In this book Honeyman looks at manifestations of youth agency (and representations of agency produced for youth) as depicted in fairy tales, childlore and folk literature, investigating the dynamic of ideological manipulation and independent resistance as it can be read or expressed in bodies, first through social puppetry and then through coercive temptation (our consumption replacing the more obvious strings that bind us). Reading tales like Popeye, Hansel & Gretel, and Pinocchio, Honeyman concentrates on the agency of young subjects through material relations, especially where food signifies the invisible strings used to control them in popular discourse and practice, modeling efforts to come out from under the hegemonic handler and take control, at least of their own body spaces, and ultimately finding that most examples indicate less power than the ideal holds.

Front Flap: Poet, essayist, actor, hymn-writer, wit, magazine editor, transvestite stage performer: Christopher Smart, Georgian don-turned-writer, was all of these. He was, and remains, a mercurial individual, an idiosyncratic yet strangely familiar writer of spiritual heights and material depths. His paradoxical exuberance fascinates scholars of eighteenth-century culture, and this collection of essays, a snapshot of current scholarship from both new and established Smart scholars, offers, among others, literary, theological, dramatic and philosophical perspectives on his writing. Here are new ways of reading familiar Smart works - including the astonishing, devout poem of his incarceration, Jubilate Agno - and unfamiliar ones, such as his translations and writing for children. Unexpected readers of Smart, from Coleridge to a testy anonymous annotator, are examined, and Smart's sacred translations and profane stage presence each find a place. Tom Keymer's re-evaluating afterword finds the quality of "betweenness" in Smart's work: between eras, between genres, between forms, Smart's vitality demands reassessment for each new generation of readers. Contributors: Karina Williamson, Min Wild, Rosalind Powell, Fraser Easton, Clement Hawes, William E. Levine, Noel Chevalier, Lori A. Branch, Daniel J. Ennis, Chris Mounsey, Debbie Welham, Tom Keymer. Back Flap: The editors Min Wild's monograph Christopher Smart and Satire on Smart's Midwife, was published in 2008, and various articles and reviews of a Smartian bent have followed. Her interest in that eighteenth-century favorite, the literary mode of prosopopoeia, has led her to investigate the personification of words, texts and literary modes themselves. She lectures in eighteenth-century literature and theory at Plymouth University, UK, and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Noel Chevalier is Associate Professor of English at Luther College, University of Regina, Canada. He has published articles on Jubilate Agno and on Smart's challenge to "legitimate" playhouses in Mrs. Midnight's Oratory. Although his specialty lies in the eighteenth century, his teaching and research cover a diverse range of topics, from literary responses to the Bible, to the roots of globalization, to literary representations of science and scientists. He has helped create two interdisciplinary programs at Luther: one which addresses literature for students in the sciences, and one which explores the philosophical, political, economic, and cultural contexts of globalization. Jacket illustration: "Amaryllis sarniensis or Guernsey Amaryllis," from William Curtis, The Botanical Magazine; or, Flower-Garden Displayed, Vol. IX. No. 294. London, 1795.

This book allows philosophers, literary theorists, and education specialists to come together to offer a series of readings on works of children's literature. Each of their readings is focused on pairing a particular, popular picture book or a chapter book with philosophical texts or themes. The book has three sections-the first, on picturebooks; the second, on chapter books; and the third, on two sets of paired readings of two very popular picturebooks. By means of its three sections, the book sets forth as its goal to show how philosophy can be helpful in reappraising books aimed at children from early childhood on. Particularly in the third section, the book emphasizes how philosophy can help to multiply the type of interpretative stances that are possible when readers listen again to what they thought they knew so well. The kinds of questions this book raises are the following: How are children's books already anticipating or articulating philosophical problems and discussions? How does children's literature work by means of philosophical puzzles or language games? What do children's books reveal about the existential situation the child reader faces? In posing and answering these kinds of questions, the readings within the book thus intersect with recent, developing scholarship in children's literature studies as well as in the psychology and philosophy of childhood.

