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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This book offers a historical analysis of key classical translated works for children, such as writings by Hans Christian Andersen and Grimms' tales. Translations dominate the earliest history of texts written for children in English, and stories translated from other languages have continued to shape its course to the present day. Lathey traces the role of the translator and the impact of translations on the history of English-language children's literature from the ninth century onwards. Discussions of popular texts in each era reveal fluctuations in the reception of translated children's texts, as well as instances of cultural mediation by translators and editors. Abridgement, adaptation, and alteration by translators have often been viewed in a negative light, yet a closer examination of historical translators' prefaces reveals a far more varied picture than that of faceless conduits or wilful censors. From William Caxton's dedication of his translated History of Jason to young Prince Edward in 1477 ('to thentent/he may begynne to lerne read Englissh'), to Edgar Taylor's justification of the first translation into English of Grimms' tales as a means of promoting children's imaginations in an age of reason, translators have recorded in prefaces and other writings their didactic, religious, aesthetic, financial, and even political purposes for translating children's texts.

In this study, Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World War notions of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress." In the enormously popular "juvenile" literature of the period, primarily boys' and girls' own adventure and school stories, adolescence is acknowledged as a time of sexual awareness and yet also of a romantic idealism that is lost with marriage, a time when boys and girls acquire adult duties and responsibilities and yet have not had to assume the roles of breadwinner or household manager. The book reveals a concept of adolescence as significant as the Romantic cult of childhood that preceded it, which will be of interest to scholars of both children's literature and Victorian culture.

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.

This book explores how the concept of childhood in the late 18th century was constructed through the ideological work performed by children's literature, as well as pedagogical writing and medical literature of the era. Andrew O'Malley ties the evolution of the idea of "the child" to the growth of the middle class, which used the figure of the child as a symbol in its various calls for social reform.

St. Nicholas is acknowledged to be the best children's magazine published, particularly during the reign of its founding editor, Mary Mapes Dodge. From 1873 to 1905, Dodge worked to create what she called a ""pleasure ground"" for children - a magazine that would have great impact on several generations of children. The list of authors who wrote for her includes Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mark Twain. The quality of the magazine's illustration was equally high. The magazine was also the launching pad for a new generation of authors and artists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. B. White, Jack London, and Eudora Welty. This anthology of critical writing on St. Nicholas includes the most influential articles already published and newly commissioned essays on a variety of subjects, including the impact of the St. Nicholas league, the utopian thrust of the magazine's fiction, and how Dodge persuaded Kipling to become a children's writer. Essays also analyze Dodge's relationship with her readers, her editorial practice, the illustrations, American family life as seen by young British readers, war and military life, advertising, and the middle class preoccupation with ""change of fortune"" tales. The work places St. Nicholas in American cultural history, and analyzes how it both influenced and was influenced over thirty years. Essential documentary material presently unpublished or inaccessible and illustrations from the magazine are also included.

Teen readers have always been fascinated by monsters, but lately it seems like every other young adult (YA) book is about vampires, zombies, or werewolves. These works are controversial, since they look at aspects of life and human nature that adults prefer to keep hidden from teenagers. But this is also why they are so important: They provide a literal example of how ignoring life s hazards won t make them go away and demonstrate that ignorance of danger puts one at greater risk. In They Suck, They Bite, They Eat, They Kill: The Psychological Meaning of Supernatural Monsters in Young Adult Fiction Joni Bodart examines six different monsters vampires, shapeshifters, zombies, unicorns, angels, and demons in YA literature. Bodart first discusses the meaning of these monsters in cultures all over the world. Subsequent chapters explore their history and most important incarnations, comparing the same kind of creatures featured in different titles. This volume also contains interviews with authors who provide additional insight and information, and the bibliography includes a comprehensive list of titles featuring the various monsters. Analyzing the most important and well-written series and titles for teens, They Suck, They Bite, They Eat, They Kill will be useful for parents, teachers, and anyone else hoping to understand why teens want to read books in this genre and what some of the benefits of reading them might be."

* New edition will include updated, recent children's literature and popular culture examples * Expanded attention to censorship, culturally and linguistically diverse learners, and the needs of students around the world. * Invites multiple ways for engaging with children's literature that extend beyond the typical genre and elements approach * Explains and shows how to integrate children's literature into and across the curriculum in effective, purposeful ways * Shows what a critical approach looks like in real classrooms- numerous vignettes throughout offer examples of teachers implementing critical pedagogy * The materials and practical strategies focus on issues that impact children's lives-building from students' personal experiences and cultural knowledge * Updated Companion Website enriches and extend sthe text-includes annotated bibliography of literature selections; suggested text sets; resources by chapter; and syllabi, strategies, and assignments

