Using examples of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter to explore the impact of new media and technologies on how children learn about stories and reading, this book investigates nearly 100 re-tellings in a variety of media, some authorized by Potter's publisher Frederick Warne, some unauthorized. It looks at the implications of converging developments in children's literature:
*new media and technologies now readily available to children leading to new conventions and protocols of storytelling
*changing commercial pressures on publishers and an emphasis on producing commodities associated with books and videos
*saturation marketing which targets children and adults in different ways
*and a cultural emphasis on the fragmentation, adaptation, and re-working of texts.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit is now available as picture book, chapter book, board and bath book, pop-up, video (in versions that adhere to the original story and versions that deviate radically to include "new adventures" or Christan messages), ballet, CD-Rom, computer disc, audio tape and filmstrip.
The character of Peter Rabbit may be purchased as toy, clothing, dish, ornament, wallpaper, food, paper doll, and much else. His story and that of his author, Beatrix Potter, reappear in fragmented form in other books for children, in a murder mystery for adults and in a graphic novel for teenagers. This book raises questions about the impact of these developments on young readers.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203305213

Reception studies have transformed the classics. Many more literary and cultural texts are now regarded as 'valid' for classical study. And within this process of widening, children's literature has in its turn emerged as being increasingly important. Books written for children now comprise one of the largest and most prominent bodies of texts to engage with the classical world, with an audience that constantly changes as it grows up. This innovative volume wrestles with that very characteristic of change which is so fundamental to children's literature, showing how significant the classics, as well as classically-inspired fiction and verse, have been in tackling the adolescent challenges posed by metamorphosis. Chapters address such themes as the use made by C S Lewis, in The Horse and his Boy, of Apuleius' The Golden Ass; how Ovidian myth frames the Narnia stories; classical 'nonsense' in Edward Lear; Pan as a powerful symbol of change in children's literature, for instance in The Wind in the Willows; the transformative power of the Orpheus myth; and how works for children have handled the teaching of the classics.

What happens to traditional stories when they are retold in another time and cultural cotntext and for a different audience? This first-of-its-kind study discusses Bible stories, classical myths, herioc legends, Arthurian romances, Robin Hood lore, folk tales, 'oriental' tales, and other stories derived from European cultures. One chapter is devoted to various retellings of classics, from Shakespeare to "Wind in the Willows."
The authors offer a general theory of what motivates the retelling of stories, and how stories express the aspirations of a society. An important function of stories is to introduce children to a cultural heritage, and to transmit a body of shared allusions and experiences that expresses a society's central values and assumptions. However, the cultural heritage may be modified through a pervasive tendency of retellings to produce socially convervative outcomes because of ethnocentric, androcentric and class-based assumptions in the source stories that persist into retellings. Therefore, some stories, such as classical myths, are particularly resistant to feminist reinterpretations, for example, while other types, such as folktales, are more malleable. In examining such possibilites, the book evaluates the processes of interpretation apparent in retellings.

While we owe much to twentieth and twenty-first century researchers' careful studies of children's linguistic and dramatic play, authors of literature, especially children's literature, have matched and even anticipated these researchers in revealing play's power-authors well aware of the way children use play to experiment with their position in the world. This volume explores the work of authors of literature as well as film, both those who write for children and those who use children as their central characters, who explore the empowering and subversive potentials of children at play. Play gives children imaginative agency over limited lives and allows for experimentation with established social roles; play's disruptive potential also may prove dangerous not only for children but for the society that restricts them.

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.

This book sets out to explore the structure and meanings within the most popular of all literary genres - the adventure story. Deconstructing the Hero offers analytical readings of some of the most widely read adventure stories such as Treasure Island, the James Bond stories and Star Wars. The book describes how adventure stories are influential in shaping children's perception and establishing values.
When many of these stories define non-white, non-European people as inferior, and women as marginal or incapable, we should be worried about what they are teaching our children to think. Margery Hourihan shows how teaching children to read books critically can help to prevent the establishment of negative attitudes, discourage aggression and promote values of emotion and creativity.

