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.

Literary Allusion in Harry Potter builds on the world-wide enthusiasm for J. K. Rowling's series in order to introduce its readers to some of the great works of literature on which Rowling draws. Harry Potter's narrative techniques are rooted in the western literary tradition and its allusiveness provides insight into Rowling's fictional world. Each chapter of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter consists of an in-depth discussion of the intersection between Harry Potter and a canonical literary work, such as the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Homer, Ovid, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson, and the novels of Austen, Hardy and Dickens. This approach aims to transform the reader's understanding of Rowling's literary achievement as well as to encourage the discovery of works with which they may be less familiar. The aim of this book is to delight Potter fans with a new perspective on their favourite books while harnessing that enthusiasm to increase their wider appreciation of literature.

On its first publication Narratives of Love and Loss was widely recognised as an important and perceptive contribution to the study of children's literature and for its capacity to stimulate deep emotional responses in both child and adult readers. This welcome reissue includes a new postscript exploring in detail the phenomenal success of J.K Rowling's series of Harry Potter stories. The authors succeed in bringing a deep sociological and psychoanalytic close reading to some of the finest writing for children in post-war Britain and America, including works by C.S. Lewis, Rumer Godden, E.B. White and Russel Hoban. Focussed primarily on the 'fantasy genre of stories' the authors identify and sensitively explore the themes of imaginative and emotional growth, language and play, love and loss; always situating these within the broader social and cultural context.

This book examines constructions of childhood in the works of Louisa May Alcott. While Little Women continues to gain popular and critical attention, Alcott's wider works for children have largely been consigned to history. This book therefore investigates Alcott's lesser-known children's texts to reconsider critical assumptions about childhood in her works and in literature more widely. Kristina West investigates the trend towards reading Alcott's life into her works; readings of gender and sexuality, race, disability, and class; the sentimental domestic; portrayals of Transcendentalism and American education; and adaptations of these works. Analyzing Alcott as a writer for twenty-first-century children, West considers Alcott's place in the children's canon and how new media and fan fiction impact readings of her works today.

While there are many books about children's literature, few discuss it within its social context or investigate the ways writers reflect or react to change in society. Dennis Butts explores how shifting attitudes and historical upheavals from the 1840s onwards affected and continue to affect books written for younger audiences. Spanning from the industrial revolution to the sexual revolution, this title tells about the impact these external events have had on writers as diverse as moral storyteller Barbara Hofland and the controversial Melvin Burgess. G.A. Henty, Robert Louis Stevenson and even Philip Pullman are included in the discussion, as Butts identifies commonalities between books of the past and present, arguing that trends shown in most of the early children's literature are being displayed again now, albeit in a more subtle manner. This book will appeal to undergraduate students attending complementary courses in children's literature during their degree in English Literature or Cultural Studies. It will also be of use to postgraduate research students working in the field of Children's Literature.

Young adult literature featuring teenage lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning characters is growing in popularity. Unlike the ""problem novels"" of the past, which focused on the guilt, bullying and isolation of LGBTQ characters, today's narratives present more sympathetic and celebratory portrayals. The author explores a selection of recent novels-many of which may be new to readers-and places them in the wider contexts of LGBTQ literature and history. Chapters discuss a range of topics, including the relationship of Queer Theory to literature, LGBTQ families, and recent trends in utopian and dystopian science fiction.

This collection of essays offers innovative methodological and disciplinary approaches to the intersection of Anglophone literary cultures with children and childhoods across the twentieth century. In two acts of re-centering, the volume focuses both on the multiplicity of childhoods and literary cultures and on child agency. Looking at classic texts for young audiences and at less widely-read and unpublished material (across genres including poetry, fiction, historical fiction or biography, picturebooks, and children's television), essays foreground the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts, explore challenges to received notions of childhood, and emphasize the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects. Chapters frame themes of spectacle, self, and specularity across the twentieth-century; question tropes of childhood; explore identity and displacement in narrating history and culture; and elevate children as makers of literary culture. A major intent of the volume is to approach literary culture not just as produced by adults for consumption by children but also as co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers.