This book builds upon and contributes to the growing academic interest in feminism within the field of children's literature studies. Christie Wilkie-Stibbs draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan in her analysis of particular children's literature texts to demonstrate how a feminist analysis opens up textual possibilities that may be applied to works of children's fiction in general, extending the range of textual engagements in children's literature through the application of a new poststructural critical apparati.

Winner of the Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award From the jaded, wired teenagers of M.T. Anderson's Feed to the spirited young rebels of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy, the protagonists of Young Adult dystopias are introducing a new generation of readers to the pleasures and challenges of dystopian imaginings. As the dark universes of YA dystopias continue to flood the market,Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers offers a critical evaluation of the literary and political potentials of this widespread publishing phenomenon. With its capacity to frighten and warn, dystopian writing powerfully engages with our pressing global concerns: liberty and self-determination, environmental destruction and looming catastrophe, questions of identity and justice, and the increasingly fragile boundaries between technology and the self. When directed at young readers, these dystopian warnings are distilled into exciting adventures with gripping plots and accessible messages that may have the potential to motivate a generation on the cusp of adulthood. This collection enacts a lively debate about the goals and efficacy of YA dystopias, with three major areas of contention: do these texts reinscribe an old didacticism or offer an exciting new frontier in children's literature? Do their political critiques represent conservative or radical ideologies? And finally, are these novels high-minded attempts to educate the young or simply bids to cash in on a formula for commercial success? This collection represents a prismatic and evolving understanding of the genre, illuminating its relevance to children's literature and our wider culture.

In her extensively researched exploration of China in British children's literature, Shih-Wen Chen provides a sustained critique of the reductive dichotomies that have limited insight into the cultural and educative role these fictions played in disseminating ideas and knowledge about China. Chen considers a range of different genres and types of publication--travelogue storybooks, historical novels, adventure stories, and periodicals--to demonstrate the diversity of images of China in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination. Turning a critical eye on popular and prolific writers such as Anne Bowman, William Dalton, Edwin Harcourt Burrage, Bessie Marchant, G.A. Henty, and Charles Gilson, Chen shows how Sino-British relations were influential in the representation of China in children's literature, challenges the notion that nineteenth-century children's literature simply parroted the dominant ideologies of the age, and offers insights into how attitudes towards children's relationship with knowledge changed over the course of the century. Her book provides a fresh context for understanding how China was constructed in the period from 1851 to 1911 and sheds light on British cultural history and the history and uses of children's literature.

What happens to traditional stories when they are retold in another time and cultural context and for a different audience? This first-of-its-kind study discusses Bible stories, classical myths, heroic legends, Arthurian romances, Robin Hood lore, folk tales, 'oriental' tales, and other stories derived from European cultures. One chapter is devoted to various retellings of classics, from Shakespeare to "Wind in the Willows." The authors offer a general theory of what motivates the retelling of stories, and how stories express the aspirations of a society. An important function of stories is to introduce children to a cultural heritage, and to transmit a body of shared allusions and experiences that expresses a society's central values and assumptions. However, the cultural heritage may be modified through a pervasive tendency of retellings to produce socially conservative outcomes because of ethnocentric, androcentric and class-based assumptions in the source stories that persist into retellings. Therefore, some stories, such as classical myths, are particularly resistant to feminist reinterpretations, for example, while other types, such as folktales, are more malleable. In examining such possibilities, the book evaluates the processes of interpretation apparent in retellings. Index included.

In a period of ongoing debate about faith, identity, migration and culture, this timely study explores the often politicised nature of constructions of one of Britain's longest standing minority communities. Representations in children's literature influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the Empire, the Holocaust and 9/11 reveal an ongoing concern with establishing, maintaining or problematising the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Chapters on gender, refugees, multiculturalism and historical fiction argue that literature for young people demonstrates that the position of Jews in Britain has been ambivalent, and that this ambivalence has persisted to a surprising degree in view of the dramatic socio-cultural changes that have taken place over two centuries. Wide-ranging in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, Jews and Jewishness in British Children's Literature discusses over one hundred texts ranging from picture books to young adult fiction and realism to fantasy. Madelyn Travis examines rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material plus works by authors including Maria Edgeworth, E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Richmal Crompton, Lynne Reid Banks, Michael Rosen and others. The study also draws on Travis's previously unpublished interviews with authors including Adele Geras, Eva Ibbotson, Ann Jungman and Judith Kerr.

