This book explores the meaning of nation or nationalism in children's literature and how it constructs and represents different national experiences. The contributors discuss diverse aspects of children's literature and film from interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches, ranging from the short story and novel to science fiction and fantasy from a range of locations including Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Norway, America, Italy, Great Britain, Iceland, Africa, Japan, South Korea, India, Sweden and Greece. The emergence of modern nation-states can be seen as coinciding with the historical rise of children's literature, while stateless or diasporic nations have frequently formulated their national consciousness and experience through children's literature, both instructing children as future citizens and highlighting how ideas of childhood inform the discourses of nation and citizenship. Because nation and childhood are so intimately connected, it is crucial for critics and scholars to shed light on how children's literatures have constructed and represented historically different national experiences. At the same time, given the massive political and demographic changes in the world since the nineteenth century and the formation of nation states, it is also crucial to evaluate how the national has been challenged by changing national languages through globalization, international commerce, and the rise of English. This book discusses how the idea of childhood pervades the rhetoric of nation and citizenship, and how children and childhood are represented across the globe through literature and film.

The Mary Poppins that many people know of today--a stern, but sweet, loveable, and reassuring British nanny--is a far cry from the character created by Pamela Lyndon Travers in the 1930's. Instead, this is the Mary Poppins reinvented by Disney in the eponymous movie. This book sheds light on the original Mary Poppins, Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins is the only full-length study that covers all the Mary Poppins books, exposing just how subversive the pre-Disney Mary Poppins character truly was. Drawing important parallels between the character and the life of her creator, who worked as a governess herself, Grilli reveals the ways in which Mary Poppins came to unsettle the rigid and rigorous rules of Victorian and Edwardian society that most governesses embodied, taught, and passed on to their charges.

Between Generations is a multidisciplinary volume that reframes children as powerful forces in the production of their own literature and culture by uncovering a tradition of creative, collaborative partnerships between adults and children in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. The intergenerational collaborations documented here provide the foundations for some of the most popular Victorian literature for children, from Margaret Gatty's Aunt Judy's Tales to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Examining the publication histories of both canonical and lesser-known Golden Age texts reveals that children collaborated with adult authors as active listeners, coauthors, critics, illustrators, and even small-scale publishers. These literary collaborations were part of a growing interest in child agency evident in cultural, social, and scientific discourses of the time. Between Generations puts these creative partnerships in conversation with collaborations in other fields, including child study, educational policy, library history, and toy culture. Taken together, these collaborations illuminate how Victorians used new critical approaches to childhood to theorize young people as viable social actors. Smith's work not only recognizes Victorian children as literary collaborators but also interrogates how those creative partnerships reflect and influence adult-child relationships in the world beyond books. Between Generations breaks the critical impasse that understands children's literature and children themselves as products of adult desire and revises common constructions of childhood that frequently and often errantly resign the young to passivity or powerlessness.

This book considers how contemporary British children s books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public. A central assumption of this volume is that Britain s imperial past continues to play a key role in its representations of race, identity, and history. The insistent inclusion of questions relating to colonialism and power structures in recent children s novels exposes the complexities and contradictions surrounding the fictional treatment of race relations and ethnicity.

Postcolonial children s literature in Britain has been inherently ambivalent since its cautious beginnings: it is both transgressive and authorizing, both undercutting and excluding. Grzegorczyk considers the ways in which children s fictions have worked with and against particular ideologies of race. The texts analyzed in this collection portray ethnic minorities as complex, hybrid products of colonialism, global migrations, and the ideology of multiculturalism. By examining the ideological content of these novels, Grzegorczyk demonstrates the centrality of the colonial past to contemporary British writing for the young."

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote stories that have defined the American frontier for generations of readers. As both author and character in her own books, she became one of the most famous figures in American children s literature. Her famous "Little House on the Prairie" series, based on her childhood in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota, blended memoir and fiction into a vivid depiction of 19th-century settler life that continues to shape many Americans understanding of the country s past. Poised between fiction and fact, literature and history, Wilder s life is a fascinating window on the American west.

Placing Wilder s life and work in historical context, and including previously unpublished material from the Wilder archives, Sallie Ketcham introduces students to domestic frontier life, the conflict between Native Americans and infringing white populations, and the West in public memory and imagination."