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.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are grappling with the legacies of past centuries and their cascading effects upon children and all people. We realize anew how imperialism, globalization, industrialization, and revolution continue to reshape our world and that of new generations. At a volatile moment, this collection asks how twenty-first century literature and related media represent and shape the contemporary child, childhood, and youth. Because literary representations construct ideal childhoods as well as model the rights, privileges, and respect afforded to actual young people, this collection surveys examples from popular culture and from scholarly practice. Chapters investigate the human rights of children in literature and international policy; the potential subjective agency and power of the child; the role models proposed for young people; the diverse identities children embody and encounter; and the environmental well-being of future human and nonhuman generations. As a snapshot of our developing historical moment, this collection identifies emergent trends, considers theories and critiques of childhood and literature, and observes how new technologies and paradigms are destabilizing past conventions of storytelling and lived experience.

In the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children's fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and of unprecedented growth in Irish children's literature. Close readings of selected texts by five award-winning authors are linked to social, intellectual and political changes in the period covered and draw on postcolonial, feminist, cultural and children's literature theory, highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of home and the value of children's literature as a lens through which to view culture and society as well as an imaginative space where young people can engage with complex ideas relevant to their lives and the world in which they live. Examining the works of O. R. Melling, Kate Thompson, Eoin Colfer, Siobhan Parkinson and Siobhan Dowd, Ciara Ni Bhroin argues that Irish children's literature changed at this time from being a vehicle that largely promoted hegemonic ideologies of home in post-independence Ireland to a site of resistance to complacent notions of home in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Since the late 1970s, scholarly interest in the translation of children's books has increased at a rapid pace. Research across a number of disciplines has contributed to a developing knowledge and understanding of the cross-cultural transformation and reception of children's literature. The purpose of this Reader is to reflect the diversity and originality of approaches to the subject by gathering together, for the first time, a range of journal articles and chapters on translation for children published during the last thirty years. From an investigation of linguistic features specific to translation for children, to accounts of the travels of international classics such as the Grimm Brothers' Household Tales or Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, to a model of narrative communication with the child reader in translated texts and, not least, the long-neglected comments of professional translators, these essays offer new insights into the challenges and difference of translating for the young.

This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with 'infancy' during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.

Inklings nannte sich eine Gruppe von Schriftstellern und Geisteswissenschaftlern in Oxford, deren bekannteste Mitglieder J.R.R. Tolkien und C.S. Lewis waren. Die Inklings-Gesellschaft e. V. widmet sich seit 1983 dem Studium und der Verbreitung der Werke dieser und ihnen nahestehender Autoren sowie der Analyse des Phantastischen in Literatur, Film und Kunst allgemein. Ihre Jahrestagungen werden in Jahrbuchern dokumentiert. Dieser Band enthalt neun Vortrage der Tagung Dustere Aussichten - Margaret Atwoods imaginative Expeditionen in das Unwohnliche, die 2014 in Duren stattfand und sich neben Atwoods Romanen auch mit der Rolle des Nordens in der Literatur beschaftigte. Funf weitere Beitrage und zahlreiche Rezensionen erganzen das Buch. Inklings was the name of a group of Oxford scholars and writers whose best-known members were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The German Inklings-Gesellschaft, founded in 1983, is dedicated to the discussion and dissemination of their works and of writers commonly associated with them and to the study of the fantastic in literature, film and the arts in general. The proceedings of the annual Inklings conferences are being published in yearbooks. This volume contains nine papers presented at the 2014 conference on Dark Visions - Margaret Atwood's Imaginative Travels into the Regions of the Uncomfortable. The contributions deal with Atwood's novels and also with the role of the North in literature at large. In addition, there are five general articles and numerous reviews.

In 18th through 20th-century British and American literature, school stories always play out the power relationships between adult and child. They also play out gender relationships, especially when females are excluded, although most histories of the genre ignore the unusual novels that probe the gendering of school stories. When the occasional man wrote about girls schools-as Charles Lamb and H. G. Wells did-he sometimes empowered his female characters, granting them freedoms that he had experienced at school.
Women who wrote about boys' schools often gave unusual emphasis to families, and at times, revealed the contradictions in the schoolyard code against telling tales or presented competing versions of masculinity, such as the Christian gentleman versus the self-made man. Sometimes these middle-class white women projected their sense of estrangement onto working class and minority women. Sometimes they wrote school stories that were in dialog with other genres, as when Mrs. Henry Wood wrote a sensation story or, like Louisa May Alcott, they domesticated the boys school story, giving prominence to a female viewpoint.

