This study examines the children s books of three extraordinary British writers J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, and Terry Pratchett and investigates their sophisticated use of narrative strategies not only to engage children in reading, but to educate them into becoming mature readers and indeed individuals. The book demonstrates how in quite different ways these writers establish reader expectations by drawing on conventions in existing genres only to subvert those expectations. Their strategies lead young readers to evaluate for themselves both the power of story to shape our understanding of the world and to develop a sense of identity and agency. Rowling, Jones, and Pratchett provide their readers with fantasies that are pleasurable and imaginative, but far from encouraging escape from reality, they convey important lessons about the complexities and challenges of the real world and how these may be faced and solved. All three writers deploy the tropes and imaginative possibilities of fantasy to disturb, challenge, and enlarge the world of their readers."

Contributions by Torsten Caeners, Phoebe Chen, Mathieu Donner, Shannon Hervey, Angela S. Insenga, Patricia Kennon, Maryna Matlock, Ferne Merrylees, Lars Schmeink, Anita Tarr, Tony M. Vinci, and Donna R. White For centuries, humanism has provided a paradigm for what it means to be human: a rational, unique, unified, universal, autonomous being. Recently, however, a new philosophical approach, posthumanism, has questioned these assumptions, asserting that being human is not a fixed state but one always dynamic and evolving. Restrictive boundaries are no longer in play, and we do not define who we are by delineating what we are not (animal, machine, monster). There is no one aspect that makes a being human--self-awareness, emotion, artistic expression, or problem-solving--since human characteristics reside in other species along with shared DNA. Instead, posthumanism looks at the ways our bodies, intelligence, and behavior connect and interact with the environment, technology, and other species. In Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, editors Anita Tarr and Donna R. White collect twelve essays that explore this new discipline's relevance in young adult literature. Adolescents often tangle with many issues raised by posthumanist theory, such as body issues. The in-betweenness of adolescence makes stories for young adults ripe for posthumanist study. Contributors to the volume explore ideas of posthumanism, including democratization of power, body enhancements, hybridity, multiplicity/plurality, and the environment, by analyzing recent works for young adults, including award-winners like Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, as well as the works of Octavia Butler and China Mieville.

From vampires and demons to ghosts and zombies, interest in monsters in literature, film, and popular culture has never been stronger. This concise Encyclopedia provides scholars and students with a comprehensive and authoritative A-Z of monsters throughout the ages. It is the first major reference book on monsters for the scholarly market. Over 200 entries written by experts in the field are accompanied by an overview introduction by the editor. Generic entries such as 'ghost' and 'vampire' are cross-listed with important specific manifestations of that monster. In addition to monsters appearing in English-language literature and film, the Encyclopedia also includes significant monsters in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African and Middle Eastern traditions. Alphabetically organized, the entries each feature suggestions for further reading. The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters is an invaluable resource for all students and scholars and an essential addition to library reference shelves.

Are the Kids All Right? by B.J. Epstein is the first survey of English-language children's literature that features lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer characters. It explores how LGBTQ characters are portrayed and what this says about contemporary society and it covers picture books, middle-grade books, and young adult fiction. Epstein explores why sex, sexuality and gender non-conformity is something that many writers and publishers of children's and young adult lit appear to shy away from. She passionately demonstrates that the information children get from literature matters, and that so called 'difficult' topics can be communicated in entertaining and informative ways. Are the Kids All Right? uses ideas from queer theory and other research to interrogate the ways LGBTQ characters are portrayed in books for children and young people, and to analyse what messages readers of such books might receive. This book brings together literary studies, sociology, queer studies, and other academic fields in an accessible manner, where the research supports the detailed analyses of over fifty books for children and young adults. In Are the Kids All Right?, Epstein looks at a range of topics, such as the lack of diversity in many of these works, how same-sex marriage is portrayed, the relative absence of bisexual and transgender characters, the way that many of these books are marketed and intended as "issue books," and more. Are the Kids All Right? is a practical and informative book that will inspire writers and publishers to produce better LGBTQ literature for young readers. About the author: B.J. Epstein is the author of over 150 articles, book reviews, personal essays, and short stories. She is lecturer in Literature and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia, and she is also a translator from the Scandinavian languages to English.

