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.

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 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.

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.

A smaller, cheaper edition of this acclaimed illustrated biography of Beatrix Potter. Respected biographer Sarah Gristwood discovers a life crisscrossed with contradictions and marked by tragedy, yet one that left a remarkable literary - and environmental - legacy. This illustrated biography of the beloved writer has been a strong seller and critical success. It is now available in a smaller, more affordable format. Interest in Beatrix Potter and her characters is undimmed, with the second Peter Rabbit film being released in summer 2021 and an exhibition at the V&A from February 2022, 'Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature'. Few people realise how extraordinary Beatrix Potter's own story is. She was a woman of contradictions. A sheltered Victorian daughter who grew into an astute modern businesswoman. A talented artist who became a scientific expert. A famous author who gave it all up to become a farmer, then a pioneering conservationist. Bestselling biographer Sarah Gristwood follows the twists and turns of Beatrix Potter's life and its key turning points - including her tragically brief first engagement and happy second marriage late in life. She traces the creation of Beatrix's most famous characters - including the naughty Peter Rabbit, confused Jemima Puddleduck and cheeky Squirrel Nutkin - revealing how she drew on her unusual childhood pets and locations in her beloved Lake District. A fitting legacy for a pioneering conservationist who helped save thousands of acres of the Lake District.' - The Mail on Sunday 'Excellent, anecdotal text...' - The Times Literary Supplement 'Beautifully illustrated.' - The Sunday Express

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.

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.

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.

Appearing first as a weekly serial in "The Christian Herald," Eleanor H. Porter's "Pollyanna" was first published in book form in 1913. This popular story of an impoverished orphan girl who travels from America's western frontier to live with her wealthy maternal Aunt Polly in the fictional east coast town of Beldingsville went through forty-seven printings in seven years and remains in print today in its original version, as well as in various translations and adaptations. The story's enduring appeal lies in Pollyanna's sunny personality and in her glad game, her playful attempt to accentuate the positive in every situation. In celebration of its centenary, this collection of thirteen original essays examines a wide variety of the novel's themes and concerns, as well as adaptations in film, manga, and translation.

In this edited collection on "Pollyanna," internationally respected and emerging scholars of children's literature consider Porter's work from modern critical perspectives. Contributors focus primarily on the novel itself but also examine Porter's sequel, "Pollyanna Grows Up," and the various film versions and translations of the novel. With backgrounds in children's literature, cultural and film studies, philosophy, and religious studies, these scholars extend critical thinking about Porter's work beyond the thematic readings that have dominated previous scholarship. In doing so, the authors approach the novel from theoretical perspectives that examine what happens when Pollyanna engages with the world around her--her community and the natural environment--exposing the implicit philosophical, religious, and nationalist ideologies of the era in which "Pollyanna" was written. The final section is devoted to studies of adaptations of Porter's protagonist.

A collection of essays based on the Children's Books History Society study conference marking the bicentenary of the Religious Tract Society and the Lutterworth Press. The book analyses the children's literature it produced, charting the development of the genre from the evangelical tract through to the popular school story, spanning the period from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It shows how publishing worked within the context of a missionary society with a global reach. The book details the nature and development of the tract genre both in Britain and America, before looking at the range of RTS and Lutterworth output of children's titles, including its movement into magazine publishing. The work studies the two great magazines for which the RTS and Lutterworth were known to generations of children, the Boy's Own Paper and the Girl's Own Paper, as well as other magazines, such The Child's Companion. There are also chapters on popular tracts, such as The Dairyman's Daughter, and successful authors, from Hesba Stretton and Mrs Walton to W.E. Johns and Laura Ingalls Wilder. These essays explore how, in order to reflect an increasingly secular age, the subject matter widened, providing more non-fiction in its periodicals as well as an increasingly broad range of fiction, mostly secular in nature. It was also necessary for the Society to alter its didactically religious tone in order to present its Christian values with more subtlety. With chapters on subjects as diverse as American religious tracts, boy's school stories, secular publishing for girls and the presentation of gender roles, this collection is a major contribution to publishing history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors include Brian Alderson, Mary Cadogan, Aileen Fyfe and Anne Thwaite.

For several generations, comics were regarded as a boy's club-created by, for, and about men and boys. In the twenty-first century, however, comics have seen a rise of female creators, characters, and readers. While this sudden presence of women and girls in comics is being regarded as new and noteworthy, the observation is not true for the genre's entire history. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the medium was enjoyed equally by both sexes, and girls were the protagonists of some of the earliest, most successful, and most influential comics. In Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts, and Gender in Classic American Comics, Michelle Ann Abate examines the important but long-overlooked cadre of young female protagonists in US comics during the first half of the twentieth century. She treats characters ranging from Little Orphan Annie and Nancy to Little Lulu, Little Audrey of the Harvey Girls, and Li'l Tomboy-a group that collectively forms a tradition of funny girls in American comics. Abate demonstrates the massive popularity these funny girls enjoyed, revealing their unexplored narrative richness, aesthetic complexity, and critical possibility. Much of the humor in these comics arose from questioning gender roles, challenging social manners, and defying the status quo. Further, they embodied powerful points of collection about both the construction and intersection of race, class, gender, and age, as well as popular perceptions about children, representations of girlhood, and changing attitudes regarding youth. Finally, but just as importantly, these strips shed light on another major phenomenon within comics: branding, licensing, and merchandising. Collectively, these comics did far more than provide amusement-they were serious agents for cultural commentary and sociopolitical change.

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 Mary Poppins that many people know of today--a stern, but sweet, loveable, and reassuring British nanny--is a far cry from the character created by Pamela Lyndon Travers in the 1930's. Instead, this is the Mary Poppins reinvented by Disney in the eponymous movie. This book sheds light on the original Mary Poppins,

Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins is the only full-length study that covers all the Mary Poppins books, exposing just how subversive the pre-Disney Mary Poppins character truly was. Drawing important parallels between the character and the life of her creator, who worked as a governess herself, Grilli reveals the ways in which Mary Poppins came to unsettle the rigid and rigorous rules of Victorian and Edwardian society that most governesses embodied, taught, and passed on to their charges.

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.