Children’s Literature and Culture

Children’s Literature and Culture: An Introduction guides readers in the study of culture in, around, and through children’s literature. Children’s literature has long been used as a mechanism by which a culture passes its values from one generation to the next. Because of this culturally didactic purpose, children’s literature can be viewed as one of the most fruitful areas of study of any given culture. At the same time, studying the cultures from which works of children’s literature emerge and in which they circulate can also help better understand not only the ideas of childhood that underpin individual texts for children but the role they play in the construction and transmission of different cultural ideologies. This book teaches readers this double work of using culture to understand children’s literature and vice versa. This volume traces the scholarly methodologies and histories that have attended the study of each of the 20 chapters’ given subject—from the representation of race in and around children’s literature to questions of censorship to how libraries can and do shape children’s literature. In the process, it prepares readers to confidently enter and forward scholarly debates and to teach such debates to their own students.