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed 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.

This Element examines the early years of British Young Adult (YA) publishing at three strategic publishing houses: Penguin, Heinemann and Macmillan. Specifically, it discusses their YA imprints (Penguin Peacocks, Heinemann New Windmills and Macmillan Topliners), all created at a time when the population of Britain was changing and becoming more diverse. Migration of colonial and former colonial subjects from the Caribbean, India, and Africa contributed to a change in the ethnic makeup of Britain, especially in major urban centres such as London, Birmingham and Manchester. While publishing has typically been seen as slow to respond to societal changes in children's literature, all three of these Young Adult imprints attempted to address and include Black British and British Asian readers and characters in their books; ultimately, however, their focus remained on white readers' concerns.

This concise and accessible critical introduction examines the world of popular fairy-tale television, tracing how fairy tales and their social and cultural implications manifest within series, television events, anthologies, and episodes, and as freestanding motifs. Providing a model of televisual analysis, Rudy and Greenhill emphasize that fairy-tale longevity in general, and particularly on TV, results from malleability-morphing from extremely complex narratives to the simple quotation of a name (like Cinderella) or phrase (like "happily ever after")-as well as its perennial value as a form that is good to think with. The global reach and popularity of fairy tales is reflected in the book's selection of diverse examples from genres such as political, lifestyle, reality, and science fiction TV. With a select mediagraphy, discussion questions, and detailed bibliography for further study, this book is an ideal guide for students and scholars of television studies, popular culture, and media studies, as well as dedicated fairy-tale fans.

Wild Visionary reconsiders Maurice Sendak's life and work in the context of his experience as a Jewish gay man. Maurice (Moishe) Bernard Sendak (1928-2012) was a fierce, romantic, and shockingly funny truth seeker who intervened in modern literature and culture. Raising the stakes of children's books, Sendak painted childhood with the dark realism and wild imagination of his own sensitive "inner child," drawing on the queer and Yiddish sensibilities that shaped his singular voice. Interweaving literary biography and cultural history, Golan Y. Moskowitz follows Sendak from his parents' Brooklyn home to spaces of creative growth and artistic vision-from neighborhood movie palaces to Hell's Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Fire Island, and the Connecticut country home he shared with Eugene Glynn, his partner of more than fifty years. Further, he analyzes Sendak's investment in the figure of the endangered child in symbolic relation to collective touchstones that impacted the artist's perspective-the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis. Through a deep exploration of Sendak's picture books, interviews, and previously unstudied personal correspondence, Wild Visionary offers a sensitive portrait of the most beloved and enchanting picture-book artist of our time.

In The Children's Book Business, Lissa Paul constructs a new kind of book biography. By focusing on Eliza Fenwick's1805 product-placement novel, Visits to the Juvenile Library, in the context of Marjorie Moon's 1990 bibliography, Benjamin Tabart's Juvenile Library, Paul explains how twenty-first century cultural sensibilities are informed by late eighteenth-century attitudes towards children, reading, knowledge, and publishing. The thinking, knowing children of the Enlightenment, she argues, are models for present day technologically-connected, socially-conscious children; the increasingly obsolete images of Romantic innocent and ignorant children are bracketed between the two periods. By drawing on recent scholarship in several fields including book history, cultural studies, and educational theory, The Children's Book Business provides a detailed historical picture of the landscape of some of the trade practices of early publishers, and explains how they developed in concert with the progressive pedagogies of several female authors, including Eliza Fenwick, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann and Jane Taylor. Paul's revisionist reading of the history of children's literature will be of interest to scholars working in eighteenth-century studies, book history, childhood studies, cultural studies, educational history, and children's literature.

A Critical Handbook of Children's Literature, Ninth Edition,gives future teachers, practicing teachers, librarians, and parents many examples of quality children's literature to guide them in choosing the best books for the classroom, library, or home. The Handbook analyzes children's books that showcase positive examples of the literary elements, formats, and genres that are the focus in the field of children's literature. The books are noteworthy children's books, from classics to favorites to just-published titles, all selected as thought-provoking, important, or motivating choices. The authors suggest that readers examine the Handbook and then apply the literary concepts to additional reading from today's ever-expanding selection of children's books.

Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black? presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a short and stark proposal of actions everyone-reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature. While Was the Cat in the Hat Black? does not assume it has all the answers to such a deeply systemic problem, its audacity should stimulate discussion and activism.

In Children's Books on the Big Screen, author Meghann Meeusen goes beyond the traditional adaptation approach of comparing and contrasting the similarities of film and book versions of a text. By tracing a pattern across films for young viewers, Meeusen proposes a consistent trend can be found in movies adapted from children's and young adult books: that representations of binaries such as male/female, self/other, and adult/child become more strongly contrasted and more diametrically opposed in the film versions. The book describes this as binary polarization, suggesting that starker opposition between concepts leads to shifts in the messages that texts send, particularly when it comes to representations of gender, race, and childhood. After introducing why critics need a new way of thinking about children's adapted texts, Children's Books on the Big Screen uses middle-grade fantasy adaptations to explore the reason for binary polarization and looks at the results of polarized binaries in adolescent films and movies adapted from picture books. Meeusen also digs into instances when multiple films are adapted from a single source such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and ends with pragmatic classroom application, suggesting teachers might utilize this theory to help students think critically about movies created by the Walt Disney corporation. Drawing from numerous popular contemporary examples, Children's Books on the Big Screen posits a theory that can begin to explain what happens-and what is at stake-when children's and young adult books are made into movies.

From Maria Edgeworth, Dr Seuss and Lewis Carroll to Sherman Alexie, Sharon Flake, and Gene Luen Yang, this is a comprehensive introduction to studying the infinitely varied worlds of literature for children and young adults. Exploring a diverse range of writing, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature includes: - Chapters covering key genres and forms from fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to picture books, graphic novels and fairy tales - A history of changing ideas of childhood and adolescence - Coverage of psychological, educational and literary theoretical approaches - Practical guidance on researching, reading and writing about children's and young adult literature - Explorations of children's and young adult film, TV and new media In addition, "Extending Your Study" sections at the end of each chapter provide advice on further reading, writing, discussion and online resources as well as case study responses from writers and teachers in the field. Accessibly written for both students new to the subject and experienced teachers, this is the most comprehensive single volume introduction to the study of writing for young people.

Wild Visionary reconsiders Maurice Sendak's life and work in the context of his experience as a Jewish gay man. Maurice (Moishe) Bernard Sendak (1928-2012) was a fierce, romantic, and shockingly funny truth seeker who intervened in modern literature and culture. Raising the stakes of children's books, Sendak painted childhood with the dark realism and wild imagination of his own sensitive "inner child," drawing on the queer and Yiddish sensibilities that shaped his singular voice. Interweaving literary biography and cultural history, Golan Y. Moskowitz follows Sendak from his parents' Brooklyn home to spaces of creative growth and artistic vision-from neighborhood movie palaces to Hell's Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Fire Island, and the Connecticut country home he shared with Eugene Glynn, his partner of more than fifty years. Further, he analyzes Sendak's investment in the figure of the endangered child in symbolic relation to collective touchstones that impacted the artist's perspective-the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis. Through a deep exploration of Sendak's picture books, interviews, and previously unstudied personal correspondence, Wild Visionary offers a sensitive portrait of the most beloved and enchanting picture-book artist of our time.

Since its inception in the 1970s, the Philosophy for Children movement (P4C) has affirmed children's literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children's classics, especially Lewis Carroll's Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children's literature in significant ways. Offering a novel take on this phenomenon, Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children's literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. Examining everything from the rise of French Theory in the United States to the crucial pedagogies offered in children's picture books, from Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events to studies of queer childhood, Kenneth B. Kidd deftly reveals the way in which children may learn from philosophy and vice versa.

What would you find if you went back and re-read your favourite books from childhood?

In The Child That Books Built Francis Spufford revisits all those childhood obsessions: fairy tales; Where the Wild Things Are; The Lord of the Rings; The Chronicles of Narnia; Little House on the Prairie; The Wind in the Willows; The Earthsea Trilogy and more. In these treasured tales Francis Spufford discovers both delight and sadness - the thrill as worlds of imagination opened up before him mixed with the memories of a boy who retreated into books when faced with a family tragedy.