New in paperback 2003. Here is a compilation of the best critical essays on this enduring classic. Selections focus on the many perspectives from which Anne of Green Gables is viewed. Is it children's literature, or does it fit a different area of literary scholarship? Each of the articles breaks new ground in the literary criticism of Montgomery's book. Also included is a comprehensive bibliographic guide to the research and criticism of Anne, from the earliest reviews to the most recent essays. Contributors: Temma R. Berg, Susan Drain, Carol Gay, Nancy Huse, Susan Jackson, Eve Kornfeld, T.D. MacLulich, Perry Nodelman, Mavis Reimer, Catherine Ross, Mary Rubio, Marilyn Solt, Gillian Thomas, Janet Weiss-Townsend, and Muriel Whitaker.

Astrid Lindgren, author of the famed Pippi Longstocking novels, is perhaps one of the most significant children's authors of the last half of the twentieth century. In this collection contributors consider films, music, and picturebooks relating to Lindgren, in addition to the author's reception internationally. Touching on everything from the Astrid Lindgren theme park at Vimmerby, Sweden to the hidden folk songs in Lindgren's works to the use of nostalgia in film adaptations of Lindgren's novels, this collection offers an important international and intermedial portrait of Lindgren research today.

While Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are often credited with inventing American environmental writing, Matthew Wynn Sivils argues that the works of these Transcendentalists must be placed within a larger literary tradition that has its origins in early Republic natural histories, Indian captivity narratives, Gothic novels, and juvenile literature. Authors such as William Bartram, Ann Eliza Bleecker, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich, to name just a few, enabled the development of a credibly American brand of proto-environmental fiction. Sivils argues that these seeds of environmental literature would come to fruition in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, which he argues is the first uniquely environmental American novel. He then connects the biogeographical politics of Cooper's The Prairie with European anti-Americanism; and concludes this study by examining how James Kirke Paulding, Thomas Cole, and James Fenimore Cooper imaginatively addressed the problem of human culpability and nationalistic cohesiveness in the face of natural disasters. With their focus on the character and implications of the imagined American landscape, these key works of early environmental thought contributed to the growing influence of the natural environment on the identity of the fledgling nation decades before the influences of Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden.

Bringing together children's literature scholars from China and the United States, this collection provides an introduction to the scope and goals of a field characterized by active but also distinctive scholarship in two countries with very different rhetorical traditions. The volume's five sections highlight the differences between and overlapping concerns of Chinese and American scholars, as they examine children's literature with respect to cultural metaphors and motifs, historical movements, authorship, didacticism, important themes, and the current status of and future directions for literature and criticism. Wide-ranging and admirably ambitious in its encouragement of communication between scholars from two major nations, Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature serves as a model for examining how and why children's literature, more than many literary forms, circulates internationally.

In this new book, Julie Cross examines the intricacies of textual humor in contemporary junior literature, using the tools of literary criticism and humor theory. Cross investigates the dialectical paradoxes of humor and debunks the common belief in oppositional binaries of simple versus complex humor. The varied combinations of so-called high and low forms of humor within junior texts for young readers, who are at such a crucial stage of their reading and social development, provide a valuable commentary upon the culture and values of contemporary western society, making the book of considerable interest to scholars of both children s literature and childhood studies.

Cross explores the ways in which the changing content, forms and functions of the many varied combinations of humor in junior texts, including the Lemony Snickett series, reveal societal attitudes towards young children and childhood. The new compounds of seemingly paradoxical high and low forms of humor, in texts for developing readers from the 1960s onwards, reflect and contribute to contemporary society s hesitant and uneven acceptance of the emergent paradigm of children s rights, abilities, participation and empowerment. Cross identifies four types of potentially subversive/transgressive humor which have emerged since the 1960s which, coupled with the three main theories of humor relief, superiority and incongruity theories enables a long-overdue charting of developments in humor within junior texts. Cross also argues that the gradual increase in the compounding of the simple and the complex provide opportunities for young readers to play with ambiguous, complicated ideas, helping them embrace the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life."

