"Patterns of sublimation begin in childhood. So does binary and hierarchical thinking. The child must be trained to see in oppositions and on a scale of order. So the story of nation and people, race and culture begins as the bedtime story." (The author) How else, asks Rashna Singh, do we explain the uncanny physical resemblance between Osama bin Laden and the evil Jaffar (of Disney's motion picture Aladdin)? Singh provides a most persuasive argument for why these sentiments are both insidious and compelling, and how they resonate to this day. While she includes such classic examples as The Secret Garden, Robinson Crusoe, and the Babar series, it is her inclusion of genuinely neglected fictions that lends her analyses a special richness. In an engaging narrative style, Singh demonstrates how constructions of character evolve into cultural imprints which encourage their young readers to choose the "goodly" side, with little thought of "badly" repercussions.

In this new monograph, author Debra Dudek defines a new era of vampire texts in which vampires have moved from their iconic dark, feared, often seductive figure lingering in alleys, to the beloved and morally sensitive vampire winning the affections of teen protagonists throughout pop culture. Dudek takes a close look at three hugely-popular vampire series for young adults, drawing parallels between the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight Saga novels/films, and The Vampire Diaries TV series/book series. By defining a new era of vampire texts and situating these three series within this transition, The Beloved Does Not Bite signals their significance and lays the groundwork for future scholarship on the flourishing genre of paranormal romances for young adults.

This volume is a critical anthology of primary texts whose main audiences were children and/or adolescents in the medieval period. The texts include theoretical and interpretive introductions and commentary.

This volume examines utopian writing for children from the eighteenth century to the present day, defining and exploring this new genre in the field of children's literature. The original essays discuss thematic conventions and present case studies of individual works. It includes interviews with creative writers and the first bibliography of utopian fiction for children.

The Poetics of Childhood investigates the sensibility of childhood and the way writers try to recapture it. It explores the earliest conceptions of innocence and the development of literature about children to the present day. It encompasses the pastoral, the dark pastoral, the anti-pastoral; it addresses picture books, fantasy and realism. It looks with originality at the literature of childhood, so that the child and adult can be seen reflectively - the child in the adult and the various stages of childhood as they are remembered and retained in adulthood. It confronts issues of primal and socially constructed desire and the issue of childhood to talk about desire. It is a poetic way of imagining the experience of childhood and explores childhood as a particularly fluid and porous time, it also addresses issues of creativity. This is an essential reference for teacher, parents, artists and writers.

First published in 1998, this volume explores how the genre of school stories had become firmly established by the turn of the twentieth century, having been built on the foundations laid by writers such as Thomas Hughes and F.W. Farrar. Stories for girls were also taking on a more exciting complexion, inspired by the 'Katy' books of Susan Coolidge. The first five decades of the twentieth century saw further developments in children's fiction. In this comprehensive volume, John and Jonathan Cooper examine each decade in turn, with alphabetically arranged entries on popular children's writers that published works in English during that period. 206 different authors are covered, many from the United States and Canada. Each entry provides information on the author's pseudonyms, date of birth, nationality, titles of works, place and date of publication and the publisher's name. The artist responsible for a book's illustrations is also identified where possible. With over 200 illustrations of cover designs and dustwrappers, many of which are now rare and have never before been published, this book will delight collectors, dealers, scholars, librarians, parents and all those who simply enjoy reading children's fiction.

The Feminine Subject in Children's Literature builds upon and contributes to the growing academic interest in feminism within the field of children's literature studies. Christie Wilkie-Stibbs draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan in her analysis of particular children's literature texts to demonstrate how a feminist analysis opens up textual possibilities that may be applied to works of children's fiction in general. Her goal is to extend the range of textual engagements in children's literature through the application of a new post-structural critical apparati.

Introducing Children's Literature is an ideal guide to reading children's literature through the perspective of literary history. Focusing on the major literary movements from Romanticism to Postmodernism, Thacker and Webb examine the concerns of each period and the ways in which these concerns influence and are influenced by the children's literature of the time.
Each section begins with a general chapter, which explains the relationship between the major issues of each literary period and the formal and thematic qualities of children's texts. Close readings of selected texts follow to demonstrate the key defining characteristics of the form of writing and the literary movements.
Original in its approach, this book sets children's literature within the context of literary movements and adult literature. It is essential reading for students studying writing for children. Books discussed include:
*Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
* Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies
*Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
*Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz
*Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden
*P.L.Travers' Mary Poppins
*E.B.White's Charlotte's Web
*Philip Pullman's Clockwork.

This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children's and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children's and young adult 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.

This book offers insights into the translation and adaptation of illustrated texts in an era in which visual texts are perceived as a dominant perceptual frame for interpreting social and cultural phenomena. Using source texts including illustrated books, comics, graphic novels and animated films, the authors analyze their translations and adaptations to address the works as multimodal entities, in which even the replacement of one component affects the entire whole. Interviews with the artists - writers, illustrators and animators - will shed more light on the observations. This volume's unique focus on the visual mode and the impact of its replacement on the multimodal whole is a topic that has not attracted as much attention as the translation of the verbal component, and will appeal to students and researchers of translation and adaptation, popular culture, media and communication, and children's literature alike.