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

Cultural Encounters in Translated Children's Literature offers a detailed and innovative model of analysis for examining the complexities of translating children's literature and sheds light on the interpretive choices at work in moving texts from one culture to another. The core of the study addresses the issue of how images of a nation, locale or country are constructed in translated children's literature, with the translation of Australian children's fiction into French serving as a case study. Issues examined include the selection of books for translation, the relationship between children's books and the national and international publishing industry, the packaging of translations and the importance of titles, blurbs and covers, the linguistic and stylistic features specific to translating for children, intertextual references, the function of the translation in the target culture, didactic and pedagogical aims, euphemistic language and explicitation, and literariness in translated texts. The findings of the case study suggest that the most common constructs of Australia in French translations reveal a preponderance of traditional Eurocentric signifiers that identify Australia with the outback, the antipodes, the exotic, the wild, the unknown, the void, the end of the world, the young and innocent nation, and the Far West. Contemporary signifiers that construct Australia as urban, multicultural, Aboriginal, worldly and inharmonious are seriously under-represented. The study also shows that French translations are conventional, conservative and didactic, showing preference for an exotic rather than local specificity, with systematic manipulation of Australian referents betraying a perception of Australia as antipodean rural exoticism. The significance of the study lies in underscoring the manner in which a given culture is constructed in another cultural milieu, especially through translated children's literature.

2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title and shortlisted for the ESSE book awards 2020, for Literatures in the English Language Childhood books play a special role in reading histories, providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers' memoirs, autobiographical accounts of reading, and interviews with readers, Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember, revisit, and sometimes forget, these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon, Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of children's literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives.

This book explores the narratives of girlhood in contemporary YA vampire fiction, bringing into the spotlight the genre's radical, ambivalent, and contradictory visions of young femininity. Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bienkowska considers less-explored popular vampire series for girls, particularly those by P.C. and Kristin Cast and Richelle Mead, tracing the ways in which they engage in larger cultural conversations on girlhood in the Western world. Mapping the interactions between girl and vampire corporealities, delving into the unconventional tales of vampire romance and girl sexual expressions, examining the narratives of women and violence, and venturing into the uncanny vampire classroom to unmask its critique of present-day schooling, the volume offers a new perspective on the vampire genre and an engaging insight into the complexities of growing up a girl.

The stories we read as children are the ones that stay with us the longest, and from the nineteenth century until the 1950s stories about schools held a particular fascination. Many will remember the goings-on at such earnest establishments as Tom Brown's Rugby, St Dominic's, Greyfriars, the Chalet School, Malory Towers and Linbury Court. In the second part of the twentieth century, with more liberal social attitudes and the advent of secondary education for all, these moral tales lost their appeal and the school story very nearly died out. More recently, however, a new generation of compromised schoolboy and schoolgirl heroes - Pennington, Tyke Tiler, Harry Potter and Millie Roads - have given it a new and challenging relevance. Focusing mainly on novels written for young people, From Morality to Mayhem charts the fall and rise of the school story, from the grim accounts of Victorian times to the magic and mayhem of our own age. In doing so it considers how fictional schools not only reflect but sometimes influence real life. This captivating study will appeal to those interested in children's literature and education, both students and the general reader, taking us on a not altogether comfortable trip down memory lane.

Our children grow up into a world of stories-in books, on screens-but what do they make of the stories we offer them? What do they think and feel as they listen to a parent read a picture-book? What if a story confuses or upsets them? Over the past fifty years, several intelligent, committed mothers undertook the onerous task of recording exactly what their children said and did in response to the stories they shared. Some of their records extended over five years, or even longer. Their research, done without funding or academic supervision, offers us unparalleled insight into children's minds long before they learn to speak-let alone learn to read. In Self and Story in Early Childhood, Hugh Crago draws on his unusual combination of expertise in literary studies, developmental psychology and psychotherapy to re-examine the startling implications of this neglected body of evidence. He highlights how much children can achieve without formal teaching, but with the supportive presence of a trusted adult who will participate with them in the story experience. This book will be of great interest to scholars of developmental psychology, early literacy and narratology, as well as to professionals working with preschoolers. Most of all, it will fascinate parents who themselves share stories with their child.