Black Authors and Illustrators of Books for Children and Young Adults is a biographical dictionary that provides comprehensive coverage of all major authors and illustrators - past and present. As the only reference volume of its kind available, this book is a valuable research tool that provides quick access for anyone studying black children's literature - whether one is a student, a librarian charged with maintaining a children's literature collection, or a scholar of children's literature. The Fourth Edition of this renowned reference work illuminates African American contributions to children's literature and books for young adults. The new edition contains updated and new information for existing author/illustrator entries, the addition of approximately 50 new profiles, and a new section listing online resources of interest to the authors and readers of black children's literature.

Recent scholarship on children s literature displays a wide variety of interests in classic and contemporary children s books. While environmental and ecological concerns have led to an interest in ecocriticism, as yet there is little on the significance of the ecological imagination and experience to both the authors and readers young and old of these texts. This edited collection brings together a set of original international research-based chapters to explore the role of children s literature in learning about environments and places, with a focus on how children s literature may inform and enrich our imagination, experiences and responses to environmental challenges and injustice. Contributions from Australia, Canada, USA and UK explore the diverse ways in which children s literature can provide what are arguably some of the first and possibly most formative engagements that some children might have with nature . Chapters examine classic and new storybooks, mythic tales, and image-based and/or written texts read at home, in school and in the field. Contributors focus on exploring how children s literature mediates and informs our imagination and understandings of diverse environments and places, and how it might open our eyes and lives to other presences, understandings and priorities through stories, their telling and re-telling, and their analysis.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research."

This volume presents key contributions to the study of ecocriticism in Nordic children's and YA literary and cultural texts, in dialogue with international classics. It investigates the extent to which texts for children and young adults reflect current environmental concerns. The chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: Ethics and Aesthetics, Landscape, Vegetal, Animal, and Human, and together they explore Nordic representations and a Nordic conception, or feeling, of nature. The textual analyses are complemented with the lived experiences of outdoor learning practices in preschools and schools captured through children's own statements. The volume highlights the growing influence of posthumanist theory and the continuing traces of anthropocentric concerns within contemporary children's literature and culture, and a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction is reflected in the conceptual tool of the volume: The Nature in Culture Matrix.

Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults is a collection of essays on twentieth-century authors who cross the borders between adult and children's literature and appeal to both audiences. This collection of fourteen essays by scholars from eight countries constitutes the first book devoted to the art of crosswriting the child and adult in twentieth-century international literature. Sandra Beckett explores the multifaceted nature of crossover literature and the diverse ways in which writers cross the borders to address a dual readership of children and adults. It considers classics such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Pinocchio, with particular emphasis on post-World War II literature. The essays in Transcending Boundaries clearly suggest that crossover literature is a major, widespread trend that appears to be sharply on the rise.

Over the past century, much attention has been paid to the literature written for adults in response to the First World War, but there has been comparatively little consideration of how the war influenced literature for young readers at the time. Based on extensive archival research, this study examines an array of wartime writing for young people and provides a new understanding of the complexities and nuances within children's literature of the period. In its discussion of nearly 150 primary sources from Britain, Canada, and the United States, this volume considers some well-known texts but also brings to light forgotten children's literature of the era, providing new insights into how WWI was presented to the young people whose lives were indelibly impacted by the crisis. Paying special attention to the varied ways in which child figures were depicted, it reflects on what these portrayals reveal about adult conceptualizations of youth, and it considers how these may have shaped young readers' own views of armed conflict, citizenship, and childhood. From the helpless victim to the heroic combatant, child figures appeared in many guises, exposing a range of adult concerns about nation, empire, and children's citizenship. Exploring everything from alphabet books for beginning readers, to recruitment materials for high school students, this book examines works from multiple genres and provides a uniquely comprehensive study of transatlantic children's literature produced during the first global war.

