The book deals with the issue of the Holocaust in the Polish literature for children and adolescents. Drawing upon some of the leading Polish authors of the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries, the author reveals the historical, ideological, and cultural entanglement of their works. The main focus of the book is to search for reasons behind the outpouring of interest in the Holocaust noticed in the most recent Polish literature for younger readers. Among these reasons, the author lists the Polish local and historical context, the new approach to issues traditionally seen as taboo, the development of memory and postmemory narratives, and the postmodern shift from a discursive totality and universalist explanations.

How is academia portrayed in children's literature? This Element ambitiously surveys fictional professors in texts marketed towards children. Professors are overwhelmingly white and male, tending to be elderly scientists who fall into three stereotypes: the vehicle to explain scientific facts, the baffled genius, and the evil madman. By the late twentieth century, the stereotype of the male, mad, muddlehead, called Professor SomethingDumb, is formed in humorous yet pejorative fashion. This Element provides a publishing history of the role of academics in children's literature, questioning the book culture which promotes the enforcement of stereotypes regarding intellectual expertise in children's media. The Element is also available, with additional material, as Open Access.

This book highlights the multi-dimensionality of the work of British fantasy writer and Discworld creator Terry Pratchett. Taking into account content, political commentary, and literary technique, it explores the impact of Pratchett's work on fantasy writing and genre conventions.With chapters on gender, multiculturalism, secularism, education, and relativism, Section One focuses on different characters' situatedness within Pratchett's novels and what this may tell us about the direction of his social, religious and political criticism. Section Two discusses the aesthetic form that this criticism takes, and analyses the post- and meta-modern aspects of Pratchett's writing, his use of humour, and genre adaptations and deconstructions. This is the ideal collection for any literary and cultural studies scholar, researcher or student interested in fantasy and popular culture in general, and in Terry Pratchett in particular.

This book is a study of children, their books and their reading experiences in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. It argues for the importance of reading to early modern childhood and of childhood to early modern reading cultures by drawing together the fields of childhood studies, early modern literature and the history of reading. Analysing literary representations of children as readers in a range of genres (including ABCs, prayer books, religious narratives, romance, anthologies, school books, drama, translations and autobiography) alongside evidence of the reading experiences of those defined as children in the period, it explores the production of different categories of child readers. Focusing on the 'good child' reader, the youth as consumer, ways of reading as a boy and as a girl, and the retrospective recollection of childhood reading, it sheds new light on the ways in which childhood and reading were understood and experienced in the period.

This book documents American modernism's efforts to disenchant adult and child readers alike of the essentialist view of childhood as redemptive, originary, and universal. For James, Barnes, Du Bois, and Stein, the twentieth century's move to position the child at the center of the self and society raised concerns about the shrinking value of maturity and prompted a critical response that imagined childhood and children's narratives in ways virtually antagonistic to both. In this original study, Mason Phillips argues that American modernism's widespread critique of childhood led to some of the period's most meaningful and most misunderstood experiments with interiority, narration, and children's literature.

Helping you encourage children's interest in history and social studies, this valuable selection guide presents the best biographies of nearly 300 notable men and women, including such high-interest people as Oprah Winfrey, Pocahontas, Jesse Owens, Jane Goodall, Charles Darwin, Davy Crockett, and so many more. "From Bibliography to History" enables you to recommend up-to-date biographies and related books to students in grades 3 to 9. Carefully chosen titles were selected using multiple criteria, including quality, currency, and audience.

The lists are organized by age group, and indicate whether the books are educational in tone, are more suitable for reading for sheer enjoyment, or succeed in both areas. From building biography collections to preparing reading lists, this essential guide helps you make the best slections possible in expanding children's opportunities for research and enjoyment.

