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.

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.

In 1922, Mildred Pitts Walter was born in DeRidder, Louisiana, to a log cutter and a midwife/beautician. She became the first member of her family to go to college, graduating in 1940. Walter moved to California, where she worked as an elementary school teacher. After being encouraged by a Publisher to write books for and about African American children, Walter went on to become a pioneer of African American children's literature. Most notably, she wrote Justin and the Best Biscuits in the World, which bent preconceptions with tales of black cowboys and men doing "women's work." She was also a contributing book reviewer to the Los Angeles Times. In Something Inside So Strong: Life in Pursuit of Choice, Courage, and Change, Walter recollects major touchstones in her life. The autobiography, divided into three parts, "Choice," "Courage," and "Change," covers Walter's life beginning with her childhood in the 1920s and moving to the present day. In "Choice," Walter describes growing up in a deeply segregated Louisiana and includes memories of school, rural home life, World War II, and participating in neighborhood activities like hog killing and church revivals. "Courage" documents her adjustment to living away from family, her experiences teaching in Los Angeles and her extensive work with her husband for the Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. The final section, "Change," shows how Walter's writing and activism merged, detailing her work as an education consultant and as an advocate for nonviolent resistance to racism. It also reveals how her world travels expanded her personal inquiry into Christianity and African spirituality. Something Inside So Strong is one woman's journey to self-discovery.

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.

Now available in paperback! Until now, there was no theoretical research of character in children's fiction and very few comprehensive theoretical studies of literary characters in general. In her latest intellectual foray, the author of From Mythic to Linear ponders the art of characterization. Through a variety of critical perspectives, she uncovers the essential differences between story ('what we are told') and discourse ('how we are told'), and carefully distinguishes between how these are employed in children's fiction and in general fiction. Yet another masterful work by a leading figure in contemporary criticism.

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 open access book is a unique study of the impact of lived experience on literate life, exploring how children's reading development is affected by their home setting, and how this sense of place influences textual interpretation of the books they read. Based on qualitative research and structured around interviews with twelve participants, Space, Place and Children's Reading Development focuses on the digital maps and artistic renderings these readers were asked to create of a place (real or imagined) that they felt reflected their literate youth, and the discussions that followed about these maps and their evolution as readers. Analysing the participant's responses, Margaret Mackey looks at the rich insights offered about the impact on childhood stability after experiences such as migration; the "reading spaces" children make based on their social relationships and domestic spheres; the creation of "textual spaces" and the significance of the recurring motif of forests in the participants' maps; the importance of the Harry Potter novels; the basis of life-long reading habits; psychological spaces and whether readers visualize when they read. Blending theoretical perspectives on reading from many disciplines with the personal experiences of readers of diverse nationalities, languages, disciplinary interests, and life experiences, this is an enlightening account of the behaviors of readers, reading histories, and place-based reader responses to literature. By building greater understanding about the broad and subtle processes that enable people to read, this study refines the kind of questions we ask about reading and moves towards developing a multidisciplinary language for the study and discussion of reading practices in contemporary times. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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.

Cooney's large body of work for adolescents defies easy classification. She has written award-winning adventure, suspense, romance, family, mystery, and historical fiction, as well as action-driven horror stories and a time-travel trilogy. Her purpose in some books, most notably horror like The Perfume, is just to encourage reluctant readers to enjoy literature. However, in her most serious and artistic books, Cooney relies on a source that is likely to surprise her readers: biblical stories and parables. For example, readers can find the seed of the idea that eventually became Whatever Happened to Janie in the story of King Solomon's wisdom when he was asked to decide which of two women, both of whom claimed to be mother of an infant, should be recognized as the true mother. The parable of the Good Samaritan provides a backdrop in several of Cooney's most successful novels. Cooney's understated use of biblical stories, and the way her Christian faith subtly informs her fiction, are explored in the book. The organization of the text reflects Cooney's major fiction categories: the "Janie" mysteries, romances, catastrophe novels, horror and suspense novels, the time travel trilogy, and her historical fiction. Representative books are discussed in detail within each chapter. Although most of the text is devoted to critical analysis of her literary work, and of the intersection of fiction and faith in her novels, Cooney's biography is also presented within the frame of her life as a single mother of grown children. The influences of her talents as an organist who played regularly for her church, the lessons she has learned from her children when they were teenagers, and life experiences that have led her to consider issues of race and gender, are examples of issues that are discussed. For children's and YA libraries and students of children's literature.

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.

This book correlates English-speaking children's brain development and acquisition of language with the linguistic input that comes from children's books. Drawing from the most current research on the developing brain, the author demonstrates how language acquisition is exclusively interactive, and highlights the benefit that accrues when that interaction includes the exploratory language play found in early childhood literature. Through discussions of specific domains of grammar, the relation of these domains to children's literature through scaffolding, and the resultant linguistic and cognitive advantages for the child, this volume offers an innovative approach to early brain maturation.

How children and children's literature helped build America's empire America's empire was not made by adults alone. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, young people became essential to its creation. Through children's literature, authors instilled the idea of America's power and the importance of its global prominence. As kids eagerly read dime novels, series fiction, pulp magazines, and comic books that dramatized the virtues of empire, they helped entrench a growing belief in America's indispensability to the international order. Empires more generally require stories to justify their existence. Children's literature seeded among young people a conviction that their country's command of a continent (and later the world) was essential to global stability. This genre allowed ardent imperialists to obscure their aggressive agendas with a veneer of harmlessness or fun. The supposedly nonthreatening nature of the child and children's literature thereby helped to disguise dominion's unsavory nature. The modern era has been called both the "American Century" and the "Century of the Child." Brian Rouleau illustrates how those conceptualizations came together by depicting children in their influential role as the junior partners of US imperial enterprise.

