Books in the Critical Approaches to Children's Literature series

Stories are told today through many formats and young interpreters bring multimedia experience to bear on every narrative format they encounter. In this book, twelve young people read a novel, watch a film and play a video game from beginning to end. Their responses inform a new framework of contemporary themes of narrative comprehension.

This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents.

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 explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency.

This book maps the development of the boy detective in British children's literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century.

This book explores how working-class writers in the 1960s and 1970s significantly reshaped British children's literature through their representations of working-class life and culture.

Runner-up of the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award 2017Winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth & Fantasy Studies 2019This book examines the creative uses of "Celtic" myth in contemporary fantasy written for children or young adults from the 1960s to the 2000s.

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.

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.

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

This book provides scholars, both national and international, with a basis for advanced research in children's literature in collections.

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.

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

This book reveals how the period's transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, and national energies offers rich opportunities in which to analyze the relationship between identity and transformation.

This pioneering study is the first full-length treatment of feminism and the environment in children's literature. Drawing on the history, philosophy and ethics of ecofeminism, it examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic landscapes in young adult fiction reflect contemporary attitudes towards environmental crisis and human responsibility.

This book investigates how cultural sameness and difference has been presented in a variety of forms and genres of children's literature from Denmark, Germany, France, Russia, Britain, and the United States;

Internationalism in Children's Series brings together international children's literature scholars who interpret 'internationalism' through various cultural, historical and theoretical lenses. From imperialism to transnationalism, from Tom Swift to Harry Potter, this book addresses the unique ability of series to introduce children to the world.

Seriality and Texts for Young People is a collection of thirteen scholarly essays about series and serial texts directed to children and youth, each of which begins from the premise that a basic principle of seriality is repetition.

Children grow up surrounded by stories, motifs, characters and themes which respond to the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages in Children's Literature explores the use and abuse of the medieval in children's literature, the many forms in which it appears, and its enduring capacity to enchant the young.

Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction is not a historical study or a survey of narrative plots, but takes a more conceptual approach that engages with the central ideas of posthumanism: the fragmented nature of posthuman identity, the concept of agency as distributed and collective and the role of embodiment in understandings of selfhood.

Examining culturally significant works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to this end.

Internationalism in Children's Series brings together international children's literature scholars who interpret 'internationalism' through various cultural, historical and theoretical lenses. From imperialism to transnationalism, from Tom Swift to Harry Potter, this book addresses the unique ability of series to introduce children to the world.

This book explores the phenomenon of the story paper, the meanings and values children took from their reading, and the responses of adults to their reading choices. It argues for the revaluing of the story paper in the inter-war years, giving the genre a pivotal role in the development of children's literature.

Many children learn from a young age to tell the truth. They also learn that some lies are necessary in order to survive in a world that paradoxically values truth-telling, but practises deception. This book examines this paradox by considering how deception is often a necessary means of survival for individuals, families, governments, and animals.

Offers new insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on a wide range of international picture books for children published between 1963 and 2008. Its chapters include metafiction; disruption to narrative conventions; interrogation of 'truths'; historiographic metafiction; difference and ex-centricity; globalisation and media.

After the first phase of industrialization in Britain, the child emerged as both a victim of and a threat to capitalism. This book explores the changing relationship between the child and capitalist society in the works of some of the most important writers of children's and young-adult texts in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

This study of the afterlife of Robinson Crusoe offers insights into the continued popularity and relevance of Crusoe's story and how modern conceptions of childhood are shaped by nostalgia and ideas of 'the popular'. Examining many adaptations in a variety of formats, it reconsiders the place Crusoe has occupied in our culture for three centuries.

This book demonstrates how contemporary children's texts draw on utopian and dystopian tropes in their projections of possible futures. The authors explore the ways in which children's texts respond to social change and global politics. The book argues that children's texts are crucially implicated in shaping the values of their readers.

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.