This book sets out to explore the structure and meanings within the most popular of all literary genres - the adventure story. Deconstructing the Hero offers analytical readings of some of the most widely read adventure stories such as Treasure Island , the James Bond stories and Star Wars. The book describes how adventure stories are influential in shaping children's perception and establishing values.
When many of these stories define non-white, non-European people as inferior, and women as marginal or incapable, we should be worried about what they are teaching our children to think. Margery Hourihan shows how teaching children to read books critically can help to prevent the establishment of negative attitudes, discourage aggression and promote values of emotion and creativity.

From Jo March of Little Women (1868) to Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (2008), the American tomboy figure has evolved into an icon of modern girlhood and symbol of female empowerment. Battling Girlhood: Sympathy, Social Justice, and the Tomboy Figure in American Literature traces the development of the tomboy figure from its origins in nineteenth-century sentimental novels to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and film.

An adapted and illustrated edition of Jane Austen's romantic classic - at an easy-to-read level for all ages! At ten years old, Fanny is sent to live with rich relatives at Mansfield Park. Fanny doesn't fit in there but she is grateful for the friendship of her cousin, Edmund. Years later, the arrival of Henry and Mary Crawford upsets their quiet lives. With even Edmund acting differently, can Fanny stay true to herself? About Jane Austen Children's Stories (Easy Classics) 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.

Ursula A. Kelly draws on radical theories of literacy, culture, identity and pedagogy to frame the culture of pedagogy as it relates to human desire. Examples from (auto) biography, classroom practices and popular media - such as the films "Exotica" and "To Sir With Love" - provide the means by which the author highlights some of the pedagogical dilemmas facing literacy practices which often work to silence the cultural politics of identity and desire.
Schooling Desire reconceptualizes traditional and dominant notions of literacy education and schooling through the lenses of feminist, poststructuralist and cultural theories. It focuses on the structuring of desire, pleasure, and longing within the experiences and practices of schooling, pushing discussions of literacy into new terrains.

Opening the Nursery Door is a fascinating collection of essays inspired by the discovery of a tiny archive: the nursery library of Jane Johnson 1707-1759, wife of a Lincolnshire vicar. It has captured the scholarly interest of social anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, educationalists and archivists as it has opened up a range of questions about the nature of childhood within English cultural life over three centuries: the texts written and read to children, the multifarious ways childhood has been considered, shaped and schooled through literacy practices, and the hitherto ignored role of women educators in early childhood across all classes.

"Opening the Nursery Door" is a fascinating collection of essays inspired by the discovery of a tiny archive: the nursery library of Jane Johnson 1707-1759, wife of a Lincolnshire vicar. It has captured the scholarly interest of social anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, educationalists and archivists as it has opened up a range of questions about the nature of childhood within English cultural life over three centuries: the texts written and read to children, the multifarious ways childhood has been considered, shaped and schooled through literacy practices, and the hitherto ignored role of women educators in early childhood across all classes.

The "Collected Critical Heritage II" comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxes sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of "Critical Heritage" published by Routledge in October 1995. The Critical Heritage series gathers together a large body of critical figures in literature. These selected sources include contemporary reviews from both popular and literary media. This volume covers English novelist and short story writer, Rudyard Kipling.

Winner, 2022 Children's Literature Association Book Award, given by the Children's Literature Association Winner, 2020 World Fantasy Awards Winner, 2020 British Fantasy Awards, Nonfiction Finalist, Creative Nonfiction IGNYTE Award, given by FIYACON for BIPOC+ in Speculative Fiction Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children's publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW's The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC's Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, "we dark girls deserve more, because we are more."