For a long time, many American educators and educational stakeholders have drawn their ideas for educational reforms from ideas generated in Europe and Asia for the changing demographics of America's diverse classrooms. This book is therefore motivated by a bold attempt at advocating for the revision of existing pedagogic fora and the creation and addition of new fora that would provide for the inclusion of thoughts, perspectives and practices of African traditional oral literature in the pedagogical tools of content area classrooms especially in North America. The articles that are presented in this book provide theoretical frameworks for using African traditional oral literature and its various tenets as teaching tools. They bring together new voices of how African literature could be used as helpful tool in classrooms. Rationale for agitating for its use as ideal for pedagogic tool is the recurrent theme throughout the various articles presented. The book explores how educators, literacy educators, learners, activists, policy makers, and curriculum developers can utilize the powerful, yet untapped gem of African oral literature as pedagogical tools in content area classrooms to help expand educators repertoire of understanding beyond the 'conventional wisdom' of their pedagogic creed. It is a comprehensive work of experienced and diverse scholars, academicians, and educators who have expertise in multicultural education, traditional oral literature, urban education, children's literature and culturally responsive pedagogy that have become the focus of U.S. discourses in public education and teacher preparation. This anthology serves as part of the quest for multiple views about our 'global village', emphasizing the importance of linking the idea of diverse knowledge with realities of global trends and development. Consequently, the goal and the basic thrust of this anthology is to negotiate for space for non-mainstream epistemology to share the pedagogical floor with the mainstream template, to foster alternative vision of reality for other knowledge production in the academic domain. The uniqueness of this collection is the idea of bringing the content and the pedagogy of most of the genres of African oral arts under one umbrella and thereby offering a practical acquaintance and appreciation with different African cultures. It therefore introduces the world of African mind and thoughts to the readers. In summary, this anthology presents an academic area which is now gaining its long overdue recognition in the academia.

At the same time that 1970s feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow were challenging earlier models that assumed the masculine psyche as the norm for human development and mental/emotional health, writers such as Anne Sexton, Olga Broumass, and Angela Carter were embarked on their own revisionist project to breathe new life into fairy tales and classical myths based on traditional gender roles. Similarly, in the 1990s, second-wave feminist clinicians continued the work begun by Chodorow and Miller, while writers of fantasy that include Terry Windling, Tanith Lee, Terry Pratchett, and Catherynne M. Valente took their inspiration from revisionist authors of the 1970s. As Schanoes shows, these two decades were both particularly fruitful eras for artists and psychoanalytic theorists concerned with issues related to the development of women's sense of self. Putting aside the limitations of both strains of feminist psychoanalytic theory, their influence is undeniable. Schanoes's book posits a new model for understanding both feminist psychoanalytic theory and feminist retellings, one that emphasizes the interdependence of theory and art and challenges the notion that literary revision involves a masculinist struggle with the writer's artistic forbearers.

For a long time, many American educators and educational stakeholders have drawn their ideas for educational reforms from ideas generated in Europe and Asia for the changing demographics of America's diverse classrooms. This book is therefore motivated by a bold attempt at advocating for the revision of existing pedagogic fora and the creation and addition of new fora that would provide for the inclusion of thoughts, perspectives and practices of African traditional oral literature in the pedagogical tools of content area classrooms especially in North America. The articles that are presented in this book provide theoretical frameworks for using African traditional oral literature and its various tenets as teaching tools. They bring together new voices of how African literature could be used as helpful tool in classrooms. Rationale for agitating for its use as ideal for pedagogic tool is the recurrent theme throughout the various articles presented. The book explores how educators, literacy educators, learners, activists, policy makers, and curriculum developers can utilize the powerful, yet untapped gem of African oral literature as pedagogical tools in content area classrooms to help expand educators repertoire of understanding beyond the 'conventional wisdom' of their pedagogic creed. It is a comprehensive work of experienced and diverse scholars, academicians, and educators who have expertise in multicultural education, traditional oral literature, urban education, children's literature and culturally responsive pedagogy that have become the focus of U.S. discourses in public education and teacher preparation. This anthology serves as part of the quest for multiple views about our 'global village', emphasizing the importance of linking the idea of diverse knowledge with realities of global trends and development. Consequently, the goal and the basic thrust of this anthology is to negotiate for space for non-mainstream epistemology to share the pedagogical floor with the mainstream template, to foster alternative vision of reality for other knowledge production in the academic domain. The uniqueness of this collection is the idea of bringing the content and the pedagogy of most of the genres of African oral arts under one umbrella and thereby offering a practical acquaintance and appreciation with different African cultures. It therefore introduces the world of African mind and thoughts to the readers. In summary, this anthology presents an academic area which is now gaining its long overdue recognition in the academia.