Winner of the Children's Literature Association Book Award This book visits a range of textual forms including diary, novel, and picturebook to explore the relationship between second-generation memory and contemporary children's literature. Ulanowicz argues that second-generation memory - informed by intimate family relationships, textual mediation, and technology - is characterized by vicarious, rather than direct, experience of the past. As such, children's literature is particularly well-suited to the representation of second-generation memory, insofar as children's fiction is particularly invested in the transmission and reproduction of cultural memory, and its form promotes the formation of various complex intergenerational relationships. Further, children's books that depict second-generation memory have the potential to challenge conventional Western notions of selfhood and ethics. This study shows how novels such as Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993) and Judy Blume's Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself (1977) - both of which feature protagonists who adapt their elders' memories into their own mnemonic repertoires - implicitly reject Cartesian notions of the unified subject in favor of a view of identity as always-already social, relational, and dynamic in character. This book not only questions how and why second-generation memory is represented in books for young people, but whether such representations of memory might be considered 'radical' or 'conservative'. Together, these analyses address a topic that has not been explored fully within the fields of children's literature, trauma and memory studies, and Holocaust studies.

Thirteen essays explore the timeless appeal of Peter's antics, and the impact of this extraordinary book on children worldwide. Contributors, each a respected scholar in the field of children's literature, examine details of Potter's life, her history as an artist, her accomplishments as a naturalist, and the contextual factors affecting her writing and illustrations. Others investigate the timelessness of this story, exploring its psychological and sociological truths and comparing Peter Rabbit to present day literature.

This book examines the representation of English working-class children - the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods that a number of writers dubbed "darkest England" - in Victorian and Edwardian imperialist literature. In particular, Boone focuses on how the writings for and about youth undertook an ideological project to enlist working-class children into the British imperial enterprise, demonstrating convincingly that the British working-class youth resisted a nationalist identification process that tended to eradicate or obfuscate class differences.

This book explores the ideas of children and childhood, and the construct of the 'ideal' Victorian child, that developed rapidly over the Victorian era along with literacy and reading material for the emerging mass reading public. Children's Literature was one of the developing areas for publishers and readers alike, yet this did not stop the reading public from bringing home works not expressly intended for children and reading to their family. Within the idealized middle class family circle, authors such as Charles Dickens were read and appreciated by members of all ages. By examining some of Dickens's works that contain the imperfect child, and placing them alongside works by Kingsley, MacDonald, Stretton, Rossetti, and Nesbit, Malkovich considers the construction, romanticization, and socialization of the Victorian child within work read by and for children during the Victorian Era and early Edwardian period. These authors use elements of religion, death, irony, fairy worlds, gender, and class to illustrate the need for the ideal child and yet the impossibility of such a construct. Malkovich contends that the 'imperfect' child more readily reflects reality, whereas the 'ideal' child reflects an unattainable fantasy and while debates rage over how to define children's literature, such children, though somewhat changed, can still be found in the most popular of literatures read by children contemporarily.

This book offers new critical approaches for the study of adaptations, abridgments, translations, parodies, and mash-ups that occur internationally in contemporary children s culture. It follows recent shifts in adaptation studies that call for a move beyond fidelity criticism, a paradigm that measures the success of an adaptation by the level of fidelity to the "original" text, toward a methodology that considers the adaptation to be always already in conversation with the adapted text. This book visits children s literature and culture in order to consider the generic, pedagogical, and ideological underpinnings that drive both the process and the product. Focusing on novels as well as folktales, films, graphic novels, and anime, the authors consider the challenges inherent in transforming the work of authors such as William Shakespeare, Charles Perrault, L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and A.A. Milne into new forms that are palatable for later audiences particularly when for perceived ideological or political reasons the textual transformation is not only unavoidable but entirely necessary. Contributors consider the challenges inherent in transforming stories and characters from one type of text to another, across genres, languages, and time, offering a range of new models that will inform future scholarship.

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.