Children's Literature? Have children ever really had a literature of their own? Jack Zipes - translator of the Grimm tales, teacher, storyteller, and scholar - has never flinched from the hard questions about kids and books. In Sticks and Stones he raises the stakes for everyone who cares about children's literature and culture. From the grisly nineteenth century moralism of Slovenly Peter (whose fingers get cut off) to the wildly successful Harry Potter books, children's literature is in many ways the 'grown-ups' version' - a story about childhood that adults tell kids. And that, argues Jack Zipes, can be a problem: even the experts don't really know what children make of what we give them.
Sticks and Stones argues that despite common American assumptions about children's books, our investment in children is paradoxically curtailing their freedom and creativity.
With refreshing independence, Jack Zipes contends that children are best served neither by the current polemics of the religious right or the radical left. Our society may believe that it is providing children with the materials and space in which to grow, but kids are becoming homogenized. Children's literature is a booming market whose success, he says, is disguising its limitations.
Sticks and Stones is a forthright and engaging book by someone who cares deeply about what and how children read.

While white racism has global dimensions, it has an unshakeable lease on life in South African political organizations and its educational system. Donnarae MacCann and Yulisa Maddy here provide a thorough and provocative analysis of South African children's literature during the key decade around Nelson Mandela's release from prison. Their research demonstrates that the literature of this period was derived from the same milieu - intellectual, educational, religious, political, and economic - that brought white supremacy to South Africa during colonial times. This volume is a signal contribution to the study of children's literature and its relation to racism and social conditions.

Historical fiction has a great deal to offer as its readers and devotees have always known. The time is ripe however for the historical novel and historical picture book to be promoted more emphatically so that many more are made aware of the delight and learning to be found in the genre. The editors of this book invited authors, academic writers and teachers to reflect on the nature, scope, range and richness of historical fiction for children. What is collected here provides an overview of the field, a consideration of significant writers of historical fiction from the nineteenth century onwards, a sense of the various historical eras commonly explored (Stone Age to World War 2), a discussion of commonly raised issues, themes and topics such as child labor, slavery and migration, and a forum for writers to reveal their insights into the writing of historical fiction. Julian Atterton, Berlie Doherty, Michael Foreman and Philip Pullman have made contributions. It provides evidence of children and students engaging creatively with historical fiction.

This book explores representations of child autonomy and self-governance in children's literature.The idea of child rule and child realms is central to children's literature, and childhood is frequently represented as a state of being, with children seen as aliens in need of passports to Adultland (and vice versa). In a sense all children's literature depends on the idea that children are different, separate, and in command of their own imaginative spaces and places. Although the idea of child rule is a persistent theme in discussions of children's literature (or about children and childhood) the metaphor itself has never been properly unpacked with critical reference to examples from those many texts that are contingent on the authority and/or power of children. Child governance and autonomy can be seen as natural or perverse; it can be displayed as a threat or as a promise. Accordingly, the "child rule"-motif can be seen in Robinsonades and horror films, in philosophical treatises and in series fiction. The representations of self-ruling children are manifold and ambivalent, and range from the idyllic to the nightmarish. Contributors to this volume visit a range of texts in which children are, in various ways, empowered, discussing whether childhood itself may be thought of as a nationality, and what that may imply. This collection shows how representations of child governance have been used for different ideological, aesthetic, and pedagogical reasons, and will appeal to scholars of children's literature, childhood studies, and cultural studies.

This book visits contemporary British children's and young adult (YA) fiction alongside cosmopolitanism, exploring the notion of the nation within the context of globalization, transnationalism and citizenship. By resisting globalization's dehumanizing conflation, cosmopolitanism offers an ethical, humanitarian, and political outlook of convivial planetary community. In its pedagogical responsibility towards readers who will become future citizens, contemporary children's and YA fiction seeks to interrogate and dismantle modes of difference and instead provide aspirational models of empathetic world citizenship. McCulloch discusses texts such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Jackie Kay's Strawgirl, Theresa Breslin's Divided City, Gillian Cross's Where I Belong, Kerry Drewery's A Brighter Fear, Saci Lloyd's Momentum, and Julie Bertagna's Exodus trilogy. This book addresses ways in which children's and YA fiction imagines not only the nation but the world beyond, seeking to disrupt binary divisions through a cosmopolitical outlook. The writers discussed envision British society's position and role within a global arena of wide-ranging topical issues, including global conflicts, gender, racial politics, ecology, and climate change. Contemporary children's fiction has matured by depicting characters who face uncertainty just as the world itself experiences an uncertain future of global risks, such as environmental threats and terrorism. The volume will be of significant interest to the fields of children's literature, YA fiction, contemporary fiction, cosmopolitanism, ecofeminism, gender theory, and British and Scottish literature.

