Children's Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
Founding Editor and Series Editor 1994-2011: Jack Zipes
Series Editor, 2011-2018: Philip Nel
Founded by Jack Zipes in 1994, Children's Literature and Culture is the longest-running series devoted to the study of children’s literature and culture from a national and international perspective. Dedicated to promoting original research in children’s literature and children’s culture, in 2011 the series expanded its focus to include childhood studies, and it seeks to explore the legal, historical, and philosophical conditions of different childhoods. An advocate for scholarship from around the globe, the series recognizes innovation and encourages interdisciplinarity. Children's Literature and Culture offers cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections considering topics such as gender, race, picturebooks, childhood, nation, religion, technology, and many others. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature
1st Edition
By Angel Daniel Matos
October 01, 2024
The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature is a provocative meditation on emotion, mood, history, and futurism in the critique of queer texts created for younger audiences. Given critical demands to distance queer youth culture from narratives of violence, sadness, and hurt that have ...
Detective Fiction for Young Readers: Full of Secrets
1st Edition
By Chris McGee
September 18, 2024
Detective Fiction for Young Readers is an examination of contemporary mystery stories for children and young adults. This volume explores how the conventions, rules, and expectations of adult mystery fiction have filtered down, so to speak, especially in the past several decades, to writing for ...
Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature
1st Edition
By Elly McCausland
May 31, 2024
Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and ...
Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood: Myths and Realities
1st Edition
Edited
By Marina Balina, Larissa Rudova, Anastasia Kostetskaya
May 27, 2024
Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and ...
Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers
1st Edition
Edited
By Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Sin Wen Lau
May 27, 2024
This edited volume explores how success is conceptualized and represented in texts for young people in Asia. The essays in this collection examine how success for children relates to education, family, gender, race, class, community, and the nation. It answers the following questions: How is ...
The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature: Only the Best
1st Edition
By Elizabeth West
May 27, 2024
Publishing for children between 1930 and 1960 has been denigrated as a relatively fallow period for creativity and quality, certainly in comparison with the ‘golden ages’ of children’s literature that preceded and succeeded it. This book questions this perception by using archival evidence to argue...
Youth Fiction and Trans Representation
1st Edition
By Tom Sandercock
January 29, 2024
Youth Fiction and Trans Representation is the first book that wholly addresses the growth of trans and gender variant representation in literature, television, and films for children and young adults in the twenty-first century. Ranging across an array of media—including picture books, novels, ...
The Figure of the Child in WWI American, British, and Canadian Children’s Literature: Farmer, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
1st Edition
By Elizabeth A. Galway
September 25, 2023
Over the past century, much attention has been paid to the literature written for adults in response to the First World War, but there has been comparatively little consideration of how the war influenced literature for young readers at the time. Based on extensive archival research, this study ...
Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial
1st Edition
Edited
By Sara L. Schwebel, Jocelyn Van Tuyl
May 31, 2023
The oldest and most prestigious children’s literature award, the Newbery Medal has since 1922 been granted annually by the American Library Association to the children’s book it deems "most distinguished." Medal books enjoy an outsized influence on American children’s literature, figuring...
Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism: Children, Animals, and Poetry
1st Edition
By Christopher (Kit) Kelen, Chengcheng You
May 31, 2023
Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism: Children, Animals, and Poetry investigates a kind of poetry written mainly by adults for children. Many genres, including the picture book, are considered in asking for what purposes ‘animal poetry’ is composed and what function it serves. Critically ...
Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults
1st Edition
Edited
By Paul Venzo, Kristine Moruzi
December 19, 2022
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. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction...
Antarctica in British Children’s Literature
1st Edition
By Sinead Moriarty
May 30, 2022
For over a century British authors have been writing about the Antarctic for child readers, yet this body of literature has never been explored in detail. Antarctica in British Children’s Literature examines this field for the first time, identifying the dominant genres and recurrent themes and ...