Children’s literature studies: general Books

Book SynopsisChild Activist Literature at the Turn of the 2020s: From Kids You Read About to Kids You Read looks at how today's child activists are not just followers in their forekids' footsteps, but blazers of new pathways, employing sophisticated rhetorical strategies that invert and subvert conventional thinking on the roles of children in politics. These young activists situate their work within a dense web of textsthe ones they read, the ones they write, and the ones that they expect adults to deploy to dismiss them. Nance-Carroll analyzes texts authored by child activists alongside narratives of youth activism in literature and media and the stories activists tell about themselves and their work, exploring issues of influence, inspiration, and authorship in child activist literature, as a growing body of work challenges not just adults' assumptions about children and politics, but also some fundamental disciplinary tenets of children's and young adult literature.

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Book SynopsisEvil in the Christian Fantasy of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling: From the White Witch to the Dark Mark argues that The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter series are essential reading for anyone committed to understanding the cultural constructions of evil in twentieth-century Europe, and the strategies of resistance available to different types of readers in response to those evils. This book also suggests that while the construction of evil in both series can and should be approached through a secular lens, it cannot be fully understood without a complementary understanding of religious transcendence. Sarah Fiona Winters explores the tension between theological evil on the one hand, and naturalist and politico-historical representations of evil on the other; and the tension within both the explicitly religious and the apparently secular between dualism, the belief that good and evil both exist and are locked in combat, and the belief in orthodox Christianity that evil is nothing. She examines the developments in theories about evil that arose from the experience of the Second World War, particularly those of Hannah Arendt and Stanley Milgram in 1963, arguing that Lewis presented obedience as a strategy against evil because he wrote before their work while Rowling presents disobedience as a strategy against evil as she wrote after their work.

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Book SynopsisFeaturing close readings of commonly studied texts, this book takes students of Children's Literature through the key works, their contexts and critical and popular afterlives. "Children's Literature in Context" is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to children's literature and its wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues involved in the study of children's literature and its social, cultural and literary contexts. Close readings of commonly studied texts including Lewis Carroll's Alice books, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", "The Lion", "The Witch and the Wardrobe", the "Harry Potter" series and the "His Dark Materials" trilogy highlight major themes and ways of reading children's literature. A chapter on afterlives and adaptations explores a range of wider cultural texts including the film adaptations of "Harry Potter", "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Golden Compass". The final section introduces key critical interpretations from different perspectives on issues including innocence, gender, fantasy, psychoanalysis and ideology. 'Review, Reading and Research' sections give suggestions for further reading, discussion and research. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying children's literature. Texts and Contexts is a series of clear, concise and accessible introductions to key literary fields and concepts. The series provides the literary, critical, historical context for texts and authors in a specific literary area in a way that introduces a range of work in the field and enables further independent study and reading.Trade ReviewChildren's Literature in Context is a meeting ground where literary history meets literary criticism in a broad intertextual reach. Here is a journey for the reader who travels from definitions of the genre to socio-political contexts, to close readings of classic and contemporary texts, to a critical framework of interpretations and perspectives, to expansive cultural adaptations. At each juncture McCulloch interweaves theory with striking ease, linking children's literature to a larger world of literature and philosophy. Her readings of texts are fresh, provocative, coherent. Designed to serve as a textbook, McCulloch's work is also a handbook to the field, offering a range of resources for students and scholars, a spacious landscape. -- Anne Lundin, Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Library & Information Studies, USA Featured in the Times Higher Education Literature Textbook round-up.Table of ContentsSeries Preface; Part I: Contexts; 1. Social and Cultural Contexts; 2. Literary Contexts; Review, Reading and Research; Part II: Texts; 3. Readings of Key Texts; Review, Reading and Research; Part III: Wider Contexts; 4. Afterlives and Adaptations; 5. Critical Contexts; Review, Reading and Research; Bibliography; Index.