In a time when almost any gritty topic can be featured in a young adult novel, there is one subject that is avoided by writers and publishers. Faith and belief in God seldom appear in traditional form in novels for teens. The lack of such ideas in mainstream adolescent literature can be interpreted by teens to mean that these matters are not important. Yet a significant part of growing up is struggling with issues of spirituality. The underlying problem, of course, is that there are so few writers who are willing to talk to teenagers about God, even indirectly, or who themselves have the religious literacy for the task. Spirituality in Young Adult Literature: The Last Taboo tackles a subject rarely portrayed in fiction aimed at teens. In this volume, Patty Campbell examines not only realistic fiction, but young adult literature that deals with mysticism, apocalyptical end times, and even YA novels that depict the Divine Encounter. Campbell maintains that fantasy works are inherently spiritual, because the plots nearly always progress toward a showdown between good and evil. As such, the author surmises that the popularity of fantasy among teens may represent their interest in the mystical dimensions of faith and the otherworldly. In this study, Campbell examines works of fiction that express perspectives from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. Distinguished YA novelist Chris Crowe provides a chapter on Mormon values and Mormon YA authors and how their novels integrate those values into their books. By looking at how spirituality is represented in novels aimed at teens, this book asks what progress, if any, has been made in slaying the taboo. Although most of the books discussed in this study are recent, an appendix lists YA books from 1967 to the present that have dealt with issues of faith. A timely look at an important subject, Spirituality in Young Adult Literature will be of interest to young adult librarians, junior and senior high school teachers, and students and instructors of college courses in adolescent literature, as well as to parents of teens.

Irish Children's Literature and Culture looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with major genres, forms, and issues, including the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, ethnicity, and globalization. It contextualizes modern Irish children's literature in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, as well as in relation to Irish writing for adults, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area. What constitutes a "national literature" is rarely straightforward, and it is especially complex when discussing writing for young people in an Irish context. Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as "Irish children's literature" in comparison with Ireland's contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. The contributors to the volume examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and children's literature internationally, raising provocative questions about the future of the topic. Irish Children's Literature and Culture is essential reading for those interested in Irish literature, culture, sociology, childhood, and children's literature. Valerie Coghlan, Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin, is a librarian and lecturer. She is a former co-editor of Bookbird: An International Journal of Children's Literature. She has published widely on Irish children's literature and co-edited several books on the topic. She is a former board member of the IRSCL, and a founder member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature, Children's Books Ireland, and IBBY Ireland. Keith O'Sullivan lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin. He is a founder member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature, a former member of the board of directors of Children's Books Ireland, and past chair of the Children's Books Ireland/Bisto Book of the Year Awards. He has published on the works of Philip Pullman and Emily Bronte.

Much of the criticism on Stephenie Meyer's immensely popular 'Twilight' novels has underrated or even disparaged the books while belittling the questionable taste of an audience that many believe is being inculcated with anti-feminist values. Avoiding a repetition of such reductive critiques of the series's purported shortcomings with respect to literary merit and political correctness, this volume adopts a cultural studies framework to explore the range of scholarly concerns awakened by the 'Twilight novels and their filmic adaptations. Contributors examine 'Twilight's debts to its predecessors in young adult, vampire, and romance literature; the problems of cinematic adaptation; issues in fan and critical reception in the United States and Korea; and the relationship between the series and contemporary conceptualizations of feminism, particularly girl culture. Placing the series within a broad tradition of literary history, reception studies, and filmic adaptation, the collection offers scholars the opportunity to engage with the books' importance for studies of popular culture, gender, and young adult literature.

In this book, Ewers provides students and professors with a new system of categorization for a differentiated description of children's literature. In the early 1970s, Swedish children's literature scholar Gote Kingberg worked to establish a system of scientific terminology for international use, but these terms are now somewhat antiquated. This book offers a much-needed update, systematically analyzing the field and articulating its key definitions, terms, and concepts.

International in scope, this study touches on subjects including the distribution of primers and textbooks, the means by which children's books are evaluated and classified, and the ways in which children's literature can find an adult audience. Also discussed are the system of symbols, norms, concepts, and discourses that have evolved during the past two centuries, leading to an investigation of how authors and publishers have endeavored to make literature "appropriate" for children and of what it means to accommodate children's needs, wishes, and values. Throughout, Ewers provides concrete examples and clear definitions of terms so that any scholar interested in children's literature will find this book approachable, insightful, and one that crosses cultural boundaries.

New in paperback! Winner of the 1996 G.K. Hall Award and Multicultural Review's 1995 Carey McWilliams Award. Paperback edition available 2002. 'Designed to be used by librarians and teachers exploring works written by and for African Americans...a wonderful professional source to help in choosing literature for school libraries...Recommended.'-THE BOOK REPORT 'This collection will fill an important need for school and public libraries seeking a more scholarly dialogue on African-American literature for young adults.'-VOYA

