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.

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.

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.

The great Victorian Christian author George MacDonald is the well-spring of the modern fantasy genre. In this book Colin Manlove offers explorations of MacDonald's eight shorter fairy tales and his longer stories At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, and The Princess and Curdie. MacDonald saw the imagination as the source of fairy tales and of divine truth together. For he believed that God lives in the depths of the human mind and "sends up from thence wonderful gifts into the light of the understanding". This makes MacDonald that very rare thing: a writer of mystical fiction whose work can give us experience of the divine. Throughout his children's fantasy stories MacDonald is describing the human and divine imagination. In the shorter tales he shows how the imagination has different regions and depths, each able to shift into the other. With the longer stories we see the imagination in relation to other aspects of the self and to its position in the world. Here the imagination is portrayed as often embattled in relation to empiricism, egotism, and greed.

"This readable and informative account... raises issues about the political and social intent of all children s literature. Essential." Choice

During the New Negro Renaissance, African American children s literature became a crucial medium through which a disparate community forged bonds of cultural, economic, and aesthetic solidarity. Employing interdisciplinary critical strategies, including social, educational, and publishing history, canon-formation theory, and extensive archival research, Children s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance analyzes childhood as a site of emerging black cultural nationalism. It explores the period s vigorous exchange about the nature and identity of black childhood and uncovers the networks of African Americans who worked together to transmit black history and culture to a new generation."

An adapted and illustrated edition of Jane Austen's romantic classic - at an easy-to-read level for all ages! Mrs Bennet is desperate to find rich husbands for her daughters, so the arrival of a charming new neighbour is welcome indeed. Sadly, the friend he brings with him is not. Mr Darcy seems to have even more pride than money. Nobody likes him - least of all Elizabeth Bennet. But not everyone is who they seem. About Jane Austen Children's Stories: From the gardens of Pemberley to the spooky halls of Northanger Abbey, join some of literature's most iconic heroines on their path to self-discovery and true love. An adaptation of Jane Austen's famous stories, illustrated to introduce children aged 7+ to the classics.

This book critically examines Le Guin's fiction for all ages, and it will be of great interest to her many admirers and to all students and scholars of children's literature.

In the first full-length study in English of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, the authors show how the checkered history of the puppet illuminates social change from the pre World War One era to the present. The authors argue that most Americans know a trivialized, diluted version of the tale, one such source is Disney's perennial classic. The authors also discover that when adults are introduced to the 'real' story, they often deem it as unsuitable for children. Placing the puppet in a variety of contexts, the authors chart the progression of this childhood tale that has frequently undergone dramatic revisions to suit America's idea of children's literature.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a pronounced trend toward a particular type of picturebook that many would label "postmodern." Postmodern picturebooks have stretched our conventional notion of what constitutes a picturebook, as well as what it means to be an engaged reader of these texts. The international researchers and scholars included in this compelling collection of work critically examine and discuss postmodern picturebooks, and reflect upon their unique contributions to both the field of children's literature and to the development of new literacies for child, adolescent, and adult readers.

As Canada came to terms with its role as an independent nation following Confederation in 1867, there was a call for a literary voice to express the needs and desires of a new country. Children's literature was one of the means through which this new voice found expression. Seen as a tool for both entertaining and educating children, this material is often overtly propagandistic and nationalistic, and addresses some of the key political, economic, and social concerns of Canada as it struggled to maintain national unity during this time. From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood studies a large variety of children's literature written in English between 1867 and 1911, revealing a distinct interest in questions of national unity and identity among children's writers of the day and exploring the influence of American and British authors on the shaping of Canadian identity. The visions of Canada expressed in this material are often in competition with one another, but together they illuminate the country's attempts to define itself and its relation to the world outside its borders.

The astonishing success of J.K. Rowling and other contemporary children's authors has demonstrated how passionately children can commit to the books they love. But this kind of devotion is not new. This timely volume takes up the challenge of assessing the complex interplay of forces that have created the popularity of children's books both today and in the past. The essays collected here ask about the meanings and values that have been ascribed to the term 'popular'. They consider whether popularity can be imposed, or if it must always emerge from children's preferences. And they investigate how the Harry Potter phenomenon fits into a repeated cycle of success and decline within the publishing industry. Whether examining eighteenth-century chapbooks, fairy tales, science schoolbooks, Victorian adventures, waif novels or school stories, these essays show how historical and publishing contexts are vital in determining which books will succeed and which will fail, which bestsellers will endure and which will fade quickly into obscurity. As they considering the fiction of Angela Brazil, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling, the contributors carefully analyse how authorial talent and cultural contexts combine, in often unpredictable ways, to generate - and sometimes even sustain - literary success.

