A complete critical guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Children's and Young Adult Comics helps readers explore how comics have engaged with one of their most crucial audiences. In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as: - The history of comics for children and young adults, from early cartoon strips to the rise of comics as mainstream children's literature - Cultural contexts - from the Comics Code Authority to graphic novel adaptations of popular children's texts such as Neil Gaiman's Coraline - Key texts - from familiar favourites like Peanuts and Archie Comics to YA graphic novels such as Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese and hybrid works including the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series - Important theoretical and critical approaches to studying children's and young adult comics Children's and Young Adult Comics includes a glossary of crucial critical terms and a lengthy resources section to help students and readers develop their understanding of these genres and pursue independent study.

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 new collection, childrena (TM)s literature scholars from twelve different countries contribute to the ongoing debate on the importance of picturebook research, focusing on aesthetic and cognitive aspects of picture books. Contributors take interdisciplinary approaches that integrate different disciplines such as literary studies, art history, linguistics, narratology, cognitive psychology, sociology, memory studies, and picture theory. Topics discussed include intervisuality, twist endings, autobiographical narration, and metaliterary awareness in picturebooks. The essays also examine the narrative challenges of first-person narratives, ellipsis, frame breaking, and mindscape as new paradigms in picturebook research. Tying picturebook studies to studies in childhood, multimodality, and literacy, this anthology is representative of the different opportunities for research in this emerging field.

Despite Kipling's popularity as an author and his standing as a politically controversial figure, much of his work has remained relatively unexamined due to its characterization as 'children's literature'. Sue Walsh challenges the apparently clear division between 'children's' and 'adult' literature, and poses important questions about how these strict categories have influenced critical work on Kipling and on literature in general. For example, why are some of Kipling's books viewed as children's literature, and what critical assumptions does this label produce? Why is it that Kim is viewed by critics as transcending attempts at categorization? Using Kipling as a case study, Walsh discusses texts such as Kim, The Jungle Books, the Just-So Stories, Puck of Pook's Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, re-evaluating earlier critical approaches and offering fresh readings of these relatively neglected works. In the process, she suggests new directions for postcolonial and childhood studies and interrogates the way biographical criticism on children's literature in particular has tended to supersede and obstruct other kinds of readings.

Taking a critical, research-oriented perspective, this exploration of the theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical connections between the reading and teaching of young adult literature and adolescent identity development centers around three key questions:

• Who are the teens reading young adult literature?
• Why should teachers teach young adult literature?
• Why are teens reading young adult literature?

All chapters work simultaneously on two levels: each provides both a critical resource about contemporary young adult literature that could be used in YA literature classes or workshops and specific practical suggestions about what texts to use and how to teach them effectively in middle and high school classes.

Theorizing, problematizing, and reflecting in new ways on the teaching and reading of young adult literature in middle and secondary school classrooms, this valuable resource for teachers and teacher educators will help them to develop classrooms where students use literature as a means of making sense of themselves, each other, and the world around them.

From 1929 to 1997, Rumer Godden published more than 60 books, including novels, biographies, children's books, and poetry; this is the first collection devoted to this important transnational writer. Focusing on Godden's writing from the 1930s onward, the contributors uncover the breadth and variety of the literary landscape on display in works such as Black Narcissus, The Lady and the Unicorn, A Fugue in Time, and The River. Often drawing on her own experiences living in India and Britain, Godden establishes a diverse narrative topography that allows her to engage with issues related to her own uncertain position as an author representing such nomadic Others as gypsies, or taking up the displacements brought about by international conflict. Recognizing that studies of the transnational must consider the condition of enforced and elected exile within the changing political and cultural borders of postcolonial nations, the contributors position Godden with respect to different and overlapping fields of inquiry: modern literary history; colonial, postcolonial, and transnational studies; inter-media studies; and children's literature. Taken together, the essays in this volume demonstrate the richness and variety of Godden's writing and render the myriad ways in which Godden is an important critical presence in mid-twentieth-century fiction.

