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.

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.

This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children's and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children's and young adult literature.

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

This intriguing anthology brings together a broad range of critical essays on girls' series fiction from established scholars such as Chamberlain, Johnson, and Romalov, along with emerging scholars Katrine Poe, Maureen Reed, and Deborah Siegel. Topics include: Anne of Green Gables, the Isabel Carleton series, early twentieth-century girls' automobile series, girls' scouting novels, 1910-1935, Cherry Ames in World War II, Nancy Drew, and Judy Bolton.

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.

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.

"German Children's and Youth Literature in Exile 1933-1950," contains biographies of 101 authors and illustrators of children's and youth literature as well as bibliographies of the books written and illustrated by them that were published in exile between 1933 and 1950. Included are authors who were born before 1918 in Germany or in areas of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, who were forced to flee and live through the Nazi dictatorship in exile. Among them were prominent authors such as Bertolt Brecht, authors of "classics" in children's and youth literature like Kurt Held ("Die rote Zora und ihre Bande"; 1941), Irmgard Keun ("Nach Mitternacht"; 1937) oder Felix Salten ("Bambi"; 1923), and also authors less known today. Each bibliography also includes the translations of the author's works into languages from all over the world. Recorded in the bibliographies are all forms and genres of children's literature: narrative literature and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Every bibliographic entry contains a short overview of the contents, a description of the graphic techniques used for the illustrations, and if known, a commentary on the historical origins of the book, as well as information on the place where the copy of the book was examined. The handbook includes two indexes. The name index lists the names of authors, illustrators, editors, translators and designers, the private owners of the copies examined, as well as the names of other authors in exile listed in the biography. The title index lists all the books that are described in the bibliographies.

Re-reading Harry Potter is the first extended 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, and 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 as the amount of money, media coverage, and ideological unease involved indicates otherwise. The first part of the study provides a survey of responses (both of general readers and critics) to the Harry Potter books. The second part examines the presentation of certain themes, including gender, race, and desire, with a view to understanding how these may impinge on social and political concerns of our world.

An adapted and illustrated edition of Jane Austen's romantic classic - at an easy-to-read level for all ages! All Catherine wants is to be like the heroines in the books she reads. On her first trip away from home, she finally gets her chance. A new friendship and a growing love lead her to the spooky Northanger Abbey. There Catherine will find that a little imagination can cause a lot of trouble. About Jane Austen Children's Stories: From the gardens of Pemberley to the spooky halls of Northanger Abbey, join some of literature's most iconic heroines on their path to self-discovery and true love. An adaptation of Jane Austen's famous stories, illustrated to introduce children aged 7+ to the classics.

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.