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Book SynopsisThis 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.Table of ContentsIntroduction: the Romantic cultures of infancy 1. ‘A detached peninsula’: infancy in the work of Thomas De Quincey. Martina Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy 2. William Blake’s Infant Joy. Robert Rix 3. The infant, the mother, and the breast in the paintings of Marguerite Gérard. Loren Lerner 4. Mother at the source: romanticism and infant education. Robert A. Davis 5. Coleridge, the ridiculous child, and the limits of Romanticism. Andrew McInnes 6. Educational experiments: childhood sympathy, regulation and object relations in Maria Edgeworth’s writing about education. Charles Armstrong 7. ‘Advice [...] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: human and non-human infancy in eighteenth-century moral animal tales. Anja Höing 8. William Godwin, Romantic-era historiography and the political cultures of infancy. John-Erik Hansson 9. Experimenting with children: infants in the scientific imagination. Lisa Ann Robertson 10. ‘A wretch so sad, so lorn’: the feral child and the Romantic cultures of infancy. Rolf Lessenich

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Book SynopsisChildren’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind explores ways in which children’s literature becomes the object and catalyst of play that brings younger and older generations closer to one another. Providing examples from diverse cultural and historical contexts, this collection argues that children’s texts promote intergenerational play through the use of literary devices and graphic formats and that they may prompt joint play practices in the real world. The book offers a distinctive contribution to children’s literature scholarship by shifting critical attention away from the difference and conflict between children and adults to the exploration of inter-age interdependencies as equally crucial aspects of human life, presenting a new perspective for all who research and work with children’s culture in times of global aging.Table of Contents Chapter 1. Play, Children’s Literature, and Intergenerational Connectivity. - Chapter 2: The Child Reader’s Playful Adventures in Wonderland. - Chapter 3. The Nature of Play and Adult-Child Interaction in the Alice Books and Coraline. -Chapter 4. Embracing the Childlike: Play in Picturebook Poetics. - Chapter 5. Intergenerational Encounters in Contemporary Picturebooks. - Chapter 6. Rabindranath Tagore the Grandfather: Shey as a Playful Encounter between a Poet and His Granddaughter. - Chapter 7. How Fictional Representations of Intergenerational Play May Be Important for Child Readers: A Cognitive Approach. - Chapter 8. “How did Child of Light save me?” Engagement with a Children’s Multimodal Game Narrative as Adult play and Self-therapy. - Chapter 9. No Adults in the Woods: Relationships between Adults and Children during Outdoor Play in Award-Winning Picturebooks from the United States. - Chapter 10. Don’t Tell the Parents! The Illicitness of Intergenerational Play. - Chapter 11. Not Your (Ordinary) Grandma: Old Age in Three Contemporary Dutch Children’s Books. - Chapter 12. Barbie Unbound: The Satirical Representation of the Barbie Doll as an Exemplification of Realism and Crossover Attitude in Young Adult Literature. - Chapter 13. Deconstructing Stereotypes through Reading Children’s Literature as Intergenerational Play: The Case of the Stepmother. - Chapter 14. Family in Finnish Picturebooks: Playful Books Challenging Normative Representation of Family.

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Book SynopsisChapter 1: Introduction.- Part 1: Rewriting, Retelling, and Adaptation.- Chapter 2: Saint-Exupéry’s Memories and the Prince’s Life on B612 in the Morgan Library Manuscript of The Little Prince.- Chapter 3: And the Story Lives On: Fred Fordham’s Graphic Novel Adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.- Chapter 4: Nikolai Nosov’s Novella Vitya Maleyev in School and at Home: The Turn to Psychological Prose.- Chapter 5: An Educational Tale of the Japanese “Child” as a Western Ideal Entrusted to a Fox: Gon the Fox and the Sociology of Knowledge.- Chapter 06: From Srimad-Bhagavatam to Comics: Reading the Imprints of Lord K???a in the Children World.- Part 2: Critical Reading: Theories and Interpretations.- Chapter 7: On Whangdoodles and Changing Times: Reading Scandal, Adaptation, and Identity Politics in the Works of Roald Dahl.- Chapter 8: Fairy Tales: A Psychoanalytic Review.- Chapter 9: The Labyrinth of Gender in The Twin Knights: Osamu Tezuka’s World between Diversity and Limits.- Chapter 10: Little Red Riding Hood in the Mirror of Different Cultures and Time Periods.- Chapter 11: Magic Mirrors and Traumatic Chronotopes: Mizuki Tsujimura’s and Erin Morgenstern’s Contemporary Fairy Tales.

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