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature is a vibrant and authoritative exploration of children's literature in all its manifestations. It features a series of essays written by expert contributors who provide an illuminating examination of why children's literature is the way it is. Topics covered include:

• the history and development of children's literature
• various theoretical approaches used to explore the texts, including narratological methods
• questions of gender and sexuality along with issues of race and ethnicity
• realism and fantasy as two prevailing modes of story-telling
• picture books, comics and graphic novels as well as 'young adult' fiction and the 'crossover' novel
• media adaptations and neglected areas of children's literature.

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature contains suggestions for further reading throughout plus a helpful timeline and a substantial glossary of key terms and names, both established and more cutting-edge. This is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to an increasingly complex and popular discipline.

A comet in the mounting firmament of third-world, non-white, female writers, Edwidge Danticat stands apart. Danticat is an accomplished trilingual children's and YA author, activist, op-ed and cinema writer, and keynote speaker. Much of her work introduces the world to the cultural uniqueness of Haiti, the first black republic, and the elements of African heritage, language, and Vodou that continue to color all aspects of the island's art and self-expression This companion provides an in-depth look into the world and writings of Danticat through A-Z entries. These entries cover both her works and the prevalent themes of her writing, including colonialism, slavery, superstition, adaptation, dreams and coming of age. It also provides a biography of Danticat, a list of 32 aphorisms from Danticat's fiction, a guide to the names and histories of the real places in her fiction, lesson planning aids, and a robust glossary offering translations and definitions for the many Creole, French, Japanese, Latin, Spanish, and Taino terms in Danticat's writing.

Making use of recent masculinity theories, Joseph A. Kestner sheds new light on Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. Beginning with works published in the 1880s, when writers like H. Rider Haggard took inspiration from the First Boer War and the Zulu War, Kestner engages tales involving initiation and rites of passage, experiences with the non-Western Other, colonial contexts, and sexual encounters. Canonical authors such as R.L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Olive Schreiner are examined alongside popular writers like A.E.W. Mason, W.H. Hudson and John Buchan, providing an expansive picture of the crisis of masculinity that pervades adventure texts during the period.

Between 1932 and 1958, thousands of children read volumes in the book series Childhood of Famous Americans. With colorful cover art and compelling-and often highly fictionalized-narrative storylines, these biographies celebrated the national virtues and achievements of famous women like Betsy Ross, Louisa May Alcott, and Amelia Earhart. Employing deep archival research, Gregory M. Pfitzer examines the editorial and production choices of the publisher and considers the influence of the series on readers and American culture more broadly.In telling the story of how female subjects were chosen and what went into writing these histories for young female readers of the time, Pfitzer illustrates how these books shaped children's thinking and historical imaginations around girlhood using tales from the past. Utilizing documented conversations and disagreements among authors, editors, readers, reviewers, and sales agents at Bobbs-Merrill, "Fame is Not Just for the Fellas" places the series in the context of national debates around fame, gender, historical memory, and portrayals of children and childhood for a young reading public-charged debates that continue to this day.

A Day No Pigs Would Die, Speak, Thirteen Reasons Why These are some of the most beloved, and most challenged, books. Leaving controversial titles such as these out of your collection or limiting their access is not the answer to challenges. While ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom reports more than 4,500 challenges to young adult literature from 2000 through 2009. This authoritative handbook gives you the information you need to defend challenged books with an informed response and ensure free access to young book lovers. With a profile of each book that includes its plot and characters, related materials and published reviews, awards and prizes, and Web and audiovisual resources, you will be prepared to answer even the toughest attacks.

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.