How are the religious experiences of teenagers expressed in today's young adult literature? How do authors use religious texts and beliefs to add depth to characters, settings and plots? How does YA fiction place itself in the larger conversation regarding the post secular? Modern YA fiction does not shy away from the dilemmas and anxieties teenagers face today. While many stories end with the protagonist in a state of flux-if not despair-some authors choose redemption or reconciliation. This collection of new essays explores these questions and more, with a focus on stories in which characters respond to a new (often shifting) religious landscape, in both realistic and fantastic worlds.

Picture books appear so innocent and entertaining with their illustrations and the few well chosen words which merge to tell a story. Yet they are arguably the most powerful venue of character development possible. Children observe the character's behaviors on the page and interpret them through the context of their own lives. It is in this interpretation that character development-societally sanctioned behaviors and morals are taught. But a child's life most likely does not feature supernatural characters-""Monsters"" such as vampires or sea serpents etc. This is the first collected edition to ask what morals are offered to children through the use of supernatural characters/Monsters appearing in their books.

First published in 1996. There has been no more important relationship between folk artist and folklorist than that between Zsuzsanna Palko and Linda Degh. Degh's painstaking collection of Mrs. Palko's tales attracted the admiration of the Hungarian-speaking world. In 1954 Mrs. Palko was named Master of Folklore by the Hungarian government and summoned to Budapest to receive ceremonial recognition. The unlettered 74-year-old woman from Kakasd had become "Aunt Zsuzsi" to Linda Degh-and was about to become one of the world's best known storytellers, through Degh's work.

After the success of How Did Long John Silver Lose His Leg?, Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt take their forensic lenses to more mysteries that have troubled readers of children's books over the centuries. Their questions range from the historical to the philosophical, some of which are puzzling, some of which are controversial: - Why does it seem there are no Nursery Rhymes before 1744? - Why did God start to die in children's books long before Nietzsche noticed it? - Why are the schoolgirls at Enid Blyton's St Clare's so horrible? - Why are there so many dead parents littering children's books? - Why does C.S. Lewis annoy so many people? The book also explains why an elephant captures Adolph Hitler, who was Biggles's great love, and whose side G.A. Henty was on in the American civil war, and delivers a plethora of erudite, entertaining answers to questions that you may not have thought of asking. And notably, of course, it reveals why William George Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove, was never permanently removed from Greyfriars School.

All too often, attention is paid only to those children's novels that were written in English, with non-English-language works being passed over and neglected. Beyond Babar: The European Tradition in Children's Literature examines eleven of the most celebrated European children's novels in substantial, critical essays written by well-known international scholars. This approach provides a comprehensive discussion of the selected works from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Each essay offers a critical introduction to the text that can serve as a point of departure for literary scholars, professors of children's literature, primary and secondary school teachers, and librarians who are interested in texts that cross languages and cultures. Beyond Babar is especially meant to assist instructors of children's literature who would like to use these texts in the classroom, in order to begin to redress the English-language dominance of many children's literature courses. This volume will also be of interest to the general public, as its ultimate aim is to bring to the attention of all English-speaking readers the literature from other parts of the world, in this case from Europe. Beyond Babar helps to facilitate the border crossings of these European masterpieces of children's literature into the English-speaking world.