Series Information:
Children's Literature and Culture

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.

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.

This book bridges the fields of Children's Literature and Italian Studies by examining how turn-of-the-century children's books forged a unified national identity for the new Italian State. Through contextualized close readings of a wide range of texts, Truglio shows how the 19th-century concept of recapitulation, which held that ontogeny (the individual's development) repeats phylogeny (the evolution of the species), underlies the strategies of this corpus. Italian fairy tales, novels, poems, and short stories imply that the personal development of the child corresponds to and hence naturalizes the modernizing development of the nation. In the context of Italy's uneven and ambivalent modernization, these narrative trajectories are enabled by a developmental melancholia. Using a psychoanalytic lens, and in dialogue with recent Anglophone Children's Literature criticism, this study proposes that national identity was constructed via a process of renouncing and incorporating paternal and maternal figures, rendered as compulsory steps into maturity and modernity. With chapters on the heroic figure of Garibaldi, the Orientalized depiction of the South, and the role of girls in formation narratives, this book discloses how melancholic itineraries produced gendered national subjects. This study engages both well-known Italian texts, such as Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio and De Amicis' Heart, and books that have fallen into obscurity by authors such as Baccini, Treves, Gianelli, and Nuccio. Its approach and corpus shed light on questions being examined by Italianists, Children's Literature scholars, and social and cultural historians with an interest in national identity formation.

This book investigates the 'series' in children's literature. The works of several well-known children's authors - UK and the US, traditional and contemporary - are analyzed, and using these examples, the book explores the special nature and appeal of series writing for children. As well as providing an historical overview of the series, the author raises important questions about the nature of literary criticism applied to children's literature.

This book investigates the 'series' in children's literature. The works of several well-known children's authors - UK and the US, traditional and contemporary - are analyzed, and using these examples, the book explores the special nature and appeal of series writing for children. As well as providing an historical overview of the series, the author raises important questions about the nature of literary criticism applied to children's literature.

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.

In this, the first modern study of the ancient fairytale, Graham Anderson asks whether the familiar children's fairytale of today existed in the ancient world. He examines texts from the classical period and finds many stories which resemble those we know today, including:
* a Jewish Egyptian Cinderella
* a Snow White whose enemy is the goddess Artemis
* a Pied Piper at Troy.
He puts forward many previously unsuspected candidates as classical variants of the modern fairytale and argues that the degree of violence and cruelty in the ancient tales means they must have been meant for adults.

In this, the first modern study of the ancient fairytale, Graham Anderson asks whether the familiar children's fairytale of today existed in the ancient world. He examines texts from the classical period and finds many stories which resemble those we know today, including:
* a Jewish Egyptian Cinderella
* a Snow White whose enemy is the goddess Artemis
* a Pied Piper at Troy.
He puts forward many previously unsuspected candidates as classical variants of the modern fairytale and argues that the degree of violence and cruelty in the ancient tales means they must have been meant for adults.

E.S. Turner's first book, published in 1948, is a wholly original, richly researched and uncommonly insightful study of a somewhat disreputable genre: the 'Boys' Weekly' papers commonly known as 'penny dreadfuls.'

'A classic of its kind... Turner] ploughed through back numbers of the old blood-and-thunder adventure magazines specialising in cliffhanger serials; the young hero would be left hanging over a cliff in a totally impossible situation, which would be easily resolved in the next issue: 'With one bound Jack was free.' Social history had never been as much fun or, with three extra printings in its first week - such was the demand - as profitable.' Jonathan Sale, Guardian

'Some people felt that E.S. Turner may have invented a new kind of book - the popular social history, very British, very funny, but written with a glistening elegance.'

Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books

There aren t many books more beloved than The Tale of Peter Rabbit and even fewer authors as iconic as Beatrix Potter. More than 150 million copies of her books have sold worldwide and interest in her work and life remains high. And her characters Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, and all the rest exist in a charmed world filled with flowers and gardens. Beatrix Potter s Gardening Life is the first book to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter s love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work. The book begins with a gardener s biography, highlighting the key moments and places throughout her life that helped define her, including her home Hill Top Farm in England's Lake District. Next, the reader follows Beatrix Potter through a year in her garden, with a season-by-season overview of what is blooming that truly brings her gardens alive. The book culminates in a traveler s guide, with information on how and where to visit Potter s gardens today. Richly illustrated and filled with quotations from her books, letters, and journals, it is essential reading for all who know and cherish Beatrix Potter s classic tales."

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of character focalization in ten contemporary realistic children's novels. The author argues that character focalization, defined as the location of fictional world perception in the mind of a character, is a prominent textual structure in these novels. He demonstrates how significant meanings are conveyed in a variety of forms related to characters' personal and interpersonal experiences. Through close analysis of each text, moreover, he exposes distinctive perceptual, psychological, and social-psychological patterns in the opening chapters of each novel, which are thereafter developed by the principles of continuation, augmentation, and reconfiguration. This book will appeal to scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of narrative studies, stylistics, children's literature scholarship, linguistics, and education.

A history of children's literature in China, set in the framework of China's revolution and modernization. Lu Xun and his brother Zhou Zhuren were the founding fathers of the idea of the political importance of children and how that connected with literature tailored for them in the 20s and 30s.