundbreaking examination of the nature of imagining for children and re-imagining for the adult writer and illustrator.

This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Astroem seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children's literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.

This book is designed to meet the needs of professionals working with children and their books. Intented for use as a reference book for library assistants and librarians, in children's libraries, school libraries, resource centres, and general reference libraries, it should also to provide sound information for trainee librarians, teachers and parents. The primary function of this book is to serve as a guide to the selection of books for children, recognising the vast range of books published and the individual rates of reading and social development of different children.The first section focuses on 'The Child: Growing and Knowing through Books', applying reading development theories of the 20th and 21st century to the selection of specific books and covering the characteristics of the various genres of children's literature, including the classics and award winners.There is also coverage of books for special situations and dilemmas and for children who are reluctant to read, along with a section on electronic formats.The second section focuses on 'The Professional: Knowing and Growing', providing ideas for book promotion within the children's library or school library and classroom.This section includes a contribution from Tricia Kings and covers the selection of books for children from ethnic groups communities through out the world.There are also ideas for books for fathers and sons to enjoy reading together.

Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children's literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.

The Shelf2Life Children's Literature and Fiction Collection is a charming set of pre-1923 nursery rhymes, fairy tales, classic novels and short stories for children and young adults. From a tardy white rabbit, spirited orphan and loyal watchdog to a dreamer named Dorothy, this collection presents an assortment of memorable characters whose stories light up the pages. The young and young at heart will delight in magical tales of fairies and angels and be captivated by explorations of mysterious islands. The Shelf2Life Children's Literature and Fiction Collection allows you to open a door into a world of fantasy and make-believe where imaginations can run wild.

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.

Over the past fifty years, children's literature has freed itself of many traditional restrictions and become a field of exciting innovations in both form and content. The new status of children's literature has been accompanied by an unprecedented growth in research on children's literature internationally. This volume explores the many changes that have taken place in the past half-century in children's literature, showing how those changes reflect our rapidly-changing world and attempt to prepare children for the new millennium. Among the issues discussed are the shifting boundaries between children's literature and adult literature, postmodern trends, paradigm shifts, national literatures, and the reconceptualization of the past.

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.

The first book-length look at childhood in Edwardian fiction, this book challenges assumptions that the Edwardian period was simply a continuation of the Victorian or the start of the Modern. Exploring both classics and popular fiction, the authors provide a a compelling picture of the Edwardian fictional cult of childhood.

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.

Mystery in Children's Literature charts a development from religious mystery through rationally solved detective fictions to insoluble supernatural and horror mysteries. Written by internationally recognized scholars in the field, these 13 original essays offer challenging and innovative readings of both classic and popular mysteries for children. This volume will be essential and stimulating for anyone with an interest in children's literature or in mystery fiction.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This book makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of childhood studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture by drawing on the intersecting fields of girlhood, evangelicalism, and reform to investigate texts written in North America about girls, for girls, and by girls. Responding both to the intellectual excitement generated by the rise of girlhood studies, as well as to the call by recent scholars to recognize the significance of religion as a meaningful category in the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture, this collection locates evangelicalism at the center of its inquiry into girlhood. Contributors draw on a wide range of texts, including canonical literature by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and overlooked archives such as US Methodist Sunday School fiction, children's missionary periodicals, and the Christian Recorder, the flagship newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. These essays investigate representations of girlhood that engage, codify, and critique normative Protestant constructions of girlhood. Contributors examine girlhood in the context of reform, revealing the ways in which Protestantism at once constrained and enabled female agency. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives, including African American Studies, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, and Material Culture Studies, this volume enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century childhood by focusing on the particularities of girlhood, expanding it beyond that of the white able-bodied middle-class girl and attending to the intersectionality of identity and religion.

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.

Movable books are an innovative area of children's publishing. Commonly equated with spectacular pop-ups, movable books have a little-known history as interactive, narrative media. Since they are hybrid artifacts consisting of words, images and movable components, they cross the borders between story, toy, and game. Interactive Books is a historical and comparative study of early movable books in relation to the children who engage with them. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh focuses on the period movable books became connected with children from the mid-17th to the early-19th centuries. In particular, she examines turn-up books, paper doll books, and related hybrid experiments like toy theaters and paignion (or domestic play set) produced between 1650 and 1830. Despite being popular in their own time, these artifacts are little known today. This study draws attention to a gap in our knowledge of children's print culture by showing how these artifacts are important in their own right. Reid-Walsh combines archival research with children's literature studies, book history, and juvenilia studies. By examining commercially produced and homemade examples, she explores the interrelations among children, interactive media, and historical participatory culture. By drawing on both Enlightenment thinkers and contemporary digital media theorists Interactive Books enables us to think critically about children's media texts paper and digital, past and present.

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.

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