'Rundell is the real deal, a writer of boundless gifts and extraordinary imaginative power whose novels will be read, cherished and reread long after most so-called "serious" novels are forgotten' Observer

Katherine Rundell - Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and prize-winning author of five novels for children - explores how children's books ignite, and can re-ignite, the imagination; how children's fiction, with its unabashed emotion and playfulness, can awaken old hungers and create new perspectives on the world. This delightful and persuasive essay is for adult readers.

Metaphysics of Children's Literature is the first sustained study of ways in which children's literature confronts metaphysical questions about reality and the nature of what there is in the world. In its exploration of something and nothing, this book identifies a number of metaphysical structures in texts for young people-such as the ontological exchange or nowhere in extremis-demonstrating that their entanglement with the workings of reality is unique to the conditions of children's literature. Drawing on contemporary children's literature discourse and metaphysicians from Heidegger and Levinas, to Bachelard, Sartre and Haraway, Lisa Sainsbury reveals the metaphysical groundwork of children's literature. Authors and illustrators covered include: Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Mac Barnett, Ron Brooks, Peter Brown, Lewis Carroll, Eoin Colfer, Gary Crew, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Imme Dros, Sarah Ellis, Mem Fox, Zana Fraillon, Libby Gleeson, Kenneth Grahame, Armin Greder, Sonya Hartnett, Tana Hoban, Judy Horacek, Tove Jansson, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Elaine Konigsburg, Norman Lindsay, Geraldine McCaughrean, Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Edith Nesbit, Mary Norton, Jill Paton Walsh, Philippa Pearce, Ivan Southall, William Steig, Shaun Tan, Tarjei Vesaas, David Wiesner, Margaret Wild, Jacqueline Woodson and many others.

Contemporary children's picture books provide a rich domain for developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of 'multimodal' discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children's earliest literature. The book uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and The book uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and the discourse organization of visual meanings through choices in framing and composition (compositional meaning). The descriptions throughout are illustrated with examples from highly regarded children's picture books. This book extends previous social-semiotic accounts of the 'grammar' of the image, by focussing attention on discourse level meanings and on semantic relationships created by sequences of images. At the same time, it extends current understandings of how picture books work through its explicit and systematic account of the visual meanings and their integration with verbal aspects of the texts. It will be of interest to researchers in (multimodal) discourse analysis, systemic-functional theory and children's literature and literacy.

Over the last 20 years, Jacqueline Wilson has published well over 100 titles and has become firmly established in the landscape of Children's Literature. She has written for all ages, from picture books for young readers to young adult fiction and tackles a wide variety of controversial topics, such as child abuse, mental illness and bereavement. Although she has received some criticism for presenting difficult and seemingly 'adult' topics to children, she remains overwhelmingly popular among her audience and has won numerous prizes selected by children, such as the Smarties Book Prize. This collection of newly commissioned essays explores Wilson's literature from all angles. The essays cover not only the content and themes of Wilson's writing, but also her success as a publishing phenomenon and the branding of her books. Issues of gender roles and child/carer relationships are examined alongside Wilson's writing style and use of techniques such as the unreliable narrator. The book also features an interview with Jacqueline Wilson herself, where she discusses the challenges of writing social realism for young readers and how her writing has changed over her lengthy career.

Literary critics and authors have long argued about the importance or unimportance of an author's relationship to readers. What can be said about the rhetorical relationship that exists between author and reader? How do authors manipulate character, specifically, to modulate the emotional appeal of character so a reader will feel empathy, awe, even delight? In At Arm's Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children's and Young Adult Literature, Mike Cadden takes a rhetorical approach that complements structural, affective, and cognitive readings. The study offers a detailed examination of the ways authorial choice results in emotional invitation. Cadden sounds the modulation of characters along a continuum from those larger than life and awe inspiring to the life-sized and empathetic, down to the pitiable and ridiculous, and all those spaces between. Cadden examines how authors alternate between holding the young reader at arm's length from and drawing them into emotional intensity. This balance and modulation are key to a rhetorical understanding of character in literature, film, and television for the young. Written in accessible language and of interest and use to undergraduates and seasoned critics, At Arm's Length provides a broad analysis of stories for the young child and young adult, in book, film, and television. Throughout, Cadden touches on important topics in children's literature studies, including the role of safety in children's media, as well as character in multicultural and diverse literature. In addition to treating ""traditional"" works, he analyzes special cases-forms, including picture books, verse novels, and graphic novels, and modes like comedy, romance, and tragedy.

