Books in the Children's Literature and Culture series

Offering new perspectives in childhood studies and animal studies, this book critically addresses children and pets in our families, our cultures, and our societies, exploring issues such as protection, discipline, mastery, wildness, play, and domestication. Essays analyze legal discourses, visual culture, literature for children and adults, migration narratives, magazines for children, music, and language socialization to discuss how notions of nationalism, race, gender, heteronormativity, and speciesism shape cultural constructions of children and pets. This global collection shows how discourses linking children and pets are pervasive and work across cultures.

The Embodied Child: Readings in Children¿s Literature and Culture is an innovative and timely collection of essays that offers rich analyses of children¿s bodies as they are constructed in literature and popular culture. In this ground-breaking work, editors Roxanne Harde and Lydia Kokkola have brought together some of the most renown scholars in childhood studies who each delve into the complex ways children and their physical form are represented literature. Each chapter introduces readers to the subject through a distinctive lens, whether it be queer, racial, gendered, or those that are less often discussed, this book makes a long-needed contribution to discussions of the body and the child.

This book establishes the ground for a dialogue in children's literature scholarship between East and West about subjectivity, selfhood, and identity. Essays explore the theoretical concerns of globalization, multi-culturalism, and glocalization and cover children's literature and film in Japan, India, Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

This is the first volume to consider the popular literary category of Early Readers ΓÇô books written and designed for children who are just beginning to read independently. It argues that Early Readers deserve more scholarly attention and careful thought because they are, for many younger readers, their first opportunity to engage with a work of literature on their own, to feel a sense of mastery over a text, and to experience pleasure from the act of reading independently. Using interdisciplinary approaches that draw upon and synthesize research being done in education, child psychology, sociology, cultural studies, and childrenΓÇÖs literature, the volume visits Early Readers from a variety of angles: as teaching tools; as cultural artifacts that shape cultural and individual subjectivity; as mass produced products sold to a niche market of parents, educators, and young children; and as aesthetic objects, works of literature and art with specific conventions. Examining the reasons such books are so popular with young readers, as well as the reasons that some adults challenge and censor them, the volume considers the ways Early Readers contribute to the construction of younger children as readers, thinkers, consumers, and as gendered, raced, classed subjects. It also addresses childrenΓÇÖs texts that have been translated and sold around the globe, examining them as part of an increasingly transnational childrenΓÇÖs media culture that may add to or supplant regional, ethnic, and national childrenΓÇÖs literatures and cultures. While this collection focuses mostly on books written in English and often aimed at children living in the US, it is important to acknowledge that these Early Readers are a major US cultural export, influencing the reading habits and development of children across the globe.

This volume visits death in childrenΓÇÖs literature from around the world, making a substantial contribution to the dialogue between the expanding fields of Childhood Studies, ChildrenΓÇÖs Literature, and Death Studies. Considering both textual and pictorial representations of death, contributors focus on the topic of death in childrenΓÇÖs literature as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and/or a social construct. Essays covering literature from the US, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, India, and Iran display a diverse range of theoretical and cultural perspectives. Carefully organized sections interrogate how classic texts have been adapted for the twenty-first century, how death has been politicized, ritualized, or metaphorized, and visual strategies for representing death, and how death has been represented within the context of play. Asking how different cultures present the concept of death to children, this volume is the first to bring together a global range of perspective on death in childrenΓÇÖs literature and will be a valuable contribution to an array of disciplines.

The Arctic has traditionally been a space for adventure, the exotic and the fantastic, while more recent works have used the Arctic setting to explore a dystopian future, often related to climate change. The aim of the present volume is to examine themes in Arctic juvenile fiction from the early nineteenth century until today.

Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness and heteronormativity in children¿s literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people.