Soon Come Home to This Island traces the representation of West Indian characters in British children's literature from 1700 to today. This book challenges traditional notions of British children's literature as mono-cultural by illuminating the contributions of colonial and postcolonial-era Black British writers. The author examines the varying depictions of West Indian islands and peoples in a wide range of picture books, novels, textbooks, and popular periodicals published over the course of more than 300 years. An excellent resource for any children's literature student or scholar, the book includes a chronological bibliography of primary source material that includes West Indian characters and twenty black-and-white illustrations that chart the changes in visual representations of West Indians over time.

Brown Gold is a compelling history and analysis of African-American children's picturebooks from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. At the turn of the nineteenth century, good children's books about black life were hard to find - if, indeed, young black readers and their parents could even gain entry into the bookstores and libraries. But today, in the "Golden Age" of African-American children's picturebooks, one can find a wealth of titles ranging from Happy to be Nappy to Black is Brown is Tan. In this book, Michelle Martin explores how the genre has evolved from problematic early works such as Epaminondas that were rooted in minstrelsy and stereotype, through the civil rights movement, and onward to contemporary celebrations of blackness. She demonstrates the cultural importance of contemporary favorites through keen historical analysis - scrutinizing the longevity and proliferation of the Coontown series and Ten Little Niggers books, for example - that makes clear how few picturebooks existed in which black children could see themselves and their people positively represented even up until the 1960s. Martin also explores how children's authors and illustrators have addressed major issues in black life and history including racism, the civil rights movement, black feminism, major historical figures, religion, and slavery. Brown Gold adds new depth to the reader's understanding of African-American literature and culture, and illuminates how the round, dynamic characters in these children's novels, novellas, and picturebooks can put a face on the past, a face with which many contemporary readers can identify.

Bosmajian explores children's texts that have either a Holocaust survivor or a former member of the Hitler Youth as a protagonist.

Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world, nationhood and identity, the mapping of sexual awakening onto postcolonial awareness, hybridity and trans-racial romance, transgressive sexuality, the sexually abused adolescent body, music as a code for identity formation, representations of adolescent emotion, and what neuroscience research tells us about young adult readers, writers, and young artists. Throughout, the volume explores the ways writers configure their adolescent protagonists as awkward, alienated, rebellious and unhappy, so that the figure of the young adult becomes a symbol of wider political and societal concerns. Examining in depth significant contemporary novels, including those by Julia Alvarez, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce, Malorie Blackman and Meg Rosoff, among others, Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.

Winner of the Children's Literature Association Honor Book Award This volume establishes a dialogue between East and West in children's literature scholarship. In all cultures, children's literature shows a concern to depict identity and individual development, so that character and theme pivot on questions of agency and the circumstances that frame an individual's decisions and capacities to make choices and act upon them. Such issues of selfhood fall under the heading subjectivity. Attention to the representation of subjectivity in literature enables us to consider how values are formed and changed, how emotions are cultivated, and how maturation is experienced. Because subjectivities emerge in social contexts, they vary from place to place. This book brings together essays by scholars from several Asian countries - Japan, India, Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia, Thailand, and The Philippines - to address subjectivities in fiction and film within frameworks that include social change, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, globalization, and glocalization. Few scholars of western children's literature have a ready understanding of what subjectivity entails in children's literature and film from Asian countries, especially where Buddhist or Confucian thought remains influential. This volume will impact scholarship and pedagogy both within the countries represented and in countries with established traditions in teaching and research, offering a major contribution to the flow of ideas between different academic and educational cultures.

This resource provides teachers, librarians, parents, and others who work with children with an annotated bibliography of children's books that contain characters who display positive values as they relate to others. These stories will help children build associations related to their family values, help them understand the importance of the way values support a family, and recognize how values help overcome certain obstacles. A feature of this volume is the inclusion of sample activities and lessons related to the books in the bibliography. Educators and parents can use the activities as Dr. Roberts presents them, or they can use them as starting points for their own activities and lessons. The activities extend the literature by providing thought-provoking exercises and topics for discussion. They reinforce the sometimes subtle presentation of moral qualities by focussing the student's attention on the decision and actions that express them. Parents and educators, including home schooling parents and instructors in religious settings, will benefit from this helpful resource.