Contributions by Megan De Roover, Jennifer Harrison, Sarah Jackson, Zoe Jaques, Nada Kujund?Yi?c, Ivana Milkovi?c, Niall Nance-Carroll, Perry Nodelman, David Rudd, Jonathan Chun Ngai Tsang, Nicholas Tucker, Donna Varga, and Tim Wadham One hundred years ago, disparate events culminated in one of the most momentous happenings in the history of children's literature. Christopher Robin Milne was born to A. A. Milne and his wife; Edward Bear, a lovable stuffed toy, arrived on the market; and a living, young bear named Winnie settled in at the London Zoo. The collaboration originally begun by the Milnes, the Shepards, Winnie herself, and the many toys and personalities who fed into the Pooh legend continued to evolve throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to become a global phenomenon. Yet even a brief examination of this sensation reveals that Pooh and his adventures were from the onset marked by a rich complexity behind a seeming simplicity and innocence. This volume, after a decades-long lull in concentrated Pooh scholarship, seeks to highlight the plurality of perspectives, modes, and interpretations these tales afford, especially after the Disney Corporation scooped its paws into the honeypot in the 1950s. Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after One Hundred Years argues the doings of Pooh remain relevant for readers in a posthuman, information-centric, media-saturated, globalized age. Pooh's forays destabilize social certainties on all levels-linguistic, ontological, legal, narrative, political, and so on. Through essays that focus on geography, language, narrative, characterization, history, politics, economics, and a host of other social and cultural phenomena, contributors to this volume explore how the stories open up discourses about identity, ethics, social relations, and notions of belonging. This first volume to offer multiple perspectives from multiple authors on the Winnie-the-Pooh books in a single collection focuses on and develops approaches that bring this classic of children's literature into the current era. Essays included not only are of relevance to scholars with an interest in Pooh, Milne, and the ""golden age"" of children's literature, but also showcase the development of children's literature scholarship in step with exciting modern developments in literary theory.

Contributions by Malin Alkestrand, Joshua Yu Burnett, Sean P. Connors, Jill Coste, Meghan Gilbert-Hickey, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Sierra Hale, Kathryn Strong Hansen, Elizabeth Ho, Esther L. Jones, Sarah Olutola, Alex Polish, Zara Rix, Susan Tan, and Roberta Seelinger Trites Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how race and racial ideologies are implicated in YASF. This collection also examines how race and racism are discussed in YASF or if, indeed, race and racism are discussed at all. Essays explore such notable and popular works as the Divergent series, The Red Queen, The Lunar Chronicles, and the Infernal Devices trilogy. They consider the effects of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF, a genre that is often seen as progressive in its representation of adolescent protagonists. Simply put, colorblindness silences those who believe-and whose experiences demonstrate-that race and racism do continue to matter. In examining how some YASF texts normalize many of our social structures and hierarchies, this collection examines how race and racism are represented in the genre and considers how hierarchies of race are reinscribed in some texts and transgressed in others. Contributors point toward the potential of YASF to address and interrogate racial inequities in the contemporary West and beyond. They critique texts that fall short of this possibility, and they articulate ways in which readers and critics alike might nonetheless locate diversity within narratives. This is a collection troubled by the lingering emphasis on colorblindness in YASF, but it is also the work of scholars who love the genre and celebrate its progress toward inclusivity, and who further see in it an enduring future for intersectional identity.

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.

In this volume sixteen essays, in either German or English, present readings of international narratives for children and young adults (CYAL), including films and picture books, within a narratological framework. The works discussed come from different countries: Australia, Canada, Ecuador, Germany, Greece, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The contributors combine classical narratology with other approaches in narrative theory. This methodological approach leads to readings that produce new insights on the structure and meaning of the texts discussed. Der Sammelband enthalt sechzehn Artikel, teils auf Deutsch, teils auf Englisch, die sich mit dem Erzahlen in Texten der internationalen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur sowie in Filmen beschaftigen. Die Beispiele stammen aus zehn verrschiedenen Landern: Australien, Deutschland, Ecuador, Griechenland, Grossbritannien, Kanada, Neuseeland, Norwegen, Polen und den USA. Die Beitrager verbinden die klassische Narratologie mit neueren geschichtlichen Entwicklungen und Ansatzen in der Erzahlforschung. Auf diese Weise ergeben sich neue Einsichten in Struktur und Bedeutung der untersuchten Texte und Filme.

This volume provides a key analysis of Asian children's literature and film and creates a dialogue between East and West and between the cultures from which they emerge, within the complex symbiosis of their local, national and transnational frameworks. In terms of location and content the book embraces a broad scope, including contributions related to the Asian-American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Individually and collectively, these essays broach crucial questions: What elements of Asian literature and film make them distinctive, both within their own specific culture and within the broader Asian area? What aspects link them to these genres in other parts of the world? How have they represented and shaped the societies and cultures they inhabit? What moral codes do they address, underpin, or contest? The volume provides further voice to the increasingly diverse and fascinating output of the region and emphasises the importance of Asian art forms as depictions of specific cultures but also of their connection to broader themes in children's texts, and scholarship within this field.