This book situates the picturebook genre within the widespread international phenomenon of crossover literature, examining an international corpus of picturebooks - including artists' books, wordless picturebooks, and celebrity picturebooks - that appeal to readers of all ages. Focusing on contemporary picturebooks, Sandra Beckett shows that the picturebook has traditionally been seen as a children's genre, but in the eyes of many authors, illustrators, and publishers, it is a narrative form that can address any and all age groups. Innovative graphics and formats as well as the creative, often complex dialogue between text and image provide multiple levels of meaning and invite readers of all ages to consider texts that are primarily marketed as children's books. The interplay of text and image that distinguishes the picturebook from other forms of fiction and makes it a unique art form also makes it the ultimate crossover genre. Crossover picturebooks are often very complex texts that are challenging for adults as well as children. Many are characterized by difficult "e;adult"e; themes, genre blending, metafictive discourse, intertextuality, sophisticated graphics, and complex text-image interplay. Exciting experiments with new formats and techniques, as well as novel interactions with new media and technologies have made the picturebook one of the most vibrant and innovative contemporary literary genres, one that seems to know no boundaries. Crossover Picturebooks is a valuable addition to the study of a genre that is gaining increasing recognition and appreciation, and contributes significantly to the field of children's literature as a whole.

Beverly Clark studies the cross-gendering of the school story and explores the intersections of gender and age.

The last two decades have seen an enormous growth in the critical study of two very different genres, the Gothic and children's literature. This collection examines the early intersection of the Gothic and children's literature and the contemporary manifestations of the gothic impulse.

"Recommended" by ChoiceThis collection of literary and historical criticism draws on recent scholarship on canon formation, gender studies, and cultural studies both to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and national/foreign operated in nineteenth-century children's literature and to explore how this literature transmitted hegemonic notions of American citizenship and cultural values.

This book offers new critical approaches for the study of adaptations, abridgments, translations, parodies, and mash-ups that occur internationally in contemporary children''s culture. It follows recent shifts in adaptation studies that call for a move beyond fidelity criticism, a paradigm that measures the success of an adaptation by the level of fidelity to the "original" text, toward a methodology that considers the adaptation to be always already in conversation with the adapted text. This book visits children''s literature and culture in order to consider the generic, pedagogical, and ideological underpinnings that drive both the process and the product. Focusing on novels as well as folktales, films, graphic novels, and anime, the authors consider the challenges inherent in transforming the work of authors such as William Shakespeare, Charles Perrault, L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and A.A. Milne into new forms that are palatable for later audiences particularly when-for perceived ideological or political reasons-the textual transformation is not only unavoidable but entirely necessary. Contributors consider the challenges inherent in transforming stories and characters from one type of text to another, across genres, languages, and time, offering a range of new models that will inform future scholarship.

This book explores the meaning of nation or nationalism in children's literature and how it constructs and represents different national experiences. The contributors discuss diverse aspects of children's literature and film from interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches, ranging from the short story and novel to science fiction and fantasy from a range of locations.

This book offers insights into the typically overlooked perspectives of children and children's culture in Europe, North America and the Global South, and Australia during the period around the First World War, engaging with developments in Children's Literature, War Studies, and Education.

This diverse, cross-disciplinary volume examines gender construction in children's and YA literature, complementing and updating scholarship on this topic via a rich examination of core questions around gender and sexuality in classic and contemporary texts.

This book focuses on the (de)canonization processes in children's literature, considering the construction and cultural-historical changes of canons in children's literatures from the UK, US, Europe, Australia, Israel, and elsewhere. The book's comparative approach is essential to assessing transnational processes in canon formation.

This book addresses a gap in the critical literature between adult Gothic narrative and children's and YA literature in the Gothic tradition. The volume asks how this literature helps readers contextualize and understand their psychological and social environments during periods of cultural change, global terror, and economic uncertainty.

Offering new perspectives in childhood studies and animal studies, this book critically addresses children and pets in our families, our cultures, and our societies, exploring issues such as protection, discipline, mastery, wildness, play, and domestication.

With a Preface by Perry Nodelman, this book represents the current state of research on picturebooks and adjacent hybrid forms such as comics, graphic novels, and book apps for and about young people.