Books in the Children's Literature and Culture series

Looks at the interplay between text and image in picturebooks. This book explores picturebooks as a specific medium or genre in literature and culture, one that prepares children for other media of communication, and argues that picturebooks may be the most influential media of all in the socialization and representation of children.

Connecting children's literature to the discipline of food studies, this volume presents food as a multivalent signifier in children's literature, and makes a strong argument for its central place in literature and literary theory. It provides us with a critical opportunity to puzzle out the significance of food in children's literature.

Examines the fundamental themes which inform our understanding of 'the teenager', which emerge in both literary and cultural contexts, and asks whether parallel realities and identities produce forms of adolescence that are dynamic and subversive.

Examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children's perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. This book reveals the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents.

Studies a large variety of children's literature written in English between 1867 and 1911. This title reveals a distinct interest in questions of national unity and identity among children's writers of the day. It explores the influence of American and British authors on the shaping of Canadian identity.

A study that examines the literary impact of Lewis Carroll's children's books on the history of English children's literature. It elucidates the cultural content of Carroll's work and situates the Alice books in relation to Carroll's juvenilia, his letters, photographs of children and his attempt to combine children's and adult literatures.

Exploring the way food is used to seduce, and coerce within children's literature, and its readers, this book tackles questions concerning the quantity and quality of the food featured in children's fiction. It coves topics such as childhood obesity and anorexia, and demonstrates how this literature attempts to regulate childhood eating practices.

Juxtaposes the narratives of literary and actual children/young adults to explore how Western culture has imagined, defined, and dealt with their outsider status - whether orphaned, homeless, refugee, victims of abuse, or exploited - and how processes of economic, social, or political impoverishment are sustained in regimes of power and authority.

Examines the intersection of the Gothic and children's literature and the contemporary manifestations of the gothic impulse, revealing that Gothic elements can, in fact, be traced in children's literature for as long as children have been reading.

The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence became central to the Victorian fictive project. This title examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates.

Gives an account of what it means to be a child (and a parent) in America at the dawn of the millennium. This work explores the history and development of the concept of childhood, starting with the works of Calvin, Freud, and Rousseau and culminating with the modern 'consumer' childhood of Dr Spock and television.

Winner of the 2005 International Research Society for Children's Literature Award, this work offers an investigation of the elusive sensibility of childhood and the ways writers have tried to capture it over time. It traces the development of a distinct poetics from the earliest conceptions of childhood innocence in the Romantic Age.

Soviet literature in general and Soviet children's literature in particular have often been labeled by Western and post-Soviet Russian scholars and critics as propaganda. This volume explores the importance of children's culture, from literature to comics to theater to film, and in connection with Russian culture, history, and society.

Explores childhood and children's books in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800. This collection of fourteen essays presents a basis for reconceptualizing the development of a separate literature for children as central to evolving early modern concepts of human development and socialization.

This book examines young reader's narratives about Nazism and the Holocaust in terms of the official as well as the understated motivations of their authors.

This book is a collection of essays on twentieth century authors who cross the borders between adult and children's literature and appeals to both audiences.

Explores how African and Western authors portray youth in contemporary African societies, critically examining the dominant images of Africa and Africans in books published between 1960 and 2005. This book examines issues regarding colonialism and the politics of representation.

A study of Diana Wynne Jones' work. This book examines her critiques of the fantastic tradition's ideas about childhood and adolescence. It is useful to those studying fantasy and children's literature.

This book examines how contemporary debates about masculinity are reflected and taken up in fiction and film for young audiences.

This book studies the interaction of heritage and fiction written for children over a forty year period in Britain. Examples range from new interactive displays in museums to historical re-enactment and the teaching of 'living history'.

Explores the global trend of crossover literature and explains how it is transforming literary canons, concepts of readership, the status of authors, the publishing industry, and bookselling practices.

Focuses on the ideological construction of the family in children's literature from Mrs Sherwood's Evangelical text of 1818 "The History of the Fairchild Family" to Jacqueline Wilson's social reality novels, interrogating the idea that portrayals of family in children's literature have changed dramatically.

Argues that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World War notions of adolescence as a period of 'storm and stress'.

Rulers of Literary Playgrounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children¿s Literature offers multifaceted reflection on interdependences between children and adults as they engage in play in literary texts and in real life..

Extends the range of critical engagement with children's fiction by exploring the feminine subject in paradigm texts by Margaret Mahy and Gillian Cross.