This book investigates the reappearance of the 19th-century dream-child from the Golden Age of Children's Literature, both in the Harry Potter series and in other works that have reached unprecedented levels of popular success today. Discussing Harry Potter as a reincarnation of Lewis Carroll's Alice and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Billone goes on to examine the recent resurrection of Alice in Tim Burton's Alice, and of Peter Pan in Michael Jackson and in James Bond. Visiting trends that have emerged since the Harry Potter series ended, the book studies revisions of the dream-child in texts and films that have inspired mass fandom in the twenty-first century: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, E.L. James's 50 Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. The volume argues that the 21st-century desire to achieve dream-states in relationship to eternal youth results from the way that dreams provide a means of realizing the fantastic yet alarming possibility of escaping from time. This current identification with the dream-child stems from the threat of political unrest and economic and environmental collapse as well as from the simultaneous technophilia and technophobia of a culture immersed in the breathless revolution of the digital age. This book not only explores how the dream-child from the past has returned to reflect misgivings about imagined dystopian futures but also reveals how the rebirth of the dream-child opens up possibilities for new narratives where happy endings remain viable against all odds. It will appeal to scholars in a wide variety of fields including Childhood Studies, Children's/YA Literature, Cinema Studies, Cultural Studies, Cyberculture, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Gothic Studies, New Media, and Popular Culture.

Reading Contemporary Picturebooks takes a look at one of the most vibrant branches of children's literature - the modern picturebook. This exciting new book takes a sample of contemporary picturebooks and closely examines the features that make them distinctive and then suggests a way of characterising the 'interanimation' of words and pictures that is the essence of the form. The reasons for the picturebook's vitality and flexibility are also explored and the close bond between the picturebook and its readers is analysed. Advances in our understanding of how visual images are organised are examined and the book concludes with an attempt to redescribe the picturebook in such a way that pictures, readers and text may be drawn together. Picturing Text will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers interested in reading, children's literature and media studies.

An invaluable resource for students and teachers of children's literature, this book covers Newbery's work and achievements as a publisher and bookseller.

Movable books are an innovative area of children's publishing. Commonly equated with spectacular pop-ups, movable books have a little-known history as interactive, narrative media. Since they are hybrid artifacts consisting of words, images and movable components, they cross the borders between story, toy, and game. Interactive Books is a historical and comparative study of early movable books in relation to the children who engage with them. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh focuses on the period movable books became connected with children from the mid-17th to the early-19th centuries. In particular, she examines turn-up books, paper doll books, and related hybrid experiments like toy theaters and paignion (or domestic play set) produced between 1650 and 1830. Despite being popular in their own time, these artifacts are little known today. This study draws attention to a gap in our knowledge of children's print culture by showing how these artifacts are important in their own right. Reid-Walsh combines archival research with children's literature studies, book history, and juvenilia studies. By examining commercially produced and homemade examples, she explores the interrelations among children, interactive media, and historical participatory culture. By drawing on both Enlightenment thinkers and contemporary digital media theorists Interactive Books enables us to think critically about children's media texts paper and digital, past and present.

The presence of the Past studies the interaction of heritage and fiction written for children over a 40 year period in Britain, exploring a range of works for children from The Tale of Peter Rabbit to I Spy.

Children's Literature? Have children ever really had a literature of their own? Jack Zipes - translator of the Grimm tales, teacher, storyteller, and scholar - has never flinched from the hard questions about kids and books. In Sticks and Stones he raises the stakes for everyone who cares about children's literature and culture. From the grisly nineteenth century moralism of Slovenly Peter (whose fingers get cut off) to the wildly successful Harry Potter books, children's literature is in many ways the 'grown-ups' version' - a story about childhood that adults tell kids. And that, argues Jack Zipes, can be a problem: even the experts don't really know what children make of what we give them.
Sticks and Stones argues that despite common American assumptions about children's books, our investment in children is paradoxically curtailing their freedom and creativity.
With refreshing independence, Jack Zipes contends that children are best served neither by the current polemics of the religious right or the radical left. Our society may believe that it is providing children with the materials and space in which to grow, but kids are becoming homogenized. Children's literature is a booming market whose success, he says, is disguising its limitations.
Sticks and Stones is a forthright and engaging book by someone who cares deeply about what and how children read.

Beverly Clark provides a cultural criticism of the school story, drawing upon the work of Derrida, Foucult, Spivak, Garger, and Jameson, among others. This is a study of the cross-gendering of the school story and explores the intersections of gender and age. This book argues that children's literature should receive the same critical scrutiny as adult literature.

Series Information:
Children's Literature and Culture

A collection of Japanese children's literature in translation spans three decades with contributions by major authors as well as familiar lullabies.