Contributors analyse the theories behind children's literature, its functions and cultural significance, and suggest the new directions this literature is taking in terms of its craft, themes and intentions. Africa's encounter with the West and its implications and consequences remain far-reaching and enduring in the craft and thrust of its creative writers. The contributors to ALT 33 analyse the connections between traditional stories and myths that have been told to children, as well as the work of contemporary creative writers who are writing for children in order that they understand this complex history. Some of these writers are developing traditional myths, folk tales, and legends and are writing them in new forms, while others focus on the encounter with the West that has dominated much modern African literature for adults. The previous neglect of the cultural significance, study, criticism and teaching of children's literature is addressed in this volume: How can the successes and/or failures of stories and story-telling for children in Africa be measured? Are there models to be followed and whatmakes them models? What is the relationship between the text and the illustration of children's books? What should guide the reader or critic of children's literature coming out of Africa - globalism, transculturality or internalregionalism? What problems confront teachers, students, publishers and promoters of children's books in Africa? Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities. Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma HEBN: Nigeria

C.S. Lewis, beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia, answers fan letters in this sweet collection that shows why he remains one of the best-loved children's authors of all time. In his life, C.S. Lewis received thousands of letters from young fans who were eager for more knowledge of his bestselling Narnia books and their author. Here are collected many of his responses to those letters, in which he shares his feelings about writing, school, animals, and of course, Narnia. Lewis writes to the children--as he wrote for them--with understanding and respect.

This book situates the picturebook genre within the widespread international phenomenon of crossover literature, examining an international corpus of picturebooks - including artists' books, wordless picturebooks, and celebrity picturebooks - that appeal to readers of all ages. Focusing on contemporary picturebooks, Sandra Beckett shows that the picturebook has traditionally been seen as a children's genre, but in the eyes of many authors, illustrators, and publishers, it is a narrative form that can address any and all age groups. Innovative graphics and formats as well as the creative, often complex dialogue between text and image provide multiple levels of meaning and invite readers of all ages to consider texts that are primarily marketed as children's books. The interplay of text and image that distinguishes the picturebook from other forms of fiction and makes it a unique art form also makes it the ultimate crossover genre. Crossover picturebooks are often very complex texts that are challenging for adults as well as children. Many are characterized by difficult "adult" themes, genre blending, metafictive discourse, intertextuality, sophisticated graphics, and complex text-image interplay. Exciting experiments with new formats and techniques, as well as novel interactions with new media and technologies have made the picturebook one of the most vibrant and innovative contemporary literary genres, one that seems to know no boundaries. Crossover Picturebooks is a valuable addition to the study of a genre that is gaining increasing recognition and appreciation, and contributes significantly to the field of children's literature as a whole.

This book is a literary analysis of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan in all its different versions -- key rewritings, dramatisations, prequels, and sequels -- and includes a synthesis of the main critical interpretations of the text over its history. A comprehensive and intelligent study of the Peter Pan phenomenon, this study discusses the book's complicated textual history, exploring its origins in the Harlequinade theatrical tradition and British pantomime in the nineteenth century. Stirling investigates potential textual and extra-textual sources for Peter Pan, the critical tendency to seek sources in Barrie's own biography, and the proliferation of prequels and sequels aiming to explain, contextualize, or close off, Barrie's exploration of the imagination. The sources considered include Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson's Starcatchers trilogy, R?gis Loisel's six-part Peter Pan graphic novel in French (1990-2004), Andrew Birkin's The Lost Boys series, the films Hook (1991), Peter Pan (2003) and Finding Neverland (2004), and Geraldine McCaughrean's "official sequel" Peter Pan in Scarlet (2006), among others.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Educators who teach children's literature at the college level as part of the pre-service experience seldom allocate enough space in the curriculum for nonfiction literature. This book recognizes the viability of nonfiction as a literary genre that demands critical analysis, celebrates storytelling in its varied forms, and invites teacher educators and pre-service teachers, our primary audience, to nurture a spirit of inquiry and skepticism in the classroom. It is an excellent resource for teacher educators looking for a variety of nonfiction texts to include in their literacy curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. It also offers critical approaches through which students are encouraged to read these texts, and ideas for critical inquiry with young learners.

The oldest and most prestigious children's literature award, the Newbery Medal has since 1922 been granted annually by the American Library Association to the children's book it deems "most distinguished." Medal books enjoy an outsized influence on American children's literature, figuring perennially on publishers' lists, on library and bookstore shelves, and in school curricula. As such, they offer a compelling window into the history of US children's literature and publishing, as well as into changing societal attitudes about which books are "best" for America's schoolchildren. Yet literary scholars have disproportionately ignored the Medal winners in their research. This volume provides a critically- and historically-grounded scholarly analysis of representative but understudied Newbery Medal books from the 1920s through the 2010s, interrogating the disjunction between the books' omnipresence and influence, on the one hand, and the critical silence surrounding them, on the other. Dust Off the Gold Medal makes a case for closing these scholarly gaps by revealing neglected texts' insights into the politics of children's literature prizing and by demonstrating how neglected titles illuminate critical debates currently central to the field of children's literature. In particular, the essays shed light on the hidden elements of diversity apparent in the neglected Newbery canon while illustrating how the books respond-sometimes in quite subtle ways-to contemporaneous concerns around race, class, gender, disability, nationalism, and globalism.