This volume presents key contributions to the study of ecocriticism in Nordic children's and YA literary and cultural texts, in dialogue with international classics. It investigates the extent to which texts for children and young adults reflect current environmental concerns. The chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: Ethics and Aesthetics, Landscape, Vegetal, Animal, and Human, and together they explore Nordic representations and a Nordic conception, or feeling, of nature. The textual analyses are complemented with the lived experiences of outdoor learning practices in preschools and schools captured through children's own statements. The volume highlights the growing influence of posthumanist theory and the continuing traces of anthropocentric concerns within contemporary children's literature and culture, and a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction is reflected in the conceptual tool of the volume: The Nature in Culture Matrix.

This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people's agency.

The Road to Wicked examines the long life of the Oz myth. It is both a study in cultural sustainability- the capacity of artists, narratives, art forms, and genres to remain viable over time-and an examination of the marketing machinery and consumption patterns that make such sustainability possible. Drawing on the fields of macromarketing, consumer behavior, literary and cultural studies, and theories of adaption and remediation, the authors examine key adaptations and extensions of Baum's 1900 novel. These include the original Oz craze, the MGM film and its television afterlife, Wicked and its extensions, and Oz the Great and Powerful-Disney's recent (and highly lucrative) venture that builds on the considerable success of Wicked. At the end of the book, the authors offer a foundational framework for a new theory of cultural sustainability and propose a set of explanatory conditions under which any artistic experience might achieve it.

This book is a journey through the fairy-tale wardrobe, explaining how the mercurial nature of fashion has shaped and transformed the Western fairy-tale tradition. Many of fairy tale's most iconic images are items of dress: the glass slippers, the red capes, the gowns shining like the sun, and the red shoes. The material cultures from which these items have been conjured reveal the histories of patronage, political intrigue, class privilege, and sexual politics behind the most famous fairy tales. The book not only reveals the sartorial truths behind Cinderella's lost slippers, but reveals the networks of female power woven into fairy tale itself.

Extending the discussion of critical content analysis to the visual realm of picturebooks and graphic novels, this book provides a clear research methodology for understanding and analyzing visual imagery. Offering strategies for "reading" illustrations in global and multicultural literature, chapter authors explore and bring together critical theory and social semiotics while demonstrating how visual analysis can be used to uncover and analyze power, ideologies, inequity, and resistance in picturebooks and graphic novels. This volume covers a diverse range of texts and types of books and offers tools and procedures for interpreting visual images to enhance the understandings of researchers, teachers, and students as they engage with the visual culture that fills our world. These methods are significant not only to becoming a critical reader of literature but to also becoming a critical reader of visual images in everyday life.

From Strawberry Hill to The Dungeons, Alnwick Castle to Barnageddon, Gothic tourism is a fascinating, and sometimes controversial, area. This lively study considers Gothic tourism's aesthetics and origins, as well as its relationship with literature, film, folklore, heritage management, arts programming and the 'edutainment' business.

This volume focuses on the (de)canonization processes in children's literature, considering the construction and cultural-historical changes of canons in different children's literatures. Chapters by international experts in the field explore a wide range of different children's literatures from Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Eastern and Central Europe, as well as from Non-European countries such as Australia, Israel, and the United States. Situating the inquiry within larger literary and cultural studies conversations about canonicity, the contributors assess representative authors and works that have encountered changing fates in the course of canon history. Particular emphasis is given to sociological canon theories, which have so far been under-represented in canon research in children's literature. The volume therefore relates historical changes in the canon of children's literature not only to historical changes in concepts of childhood but to more encompassing political, social, economic, cultural, and ideological shifts. This volume's comparative approach takes cognizance of the fact that, if canon formation is an important cultural factor in nation-building processes, a comparative study is essential to assessing transnational processes in canon formation. This book thus renders evident the structural similarities between patterns and strategies of canon formation emerging in different children's literatures.