This book offers a variety of approaches to children's literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism. The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of "otherness" and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. Section 2 presents discussions of the colonialist mind-set in children's and young adult texts from the turn of the century. Here works by writers of animal stories in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, works of early Australian colonialist literature, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess come under the scrutiny of our postmodern reading practices. Section 3 deals directly with contemporary texts for children that manifest both a postcolonial and a neo-colonial content. In this section, the longest in the book, we have studies of children's literature from Canada, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.

The Outside Child, In and Out of the Book is situated at the intersection between children's literature studies and childhood studies. In this provocative book, Christine Wilkie-Stibbs juxtaposes the narratives of literary and actual children/young adults to explore how Western culture has imagined, defined, and dealt with their outsider status - whether orphaned, homeless, refugee, victims of abuse, or exploited - and how processes of economic, social, or political impoverishment are sustained and naturalized in regimes of power, authority, and domination. In five chapters titled: "Outsider," "Displaced," "Erased," "Abject," "Unattached," and "Colonized," the book situates and repositions a range of pre- and post-millennium children's/young adult fictions, autobiographies, policy documents, and reports in the current climate of rabid globalization, new "out-group" definitions, and prescribed normativity. Children's/young adult fictions considered include: Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses trilogy; Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Jacqueline Wilson's The Illustrated Mum; Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy; Ann Provoost's Falling; Meg Rosoff's, How I Live Now; Elizabeth Laird's A Little Piece of Ground. Autobiographical works include Zlata Filipovic's Zlata's Diary; Kevin Lewis's The Kid; Latifa's My Forbidden Face; and Valerie Zenatti's When I Was a Soldier.

This volume explores the mutual influences between children s literature and the avant-garde. Olson places particular focus on fin-de-si cle Paris, where the Avant-garde was not unified in thought and there was room for modernism to overlap with children s literature and culture in the Golden Age. The ideas explored by artists such as Florence Upton, Henri Rousseau, Sir William Nicholson, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marc Chagall had been disseminated widely in cultural productions for children; their work, in turn, influenced children s culture. These artists turned to children s culture as a "new way of seeing," allied to a contemporary interest in international artistic styles. Children s culture also has strong ties to decadence and to the grotesque, the latter of which became a distinctively Modernist vision.

This book visits the qualities of the era that were defined as uniquely childlike, the relation of childhood to high and low art, and the relation of children s literature to fin-de-si cle artistic trends. Topics of interest include the use of non-European figures (the Golliwogg), approaches to religion and pedagogy, to oppression and motherhood, to Nature in a post-Darwinian world, and to vision in art and life. Olson s unique focus covers new ground by concentrating not simply on children's literature, but on how childhood experiences and culture figure in art.

C. S. Lewis, fantasy novelist, literary scholar, and Christian apologist, is one of the most original and well-known literary figures of the twentieth century. As one who stood at the crossroads of Edwardian and modern thinking, he is often read as a sexist or even misogynistic man of his time, but this fresh rereading assesses Lewis as a prescient thinker who transformed typical Western gender paradigms. The Feminine Ethos in C. S. Lewis's 'Chronicles of Narnia' proposes that Lewis's highly nuanced metaphorical view of gender relations has been misunderstood precisely because it challenges Western chauvinist assumptions on sex and gender. Instead of perpetuating sexism, Lewis subverts the culturally inherited chauvinism of "masculine" classical heroism with the biblically inspired vision of a surprisingly "feminine" spiritual heroism. His view that we are all "feminine" in relation to the "masculine" God - a theological feminism that crosses gender lines - means that qualities we tend to consider to be feminine, such as humility, are the qualities essential to being fully human. This book's theoretical framework is Lewis's own, grounded in his view of biblical thinking, as he was informed by writers such as Milton, Wordsworth, and George MacDonald, and in terms of the uniquely progressive implications for twentieth-first century cultural studies. This highly insightful and entertaining study of theological feminism in Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia will be compelling for anyone interested in children's and fantasy literature, Inklings scholarship, gender discourse, ethical and spiritual discourse, literature and theology, and cultural studies in general.

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.