In this book, Blackford historicizes the appeal of the Persephone myth in the nineteenth century and traces figurations of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades throughout girls literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illuminates developmental patterns and anxieties in E. T. A. Hoffmann s Nutcracker and Mouse King, Louisa May Alcott s Little Women, Emily Bronte s Wuthering Heights, J. M. Barrie s Peter and Wendy, Frances Hodgson Burnett s The Secret Garden, E. B. White s Charlotte s Web, J. K. Rowling s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Stephenie Meyer s Twilight, and Neil Gaiman s Coraline. The story of the young goddess s separation from her mother and abduction into the underworld is, at root, an expression of ambivalence about female development, expressed in the various Neverlands through which female protagonists cycle and negotiate a partial return to earth. The myth conveys the role of female development in the perpetuation and renewal of humankind, coordinating natural and cultural orders through a hieros gamos (fertility coupling) rite. Meanwhile, popular novels such as Twilight and Coraline are paradoxically fresh because they recycle goddesses from myths as old as the seasons. With this book, Blackford offers a consideration of how literature for the young squares with broader canons, how classics flexibly and uniquely speak through novels that enjoy broad appeal, and how female traditions are embedded in novels by both men and women."

This book provides a new critical methodology for the study of landscapes in children's literature. Treating landscape as the integration of unchanging and irreducible physical elements, or topoi, Carroll identifies and analyses four kinds of space sacred spaces, green spaces, roadways, and lapsed spaces that are the component elements of the physical environments of canonical British children s fantasy. Using Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence as the test-case for this methodology, the book traces the development of the physical features and symbolic functions of landscape topoi from their earliest inception in medieval vernacular texts through to contemporary children's literature. The identification and analysis of landscape topoi synthesizes recent theories about interstitial space together with earlier morphological and topoanalytical studies, enabling the study of fictional landscapes in terms of their physical characteristics as well as in terms of their relationship with contemporary texts and historical precedents. Ultimately, by providing topoanalytical studies of other children s texts, Carroll proposes topoanalysis as a rich critical method for the study and understanding of children s literature and indicates how the findings of this approach may be expanded upon. In offering both transferable methodologies and detailed case-studies, this book outlines a new approach to literary landscapes as geographical places within socio-historical contexts."

Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children s Literature examines distinguished classics of children s literature both old and new including L. Frank Baum s Oz books, Laura Ingalls Wilder s Little House series, J. K. Rowling s Harry Potter novels, Lemony Snicket s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Stephenie Meyer s Twilight series to explore the queer tensions between innocence and heterosexuality within their pages. Pugh argues that children cannot retain their innocence of sexuality while learning about normative heterosexuality, yet this inherent paradox runs throughout many classic narratives of literature for young readers. Children s literature typically endorses heterosexuality through its invisible presence as the de facto sexual identity of countless protagonists and their families, yet heterosexuality s ubiquity is counterbalanced by its occlusion when authors shield their readers from forthright considerations of one of humanity s most basic and primal instincts.

The book demonstrates that tensions between innocence and sexuality render much of children s literature queer, especially when these texts disavow sexuality through celebrations of innocence. In this original study, Pugh develops interpretations of sexuality that few critics have yet ventured, paving the way for future scholarly engagement with larger questions about the ideological role of children's literature and representations of children's sexuality.

Tison Pugh is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Queering Medieval Genres and Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature and has published on children s literature in such journals as Children s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, and Marvels and Tales."

Responding to the increasingly powerful presence of dystopian literature for young adults, this volume focuses on novels featuring a female protagonist who contends with societal and governmental threats at the same time that she is navigating the treacherous waters of young adulthood. The contributors relate the liminal nature of the female protagonist to liminality as a unifying feature of dystopian literature, literature for and about young women, and cultural expectations of adolescent womanhood. Divided into three sections, the collection investigates cultural assumptions and expectations of adolescent women, considers the various means of resistance and rebellion made available to and explored by female protagonists, and examines how the adolescent female protagonist is situated with respect to the groups and environments that surround her. In a series of thought-provoking essays on a wide range of writers that includes Libba Bray, Scott Westerfeld, Tahereh Mafi, Veronica Roth, Marissa Meyer, Ally Condie, and Suzanne Collins, the collection makes a convincing case for how this rebellious figure interrogates the competing constructions of adolescent womanhood in late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture.