The Embodied Child: Readings in Children's Literature and Culture brings together essays that offer compelling analyses of children's bodies as they read and are read, as they interact with literature and other cultural artifacts, and as they are constructed in literature and popular culture. The chapters examine the ideology behind the cultural constructions of the child's body and the impact they have on society, and how the child's body becomes a carrier of cultural ideology within the cultural imagination. They also consider the portrayal of children's bodies in terms of the seeming dichotomies between healthy-vs-unhealthy bodies as well as able-bodied-vs-disabled, and examines flesh-and-blood bodies that engage with literary texts and other media. The contributors bring perspectives from anthropology, communication, education, literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, physical education, and religious studies. With wide and astute coverage of disparate literary and cultural texts, and lively scholarly discussions in the introductions to the collection and to each section, this book makes a long-needed contribution to discussions of the body and the child.

This work traces the concepts of initiation, transformation and rebirth though Beatrix Potter's personal writings and her children's fiction. Her letters and journals reveal attempts to escape from what she called her "unloved birthplace" and her overbearing parents. Potter felt that her life culminated in her forties, when she was, in effect, reborn through marriage as Mrs. William Heelis, a farmer raising Herdwick sheep and buying land for the National Trust. From her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, through some of the last, such as The Fairy Caravan and The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, central characters undergo processes of initiation during which they mature toward adulthood. The most successful ones move from being helpless children to more mature creatures on their way to independence, while others experience no change or even regression.

This book explores the ethical dimensions surrounding the development of education for sustainable development within schools, and examines these issues through the lens of ethical literacy. The book argues that teaching children to engage with nature is crucial if they are to develop a true understanding of sustainability and climate issues, and claims that sustainability education is much more successful when pupils are treated as moral agents rather than being passive subjects of testing and assessment. The collection brings together a range of fresh and creative perspectives on how issues around ethical literacies can be elaborated and expanded with regard to democratic sustainability education. The use of childrens books in teaching about sustainability is carefully explored, as are the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of environmental education. Including an afterword by Arjen Wals, Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability, the book will be of great interest to students and researchers in the field of sustainability education.

This book is about the implications of novels for young readers that tell their stories by alternating between different narrative lines focused on different characters. It asks: if you make sense of fiction by identifying with one main character, how do you handle two or more of them? Do novels with alternating narratives diverge from longstanding conventions and represent a significant change in literature for young readers? If not, how do these novels manage to operate within the parameters of those conventions? This book considers answers to these questions by means of a series of close readings that explore the structural, educational and ideological implications of a variety of American, British, Canadian and Australian novels for children and for young adults.

Applying critical race theory to contemporary African American children's and young adult literature, this book explores one key racial issue that has been overlooked both in race studies and literary scholarship-internalised racism. By systematically examining the issue of internalised racism and its detrimental psychological effects, particularly towards the young and vulnerable, this book defamiliarises the very racial issue that otherwise has become normalised in American racial discourse, reaffirming the relevance of race, racism, and racialisation in contemporary America. Through readings of works by Jacqueline Woodson, Sharon G. Flake, Tanita S. Davis, Sapphire, Rosa Guy, and Nikki Grimes, Suriyan Panlay develops a new critical discourse on internalised racism by studying its effects on marginalised children, its manifestations, and the fictional narrative strategies that can be used to regain and reclaim a sense of self.

This book is a study of the evolving relationships between literature, cyberspace, and young adults in the twenty-first century. Megan L. Musgrave explores the ways that young adult fiction is becoming a platform for a public conversation about the great benefits and terrible risks of our increasing dependence upon technology in public and private life. Drawing from theories of digital citizenship and posthuman theory, Digital Citizenship in Twenty-First Century Young Adult Literature considers how the imaginary forms of activism depicted in literature can prompt young people to shape their identities and choices as citizens in a digital culture