In this new book, Noga Applebaum surveys science fiction novels published for children and young adults from 1980 to the present, exposing the anti-technological bias existing within a genre often associated with the celebration of technology. Applebaum argues that perceptions of technology as a corrupting force, particularly in relation to its use by young people, are a manifestation of the enduring allure of the myth of childhood innocence and result in young-adult fiction that endorses a technophobic agenda. This agenda is a form of resistance to the changing face of childhood and technology's contribution to this change. Further, Applebaum contends that technophobic literature disempowers its young readers by implying that the technologies of the future are inherently dangerous, while it neglects to acknowledge children's complex, yet pleasurable, interactions with technology today. The study looks at works by well-known authors including M.T. Anderson, Monica Hughes, Lois Lowry, Garth Nix, and Philip Reeve, and explores topics such as ecology, cloning, the impact of technology on narrative structure, and the adult-child hierarchy. While focusing on the popular genre of science fiction as a useful case study, Applebaum demonstrates that negative attitudes toward technology exist within children's literature in general, making the book of considerable interest to scholars of both science fiction and children's literature.

By the middle 1800s, toys were appearing in forms that drew upon--and that inspired--advances in areas such as optics, biology, geography, transportation, and automation. In these decades, too, a new type of wonder tale was being brought to maturity by a Poe-inspired Jules Verne. The modern wonder tale's highly-charged vision expressed the hopes and the fears, and the delights and the traumas, engendered by "new worlds idealism"--that Western pursuit of both mechanical and geographical conquest. Exploring realms belonging to childhood, literature, science, and history, this innovative study weaves together the histories of wonder tales and children's toys, focusing specifically on their modern aspects and how they reflect and express the social attitudes of that time period beginning around 1957.

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 boysa (TM) and girlsa (TM) 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 childrena (TM)s literature and Victorian culture.

This book considers one of the most controversial aspects of children's and young adult literature: its use as an instrument of power. Children in contemporary Western society are oppressed and powerless, yet they are allowed, in fiction written by adults for the enlightenment and enjoyment of children, to become strong, brave, rich, powerful, and independent -- on certain conditions and for a limited time. Though the best children's literature offers readers the potential to challenge the authority of adults, many authors use artistic means such as the narrative voice and the subject position to manipulate the child reader. Looking at key works from the eighteenth century to the present, Nikolajeva explores topics such as genre, gender, crossvocalization, species, and picturebook images. Contemporary power theories including social and cultural studies, carnival theory, feminism, postcolonial and queer studies, and narratology are also considered, in order to demonstrate how a balance is maintained between the two opposite inherent goals of children's literature: to empower and to educate the child.

In this pioneering and timely book, Lampert examines the ways in which cultural identities are constructed within young adult and children's literature about the attacks of September 11, 2001. Looking at examples including picture books, young adult novels, and a selection of DC Comics, Lampert finds the co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance, the binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity, and the glorification of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. Specifically, Lampert identifies three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children--ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities--arguing that their formation is contingent upon post-9/11 politics. These shifting identities offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitute good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context.

Lampert makes an original contribution to the field of children's literature by providing a focused and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.

This comparative study looks at the way English books for girls are imported and translated into Dutch and Flemish culture. Fiction for girls has existed in Flanders and the Netherlands for more than one hundred years and started with the translation of Little Women into Dutch in 1876. Original fiction for girls in Dutch has developed especially in the Netherlands. Translations from English, German and French played an important role in developing the genre over time and Flanders plays an important role in bringing translations of narrative fiction for girls on the Dutch-Flemish market. Translations take many forms and the way a narrative is translated can vary a lot. It is often assumed that only the best of other cultures is translated, but that is not really the case. A large proportion of the translations analyzed in this study are popular fiction series which were heavily adapted and changed in the translation process. The same is true of classic girls' texts, such as Little Women, which are often unrecognizable in translation. However, not all translations take that many liberties with the original and many award-winning books are translated in a faithful way.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Day No Pigs Would Die, Speak, Thirteen Reasons Why These are some of the most beloved, and most challenged, books. Leaving controversial titles such as these out of your collection or limiting their access is not the answer to challenges. While ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom reports more than 4,500 challenges to young adult literature from 2000 through 2009. This authoritative handbook gives you the information you need to defend challenged books with an informed response and ensure free access to young book lovers. With a profile of each book that includes its plot and characters, related materials and published reviews, awards and prizes, and Web and audiovisual resources, you will be prepared to answer even the toughest attacks.