Drawing on a dynamic set of "graphic texts of girlhood," Elizabeth Marshall identifies the locations, cultural practices, and representational strategies through which schoolgirls experience real and metaphorical violence. How is the schoolgirl made legible through violence in graphic texts of girlhood? What knowledge about girlhood and violence are under erasure within mainstream images and scripts about the schoolgirl? In what ways has the schoolgirl been pictured in graphic narratives to communicate feminist knowledge, represent trauma, and/or testify about social violence? Graphic Girlhoods focuses on these questions to make visible and ultimately question how sexism, racism and other forms of structural violence inform education and girlhood. From picture books about mean girls like The Recess Queen or graphic novels like Jane, The Fox and Me to Ronald Searle's ghastly pupils in the St. Trinian's cartoons to graphic memoirs about schooling by adult women, such as Ruby Bridges's Through My Eyes and Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons texts for and about the schoolgirl stake a claim in ongoing debates about gender and education.

Victorian literature for audiences of all ages provides a broad foundation upon which to explore complex and evolving ideas about young people. In turn, this collection argues, contemporary works for young people that draw on Victorian literature and culture ultimately reflect our own disruptions and upheavals, particularly as they relate to child and adolescent readers and our experiences of them. The essays herein suggest that we struggle now, as the Victorians did then, to assert a cohesive understanding of young readers and that this lack of cohesion is a result of or a parallel to the disruptions taking place on a larger (even global) scale.

This volume explores the mutual influences between children's literature and the avant-garde. Olson places particular focus on fin-de-siecle Paris, where the Avant-garde was not unified in thought and there was room for modernism to overlap with children's literature and culture in the Golden Age. The ideas explored by artists such as Florence Upton, Henri Rousseau, Sir William Nicholson, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marc Chagall had been disseminated widely in cultural productions for children; their work, in turn, influenced children's culture. These artists turned to children's culture as a "new way of seeing," allied to a contemporary interest in international artistic styles. Children's culture also has strong ties to decadence and to the grotesque, the latter of which became a distinctively Modernist vision. This book visits the qualities of the era that were defined as uniquely childlike, the relation of childhood to high and low art, and the relation of children's literature to fin-de-siecle artistic trends. Topics of interest include the use of non-European figures (the Golliwogg), approaches to religion and pedagogy, to oppression and motherhood, to Nature in a post-Darwinian world, and to vision in art and life. Olson's unique focus covers new ground by concentrating not simply on children's literature, but on how childhood experiences and culture figure in art.

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.

In this important and timely study, Murray Knowles and Kristen Malmkjaer examine the work of some of our most popular 19th and 20th century children's writers in order to expose the persuasive power of language in children's literature. At the heart of "Language and" "Control in Children's Literature" lies two surveys of children's favorite readings, the first conducted in 1888, the other a hundred years later by the authors themselves. Using computer analyses of the vocabulary and grammar patterns in the most popular children's texts of each period, the authors examine the ways in which authors use language to inculcate a particular world view in the minds of their readers. This is an invaluable book for anyone concerned with language, literature, children and what they read.

Children's literature has received little serious linguistic analysis despite its widely acknowledged influence on the development and socialisation of young people. In this important and timely study Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer examine the work of some of our most popular children's writers from this and the last century in order to expose the persuasive power of language.
In this comprehensive survey of children's literature, both nineteenth and twentieth century authors are considered. Looking at the work of nineteenth century English writers of juvenile fiction, Knowles and Malmkjaer expose the colonial and class assumptions on which the books were predicated. In the modern 'teen' novel and the work of Roald Dahl the authors find contemporary attempts to control children within socially established frameworks. Other authors discussed include, Oscar Wilde, E. Nesbit, Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis.
An invaluable book for anyone concerned with children and what they read, whether parent, teacher or student of language and literature.