This collection of essays offers innovative methodological and disciplinary approaches to the intersection of Anglophone literary cultures with children and childhoods across the twentieth century. In two acts of re-centering, the volume focuses both on the multiplicity of childhoods and literary cultures and on child agency. Looking at classic texts for young audiences and at less widely-read and unpublished material (across genres including poetry, fiction, historical fiction or biography, picturebooks, and children's television), essays foreground the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts, explore challenges to received notions of childhood, and emphasize the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects. Chapters frame themes of spectacle, self, and specularity across the twentieth-century; question tropes of childhood; explore identity and displacement in narrating history and culture; and elevate children as makers of literary culture. A major intent of the volume is to approach literary culture not just as produced by adults for consumption by children but also as co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers.

Drawing on critical race theory, critical race feminism, critical multicultural analysis, and intertextuality this book examines how slavery is represented in contemporary children's picture books. Through analysis of recently published picture books about slavery, Rogers discusses how these books engage with and respond to the historiography of the institution of slavery. Exploring how contemporary writers and illustrators have represented the institution of slavery, Rogers presents a critical and responsible approach for reading and using picture books in K-12 classrooms and demonstrates how these picture books about slavery continue to perform important cultural work.

The myth of the Victorian family remains a pervasive influence within a contemporary Britain that perceives itself to be in social crisis. Nostalgic for a golden age of "Victorian values" in which visions of supportive, united families predominate, the common consciousness, exhorted by social and political discourse, continues to vaunt the "traditional, natural" family as the template by which all other family forms are gauged. Yet this fantasy of family, nurtured and augmented throughout the Victorian era, was essentially a construct that belied the realities of a nineteenth-century world in which orphanhood, fostering, and stepfamilies were endemic.

Focusing primarily on British children's texts written by women and drawing extensively on socio-historic material, The Fantasy of Family considers the paradoxes implicit to the perpetuation of the domestic ideal within the Victorian era and offers new perspectives on both nineteenth-century and contemporary society.

Soviet literature in general and Soviet children 's literature in particular have often been labeled by Western and post-Soviet Russian scholars and critics as propaganda. Below the surface, however, Soviet children 's literature and culture allowed its creators greater experimental and creative freedom than did the socialist realist culture for adults. This volume explores the importance of children 's culture, from literature to comics to theater to film, in the formation of Soviet social identity and in connection with broader Russian culture, history, and society.

Oscar Wilde's two collections of children's literature, The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), have often been marginalised in critical accounts as their apparently conservative didacticism appears at odds with the characterisation of Wilde as an amoral aesthete. In this, the first full-length study of Wilde's fairy tales for children, Jarlath Killeen argues that Wilde's stories are neither uniformly conservative nor subversive, but a blend of both. Killeen contends that while they should be read in relation to a literary tradition of fairy tales that emerged in nineteenth century Europe; Irish issues heavily influenced the work. These issues were powerfully shaped by the 'folk Catholicism' Wilde encountered in the west of Ireland. By resituating the fairy tales in a complex nexus of theological, political, social, and national concerns, Killeen restores the tales to their proper place in the Wilde canon.

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.

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.

Eclectic library reading programs for young children have blossomed across the nation over the last decade, encouraging in toddlers a fondness for the library and an excitement for the caches of books to be found there. Likewise, in an effort to promote a love of language in babies as young as three months old, scores of early childhood initiatives are beginning to sprout as well. Aimed at children's librarians and other professionals who work with very young children, this librarian-tested sourcebook provides complete programs that spotlight the value and necessity of singing, speaking, and reading to babies in their earliest months. Ten ready-to-use programs are divided for their intended audience: five for 'pre-walkers' and five for walkers. Marino combines rhymes involving body movement, songs, fingerplays, circle games, and books in ways that teach interaction skills with young children and help to enrich their language and enhance their listening capabilities. Several of the rhymes are repeated in a take-home section to aid librarians and others in charge of children's programs to present parents and caregivers with the tools they need to use rhymes and activities whenever and wherever they want. A helpful bibliography lists the best picture books, programming books, rhyme collections, and numerous recordings that are suitable for very young children. The captivating activities in Babies in the Library! will delight the youngest library users while making it easy for librarians to create programs for this important and growing segment of the library population.