Focusing upon contemporary young adult literature, this collection features an academic look at the use of the classic fairy tale and its Gothic elements in the creation of both new tales and retellings of classic stories.

This anthology brings together for the first time a collection of autobiographical accounts of their childhood by a range of prominent nineteenth-century literary women. These are strongly individualised descriptions by women who breached the cultural prohibitions against self writing, especially in the attention given to psychologically formative incidents and memories. Several offer detailed accounts of their inadequate schooling and their keen hunger for knowledge: others give new insights into the dynamics of Victorian family life, especially relationships with parents and siblings, the games they invented, and their sense of being misunderstood. Most contributors vividly describe their fears and fantasies, together with obsessive religious practices, and the development of an inner life as a survival strategy. This collection makes vital out-of-print material available to scholars working in the field of women's autobiography, the history of childhood, and Victorian literature. The volume will also appeal to general readers interested in biography, autobiography, the history of family life, education, and women's writing: read alongside Victorian women's novels it offers an intriguing commentary on some of their key themes.

Literary sidekicks like Dr. Watson and Robin the Boy Wonder have not been the singular subject of a significant critical study-until now. Using young adult literature (YA) to study the sidekick reveals new and exciting ways to understand these kinds of characters and this kind of literature. YA has embraced the sidekick, recognizing the way the character reflects the importance of growth and finding one's place in the world. The nature of many YA texts allows sidekicks to grow beyond literary or historical origins. This includes letting sidekicks "evolve" over the course of multiple texts, using parallel novels to add complexity to a sidekick's characterization, and telling a story from the sidekick's perspective, paradoxically making the sidekick the hero. A singularly focused and prolonged study helps to establish sidekick scholarship as a burgeoning field in and of itself.

Can fairy tales subvert consumerism? Can fantasy and children's literature counter the homogenizing influence of globalization? Can storytellers retain their authenticity in the age of consumerism? These are some of the critical questions raised by Jack Zipes, the celebrated scholar of fairy tales and children's literature. In this book, Zipes argues that, despite a dangerous reconfiguration of children as consumers in the civilizing process, children's literature, fairy tales, and storytelling possess a uniquely powerful (even fantastic)capacity to resist the "relentless progress" of negative trends in culture. He also argues that these tales and stories may lose their power if they are too diluted by commercialism and merchandising.

Stories have been used for centuries as a way to teach children (and adults) how to see the world, as well as their place within it. In Relentless Progress, Zipes looks at the surprising ways that stories have influenced people within contemporary culture and vice versa. Among the many topics explored here are the dumbing down of books for children, the marketing of childhood, the changing shape of feminist fairy tales, and why American and British children aren?t exposed to more non-western fairy tales. From picture books to graphic novels, from children's films to video games, from Grimm's fairy tales to the multimedia Harry Potter phenomenon, Zipes demonstrates that while children's stories have changed greatly in recent years, much about these stories have remained the same?despite their contemporary, high-tech repackaging.

Relentless Progress offers remarkable insight into why classic folklore and fairy tales should remain an important part of the lives of children in today's digital culture.

The Child That Haunts Us focuses on the symbolic use of the child archetype through the exploration of miniature characters from the realms of children s literature.

Jung argued that the child archetype should never be mistaken for the real child. In this book Susan Hancock considers how the child is portrayed in literature and fairytale and explores the suggestion from Jung and Bachelard that the symbolic resonance of the miniature is inversely proportionate to its size.

We encounter many instances where the miniature characters are a visibly vulnerable other, yet often these occur in association with images of the supernatural, as the desired or feared object of adult imagination. In The Child That Haunts Us it is emphasised that the treatment by any society, past or present, of its smallest and most vulnerable members is truly revealing of the values it really holds.

This original and sensitive exploration will be of particular interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics engaged in Jungian studies, children s literature, childhood studies and those with an interest in socio-cultural constructions of childhood.