While most scholars who study children's books are pre-occupied with the child characters and adult mediators, Vanessa Joosen re-positions the lens to focus on the under-explored construction of adulthood in children's literature. Adulthood in Children's Literature demonstrates how books for young readers evoke adulthood as a stage in life, enacted by adult characters, and in relationship with the construction of childhood. Employing age studies as a framework for analysis, this book covers a range of English and Dutch children's books published from 1970 to the present. Calling upon critical voices like Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Peter Hollindale, Maria Nikolajeva and Lorraine Green, and the works of such authors as Babette Cole, Philip Pullman, Ted van Lieshout, Jacqueline Wilson, Salman Rushdie and Guus Kuijer, Joosen offers a fresh perspective on children's literature by focusing not on the child but the adult.

Following on the heels of the first volume of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, this second volume narrates the development of L.M. Montgomery's (1874-1942) critical reputation in the seventy years since her death. Edited by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre, it traces milestones and turning points such as adaptations for stage and screen, posthumous publications, and the development of Montgomery Studies as a scholarly field. Lefebvre's introduction also considers Montgomery's publishing history in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom at a time when her work remained in print not because it was considered part of a university canon of literature, but simply due to the continued interest of readers. The twenty samples of Montgomery scholarship included in this volume broach topics such as gender and genre, narrative strategies in fiction and life writing, translation, and Montgomery's archival papers. They reflect shifts in Montgomery's critical reputation decade by decade: the 1960s, when a milestone chapter on Montgomery coincided with a second wave of texts seeking to create a canon of Canadian literature; the 1970s, in the midst of a sustained reassessment of popular fiction and of literature by women; the 1980s, when the publication of Montgomery's life writing, which coincided with the broadcast of critically acclaimed television productions adapted from her fiction, radically altered how readers perceived her and her work; the 1990s, when a conference series on Montgomery began to generate a sustained amount of scholarship; and the opening years of the twenty-first century, when the field of Montgomery Studies became both international and interdisciplinary. This is the first book to consider the posthumous life of one of Canada's most enduringly popular authors.

The L.M. Montgomery Reader assembles significant rediscovered primary material on one of Canada's most enduringly popular authors throughout her high-profile career and after her death. Each of its three volumes gathers pieces published all over the world to set the stage for a much-needed reassessment of Montgomery's literary reputation. Much of the material is freshly unearthed from archives and digital collections and has never before been published in book form. The selections appearing in this first volume focus on Montgomery's role as a public celebrity and author of the resoundingly successful Anne of Green Gables (1908). They give a strong impression of her as a writer and cultural critic as she discusses a range of topics with wit, wisdom, and humour, including the natural landscape of Prince Edward Island, her wide readership, anxieties about modernity, and the continued relevance of "old ideals." These essays and interviews, joined by a number of additional pieces that discuss her work's literary and cultural value in relation to an emerging canon of Canadian literature, make up nearly one hundred selections in all. Each volume is accompanied by an extensive introduction and detailed commentary by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre that trace the interplay between the author and the critic, as well as between the private and the public Montgomery. This volume - and the Reader as a whole - adds tremendously to our understanding and appreciation of Montgomery's legacy as a Canadian author and as a literary celebrity both during and beyond her lifetime.

Essays by Ian Andrews, Roland Boer, Heidi Brush, Angela Hubler, Cynthia Anne McLeod, Carl F. Miller, Jana Mikota, Mervyn Nicholson, Jane Rosen, Sharon Smulders, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Naomi Wood A significant body of scholarship examines the production of children's literature by women and minorities, as well as the representation of gender, race, and sexuality. But few scholars have previously analyzed class in children's literature. This definitive collection remedies that by defining and exemplifying historical materialist approaches to children's literature. The introduction of Little Red Readings lucidly discusses characteristics of historical materialism, the methodological approach to the study of literature and culture first outlined by Karl Marx, defining key concepts and analyzing factors that have marginalized this tradition, particularly in the United States. The thirteen essays here analyze a wide range of texts--from children's bibles to Mary Poppins to The Hunger Games--using concepts in historical materialism from class struggle to the commodity. Essayists apply the work of Marxist theorists such as Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson to children's literature and film. Others examine the work of leftist writers in India, Germany, England, and the United States. The authors argue that historical materialist methodology is critical to the study of children's literature, as children often suffer most from inequality. Some of the critics in this collection reveal the ways that literature for children often functions to naturalize capitalist economic and social relations. Other critics champion literature that reveals to readers the construction of social reality and point to texts that enable an understanding of the role ordinary people might play in creating a more just future. The collection adds substantially to our understanding of the political and class character of children's literature worldwide, and contributes to the development of a radical history of children's literature.