This book studies children's and young adult literature of genocide since 1945, considering issues of representation and using postcolonial theory to provide both literary analysis and implications for educating the young. Many of the authors visited accurately and authentically portray the genocide about which they write; others perpetuate stereotypes or otherwise distort, demean, or oversimplify. In this focus on young people's literature of specific genocides, Gangi profiles and critiques works on the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979); the Iraqi Kurds (1988); the Maya of Guatemala (1981-1983); Bosnia, Kosovo, and Srebrenica (1990s); Rwanda (1994); and Darfur (2003-present). In addition to critical analysis, each chapter also provides historical background based on the work of prominent genocide scholars. To conduct research for the book, Gangi traveled to Bosnia, engaged in conversation with young people from Rwanda, and spoke with scholars who had traveled to or lived in Guatemala and Cambodia. This book analyses the ways contemporary children, typically ages ten and up, are engaged in the study of genocide, and addresses the ways in which child survivors who have witnessed genocide are helped by literature that mirrors their experiences.

Storybridge to Second Language Literacy makes a case for using authentic children's literature- alternately also referred to as 'stories' or 'real books'-as the medium of instruction in teaching English to young learners, particularly in contexts where children must access general curriculum subjects in English. The author first proposes theoretical foundations for the argument that illustrated children's books are superior to traditional language teaching courses in the primary school. She builds the case around the motivational power of stories, the language and content of quality children's literature, and the potential of literature to contribute to development of second language academic literacy. She then reviews research of the past thirty years that clearly supports her claim. Finally, she uses transcripts from real classrooms to illustrate how teachers in diverse contexts make use of stories. Through the classroom vignettes, a practical model of literature-based instruction emerges that is adaptable to a wide range of primary school teaching contexts, including English as a second language contexts in core-English countries. Storybridge to Second Language Literacy compiles in one volume solid theoretical foundations for story-based instruction, research evidence of the past thirty years supporting the approach (not currently available in a single source), and extensive classroom vignettes illustrating diverse practical applications (not lesson plans).This makes the book valuable for anyone in the field of young learner ELT. MA students in TESOL will find the book useful and will develop an understanding of why and how literature-based instruction works and develop insight to guide their practice. Members of TESOL Elementary Education, EFL, and Bilingual Education SIGs, and IATEFL Young Learner SIG will be interested in the volume. Instructors of teacher development courses should also find the proposed volume a valuable addition to assigned readings. Each chapter is followed by 'Think about it' questions and 'Try it out' suggestions.

Storybridge to Second Language Literacy makes a case for using authentic children's literature- alternately also referred to as 'stories' or 'real books'-as the medium of instruction in teaching English to young learners, particularly in contexts where children must access general curriculum subjects in English. The author first proposes theoretical foundations for the argument that illustrated children's books are superior to traditional language teaching courses in the primary school. She builds the case around the motivational power of stories, the language and content of quality children's literature, and the potential of literature to contribute to development of second language academic literacy. She then reviews research of the past thirty years that clearly supports her claim. Finally, she uses transcripts from real classrooms to illustrate how teachers in diverse contexts make use of stories. Through the classroom vignettes, a practical model of literature-based instruction emerges that is adaptable to a wide range of primary school teaching contexts, including English as a second language contexts in core-English countries. Storybridge to Second Language Literacy compiles in one volume solid theoretical foundations for story-based instruction, research evidence of the past thirty years supporting the approach (not currently available in a single source), and extensive classroom vignettes illustrating diverse practical applications (not lesson plans).This makes the book valuable for anyone in the field of young learner ELT. MA students in TESOL will find the book useful and will develop an understanding of why and how literature-based instruction works and develop insight to guide their practice. Members of TESOL Elementary Education, EFL, and Bilingual Education SIGs, and IATEFL Young Learner SIG will be interested in the volume. Instructors of teacher development courses should also find the proposed volume a valuable addition to assigned readings. Each chapter is followed by 'Think about it' questions and 'Try it out' suggestions.