While the field of childhood studies has blossomed in recent years, few scholars have taken up the question of age more broadly as a lens for reading American literature. Adulthood and Other Fictions shows how a diverse array of nineteenth-century writers, thinkers, and artists responded to the rise of chronological age in social and political life. Over the course of the century, age was added to the census; schools were organized around age groups; birthday cards were mass-produced; geriatrics became a medical specialty. Adulthood and Other Fictions reads American literature as a rich, critical account of this modern culture of age, and it examines how our most well-known writers registered-and often resisted-age expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color. More than simply adding age to the list of identity categories that have become de rigueur sites of scholarly attention, Adulthood and Other Fictions argues that these other measures of social location (race, gender, sexuality, class) are largely legible through the seemingly more natural and essential identity defined by age. That is, longstanding cultural ideals about maturity and development anchor ideologies of heterosexuality, race, nationalism, and capitalism, and in this sense, age rhetoric serves as one of our most pervasive disciplinary discourses. Writers including Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James anticipated the ageism of our moment, but they also recognized how age norms both structure and limit the lives of individuals at all points on the age continuum. Ultimately, the volume argues for an intersectional understanding of age that challenges the celebration of independence and autonomy imbricated in US fantasies of adulthood and in American identity itself.

This anthology explores the multitude of evidence for recognisable fairy tales drawn from sources in the much older cultures of the ancient world, appearing much earlier than the 17th century where awareness of most fairy tales tends to begin. It presents versions of Cinderella, The Emperor's New Clothes, Snow White, The Frog Prince and a host of others where the similarities to familiar 'modern' versions far outweigh the differences. Here we find Cinderella as a courtesan, Snow White coming to a tragic end or an innocent heroine murdering her sisters. We find an emperor's new clothes where the flatterers compare him to Alexander the Great, or a pair of adulterers caught in a magic trap. Tantalising fragments suggest that there is more to be discovered: we can point to a Sleeping Beauty where the girl takes on the green colouring of the surrounding wood, or we encounter a Rumpelstiltskin connected to a mystery cult. The overall picture suggests a much richer texture of popular tale as a fascinating new legacy of antiquity. This volume breaks down the traditional barriers between Classical Mythology and the fairy tale, and will be an invaluable resource for anyone working on the history of fairy tales and folklore.

This book analyses the success and adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's novel War Horse to stage, radio, live events, and feature film, in different cultures, on tours, and in translation. In under a decade, War Horse has gone from obscure children's novel to arguably one of the world's most recognisable theatrical brands, thanks to innovative puppet designs from South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company in an acclaimed stage production from the National Theatre of Great Britain. With emphasis on embodied spectatorship, collaborative meaning-making, and imaginative 'play,' this book generates fresh insights into the enduring popularity of the franchise's eponymous protagonist, Joey, offering the most in-depth study of War Horse to date.

This book examines a critical period in British children's publishing, from the earliest days of dedicated publishing firms for Black British audiences to the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK. Taking a historical approach that includes education acts, Black protest, community publishing and children's literature prizes, the study investigates the motivation behind both independent and mainstream publishing firm decisions to produce books for a specifically Black British audience. Beginning with a consideration of early reading schemes that incorporated Black and Asian characters, the book continues with a history of one of the earliest presses to publish for children, Bogle L'Ouverture. Other chapters look at the influence of community-based and independent presses, the era of multiculturalism and anti-racism, the effect of racially-motivated violence on children's publishing, and the dubious benefit of awards for Black British publishing. The volume will appeal to children's literature scholars, librarians, teachers, education-policy makers and Black British historians.

In this book, Julius-Kei Kato lets the theories and experiences of Asian American hybridity converse with and bear upon some aspects of Christian biblical and theological language. Hybridity has become a key feature of today's globalized world and is, of course, a key concept in postcolonial thought. However, despite its crucial importance, hybridity is rarely used as a paradigm through which to analyze and evaluate the influential concepts and teachings that make up religious language. This book fills a lacuna by discussing what the concept of hybridity challenges and resists, what over-simplifications it has the power to complicate, and what forgotten or overlooked strands in religious tradition it endeavors to recover and reemphasize. Shifting seamlessly between biblical, theological, and modern, real-world case studies, Kato shows how hybridity permeates and can illuminate religious phenomena as lived and believed. The ultimate goal of the move toward an embrace of hybridity is a further dissolution of the thick wall separating ideas of "us" and "them." In this book, Kato suggests the possibility of a world in which what one typically considers the "other" is increasingly recognized within oneself.