Reading the Adolescent Romance provides an exhaustive study of the developments in young adult literature since the 1980s with a focus on Francine Pascal's "Sweet Valley High" series, which has become a cultural and literary touchstone for both fans and critics of the novels. Pattee carefully examines the series' content, structure, and readers, allowing her to investigate an influential marketing and literary phenomenon and to interrogate the intersecting influences of history, audience positioning, and readability that allowed "Sweet Valley" and other teen series to flourish. This book demonstrates that, as a series of generic romance novels, "Sweet Valley High" exhibits tropes associated with both adolescent and adult romance and, as a product of the early 1980s, has and continues to espouse the conservative romantic ideologies associated with the time period. While erstwhile readers of the series recall the novels with pleasure, re-readers of Pascal's novels - who remember reading the series as young people and have re-visted the books as adults - are more critical. Interestingly, both populations continue to value "Sweet Valley High" as an identity touchstone. Amy Pattee is an associate professor of library and information science at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. There, she teaches children's and young adult literature in both the library school and in a dual degree program affiliated with Simmons College's Center for the Study of Children's Literature.

This study is concerned with how readers are positioned to interpret the past in historical fiction for children and young adults. Looking at literature published within the last thirty to forty years, Wilson identifies and explores a prevalent trend for re-visioning and rewriting the past according to modern social and political ideological assumptions. Fiction within this genre, while concerned with the past at the level of content, is additionally concerned with present views of that historical past because of the future to which it is moving. Specific areas of discussion include the identification of a new sub-genre: Living history fiction, stories of Joan of Arc, historical fiction featuring agentic females, the very popular Scholastic Press historical journal series, fictions of war, and historical fiction featuring multicultural discourses. Wilson observes specific traits in historical fiction written for children - most notably how the notion of positive progress into the future is nuanced differently in this literature in which the concept of progress from the past is inextricably linked to the protagonist's potential for agency and the realization of subjectivity. The genre consistently manifests a concern with identity construction that in turn informs and influences how a metanarrative of positive progress is played out. This book engages in a discussion of the functionality of the past within the genre and offers an interpretative frame for the sifting out of the present from the past in historical fiction for young readers.

Containing forty-eight chapters, The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks is the ultimate guide to picturebooks. It contains a detailed introduction, surveying the history and development of the field and emphasizing the international and cultural diversity of picturebooks. Divided into five key parts, this volume covers: Concepts and topics - from hybridity and ideology to metafiction and emotions; Genres - from baby books through to picturebooks for adults; Interfaces - their relations to other forms such as comics and visual media; Domains and theoretical approaches, including developmental psychology and cognitive studies; Adaptations. With ground-breaking contributions from leading and emerging scholars alike, this comprehensive volume is one of the first to focus solely on picturebook research. Its interdisciplinary approach makes it key for both scholars and students of literature, as well as education and media.

In the light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood continues all the more to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child poverty, and protection have been persistent issues in public discourse. Simultaneously, childhood has advanced as a popular subject in the arts, as the wealth of current films and novels in this field indicates. Focusing on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, this collection assembles contributions concerned with current political, social, and cultural dimensions of childhood in the United Kingdom. The individual chapters, written by internationally renowned experts from the social sciences and the humanities, address a broad spectrum of contemporary childhood issues, including debates on child protection, school dress codes, the media, the representation and construction of children in audiovisual media, and literary awards for children's fiction. Appealing to a wide scholarly audience by joining perspectives from various disciplines, including art history, education, law, film and TV studies, sociology, and literary studies, this volume endorses a transdisciplinary and meta-theoretical approach to the study of childhood. It seeks to both illustrate and dismantle the various ways in which childhood has been implicitly and explicitly conceived in different disciplines in the wake of the constructivist paradigm shift in childhood studies.

Translating Picturebooks examines the role of illustration in the translation process of picturebooks and how the word-image interplay inherent in the medium can have an impact both on translation practice and the reading process itself. The book draws on a wide range of picturebooks published and translated in a number of languages to demonstrate the myriad ways in which information and meaning is conveyed in the translation of multimodal material and in turn, the impact of these interactions on the readers' experiences of these books. The volume also analyzes strategies translators employ in translating picturebooks, including issues surrounding culturally-specific references and visual and verbal gaps, and features a chapter with excerpts from translators' diaries written during the process. Highlighting the complex dynamics at work in the translation process of picturebooks and their implications for research on translation studies and multimodal material, this book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers in translation studies, multimodality, and children's literature.