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 Future of the Nineteenth-Century Dream-Child: Fantasy, Dystopia, Cyberculture
1st Edition
By Amy Billone
May 20, 2019
This book investigates the reappearance of the 19th-century dream-child from the Golden Age of Children's Literature, both in the Harry Potter series and in other works that have reached unprecedented levels of popular success today. Discussing Harry Potter as a reincarnation of Lewis Carroll's ...
The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers
1st Edition
Edited
By Jennifer Miskec, Annette Wannamaker
February 12, 2018
This is the first volume to consider the popular literary category of Early Readers – 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, ...
Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children's Literature
1st Edition
By Blanka Grzegorczyk
February 06, 2018
This book considers how contemporary British children’s books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public. A central assumption of this volume is that Britain’s ...
Fantasy and the Real World in British Children’s Literature: The Power of Story
1st Edition
By Caroline Webb
February 06, 2018
This study examines the children’s books of three extraordinary British writers—J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, and Terry Pratchett—and investigates their sophisticated use of narrative strategies not only to engage children in reading, but to educate them into becoming mature readers and ...
Global Perspectives on Death in Children’s Literature
1st Edition
Edited
By Lesley Clement, Leyli Jamali
February 06, 2018
This volume visits death in children’s literature from around the world, making a substantial contribution to the dialogue between the expanding fields of Childhood Studies, Children’s Literature, and Death Studies. Considering both textual and pictorial representations of death, contributors focus...
Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading
1st Edition
By Marek C. Oziewicz
February 06, 2018
This book is the first to offer a justice-focused cognitive reading of modern YA speculative fiction in its narrative and filmic forms. It links the expansion of YA speculative fiction in the 20th century with the emergence of human and civil rights movements, with the communitarian revolution in ...
Re-visioning Historical Fiction for Young Readers: The Past through Modern Eyes
1st Edition
By Kim Wilson
February 06, 2018
This study is concerned with how readers are positioned to interpret the past in historical fiction for children and young adults. Looking at literature published within the last thirty to forty years, Wilson identifies and explores a prevalent trend for re-visioning and rewriting the past ...
Reading the Adolescent Romance: Sweet Valley High and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel
1st Edition
By Amy Pattee
February 06, 2018
Reading the Adolescent Romance provides an exhaustive study of the developments in young adult literature since the 1980s with a focus on Francine Pascal’s "Sweet Valley High" series, which has become a cultural and literary touchstone for both fans and critics of the novels. Pattee carefully ...
Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images
1st Edition
By Anastasia Ulanowicz
February 06, 2018
Winner of the Children’s Literature Association Book Award This book visits a range of textual forms including diary, novel, and picturebook to explore the relationship between second-generation memory and contemporary children’s literature. Ulanowicz argues that second-generation memory — informed...
Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915
1st Edition
By Marilynn Strasser Olson
February 05, 2018
This volume explores the mutual influences between children’s literature and the avant-garde. Olson places particular focus on fin-de-siècle Paris, where the Avant-garde was not unified in thought and there was room for modernism to overlap with children’s literature and culture in the Golden Age. ...
Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg
1st Edition
By Zoe Jaques
February 05, 2018
An investigation of identity formation in children's literature, this book brings together children’s literature and recent critical concerns with posthuman identity to argue that children’s fiction offers sophisticated interventions into debates about what it means to be human, and in particular ...
Picturebooks: Representation and Narration
1st Edition
Edited
By Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
February 05, 2018
This volume discusses the aesthetic and cognitive challenges of modern picturebooks from different countries, such as Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and USA. The overarching issue concerns the mutual relationship between representation and narration by means of the...