Once Upon a Time in a Different World, a unique addition to the celebrated Children's Literature and Culture series, seeks to move discussions and treatments of ideas in African America Children's literature from the margins to the forefront of literary discourse. Looking at a variety of topics, including the moralities of heterosexism, the veneration of literacy, and the "politics of hair," Neal A. Lester provides a scholarly and accessible compilation of essays that will serve as an invaluable resource for parents, students, and educators. The much-needed reexamination of African American children's texts follows an engaging call-and-response format, allowing for a lively and illuminating discussion between its primary author and a diverse group of contributors; including educators, scholars, students, parents, and critics. In addition to these distinct dialogues, the book features an enlightening generational conversation between Lester and his teenage daughter as they review the same novels. With critical assessments of Toni and Slade Morrison's The Big Box and The Book of Mean People, bell hooks' Happy to Be Nappy, and Anne Schraff's Until We Meet Again, among many other works, these provocative and fresh essays yield a wealth of perspectives on the intersections of identity formations in childhood and adulthood.

First published in 1992, this book will be an invaluable help to librarians, teachers and parents looking for quality information books for children. Four Hundred and Seventy titles have been selected by an experienced team of reviewers for young people between the ages 3 and 16. Written by teachers and librarians, each review includes full bibliographical details, a succinct assessment of the book and an indication of reader age range. The subjects covered take into account the requirements of the National Curriculum. All areas of knowledge are covered, but no attempt was made to find recommended titles in all subjects - the quality of the book with a specific topic, author or title in mind, detailed subject and author/title indexes are supplied.

Carpe Mundum analyzes German Youth culture during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Each chapter addresses a distinct topic: sex educational materials for young people, the language of the censorship debates, novels dealing with war, historical narration, magazines, popular science and science fiction, radio, and sports. Together the themes illustrate the influence of nineteenth-century holistic thinking in popular culture in early twentieth-century Germany. Public policies and institutions governing German youth culture during the Weimar Republic, including education and social welfare, evince spiritual underpinnings of Naturphilosophie - a movement which promoted the unity of all things. As cultural modernity in Germany enabled young people greater participation in shaping their culture, elements of a modernity of yough emerged as distinct from that of the adult world and its ideologically laden system of values. The essence of youthful modernity in Germany as evident most clearly in popular magazines, radio, and sports rests primarily on spontaneity, ingenuity and camaraderie.

Stories, Pictures and Reality follows two children as they work out the reality status of stories and pictures, with a daily parent-observer record from the birth of the first child until the second is eight, a span of eleven years in all. Together these children pick through the meaning of stories and the motivations of the characters they discover in this unique first-hand description of the discernment that children bring to books from an early age, full of revealing quotes that tell us a great deal about the cognitive development of our young readers: "It's a joke 'cause it couldn't really have happened", "I'll tell you what's pretend: Batman, Robin, Superman, pirates, cowboys and Indians". "Pussy cats don't fly kites!", "The man who drawed it was wrong". In analysis this longitudinal study shows that children have more insight and understanding than they are often given credit for and that they approach subjects that puzzle the most sophisticated of thinkers with an elegant simplicity beyond the expectations of conventional psychologists and children's literature commentators. This book urges readers, especially practitioners and academics, to afford greater respect to what young children are capable of in this area.

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.

The definitive and revealing biography of the author of The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett's favourite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom. On the surface, Frances' life was extremely successful: hosting regular literary salons in her home and travelling frequently between properties in the UK and America. But behind the colourful personal and social life, she was a complex and contradictory character. She lost both parents by her twenty-first birthday, Henry James called her "the most heavenly of women" although avoided her; prominent people admired her and there were many friendships as well as an ill-advised marriage to a much younger man that ended in heartache. Her success was punctuated by periods of depression, in one instance brought on by the tragic loss of her eldest son to consumption. Ann Thwaite creates a sympathetic but balanced and eye-opening biography of the woman who has enchanted numerous generations of children.