This important new book is the first monograph on children's poetry written between 1780 and 1830, when non-religious children's poetry publishing came into its own. Introducing some of the era's most significant children's poets, the book shows how the conventions of children's verse and poetics were established during the Romantic era.

For more than three decades, the same children's historical novels have been taught across the United States. Honored for their literary quality and appreciated for their alignment with social studies curricula, the books have flourished as schools moved from whole-language to phonics and from student-centered learning to standardized testing.

Books like "Johnny Tremain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins," and "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" stimulate children's imagination, transporting them into the American past and projecting them into an American future. As works of historical interpretation, however, many are startlingly out of step with current historiography and social sensibilities, especially with regard to race. Unlike textbooks, which are replaced on regular cycles and subjected to public tugs-of-war between the left and right, historical novels have simply--and quietly--endured. Taken individually, many present troubling interpretations of the American past. But embraced collectively, this classroom canon provides a rare pedagogical opportunity: it captures a range of interpretive voices across time and place, a kind of "people's history" far removed from today's state-sanctioned textbooks.

Teachers who employ historical novels in the classroom can help students recognize and interpret historical narrative as the product of research, analytical perspective, and the politics of the time. In doing so, they sensitize students to the ways in which the past is put to moral and ideological uses in the present.

Featuring separate chapters on American Indians, war, and slavery, "Child-Sized History" tracks the changes in how young readers are taught to conceptualize history and the American nation.

This genre guide to graphic novel reading interests helps librarians and teachers choose titles appropriate for children and 'tweens. Librarians and teachers know how important graphic novels can be in engaging young readers and even getting reluctant readers interested in books. Graphic Novels for Young Readers: A Genre Guide for Ages 4-14 identifies and describes the growing number of graphic novels that are suitable for and popular with readers ages 6-14. Taking a genre approach, the book organizes approximately 400 titles, most of them published in the last five years, according to genre, subgenre, and theme. It describes series and lists bibliographic information for each title. Also included are subjects and read-alikes, as well as designations of awards. A great readers' advisory tool, this guide can also be used for collection development in school and public libraries.

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.

During the early colonial encounter, children's books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US's role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the public. Subsequently, youth literature and media were important tools of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought as a means of negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance. In Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture, author Marilisa Jimenez Garcia focuses on the contributions of the Puerto Rican community to American youth, approaching Latinx literature as a transnational space that provides a critical lens for examining the lingering consequences of US and Spanish colonialism for US communities of color. Through analysis of such texts typically outside traditional Latinx or literary studies as young adult literature, textbooks, television programming, comics, music, curriculum, and youth movements, Side by Side represents the only comprehensive study of the contributions of Puerto Ricans to American youth literature and culture, as well as the only comprehensive study into the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rican literature and thought. Considering recent debates over diversity in children's and young adult literature and media and the strained relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, Jimenez Garcia's timely work encourages us to question who constitutes the expert and to resist the homogenization of Latinxs, as well as other marginalized communities, that has led to the erasure of writers, scholars, and artists.

Featuring close readings of selected poetry, visual texts, short stories and novels published for children since 1945 from Naughty Amelia Jane to Watership Down, this is the first extensive study of the nature and form of ethical discourse in British children's literature. Ethics in British Children's Literature explores the extent to which contemporary writing for children might be considered philosophical, tackling ethical spheres relevant to and arising from books for young people, such as naughtiness, good and evil, family life, and environmental ethics. Rigorously engaging with influential moral philosophers, from Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, to Arno Leopold, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, and Lars Svendsen, this book demonstrates the narrative strategies employed to engage young readers as moral agents.

Featuring close readings of commonly studied texts, this book takes students of Children's Literature through the key works, their contexts and critical and popular afterlives. "Children's Literature in Context" is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to children's literature and its wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues involved in the study of children's literature and its social, cultural and literary contexts. Close readings of commonly studied texts including Lewis Carroll's Alice books, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", "The Lion", "The Witch and the Wardrobe", the "Harry Potter" series and the "His Dark Materials" trilogy highlight major themes and ways of reading children's literature. A chapter on afterlives and adaptations explores a range of wider cultural texts including the film adaptations of "Harry Potter", "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Golden Compass". The final section introduces key critical interpretations from different perspectives on issues including innocence, gender, fantasy, psychoanalysis and ideology. 'Review, Reading and Research' sections give suggestions for further reading, discussion and research. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying children's literature. Texts and Contexts is a series of clear, concise and accessible introductions to key literary fields and concepts. The series provides the literary, critical, historical context for texts and authors in a specific literary area in a way that introduces a range of work in the field and enables further independent study and reading.