Children's Literature and the Posthuman

Zoe Jaques is Lecturer in Children’s Literature and Education at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Homerton College. She is co-author of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass: A Publishing History (2013).

"Jaques uncovers the posthuman nature of characters and types that we recognize from children’s literature: talking animals and plants, and the uncanny half-life of toys and robots are discussed through the lens of philosophers like Donna Haraway and Jacques Derrida... Jaques’s study successfully makes some interesting connections and convincingly argues for children’s literature, a place where non-traditional subjectivities are often explored, as an exciting arena for posthumanist studies."- Forum for Modern Language Studies"Children’s Literature and the Posthuman is an expansive, intelligent and frequently quite delightful trek through the history of children’s literature in order to uncover the myriad ways in which children’s books have imaginatively sought to engage with philosophical debates about what it means to be human. Unlike other critical applications of posthumanism to children’s literature, which have tended to concentrate on the impact of technology on human subjectivity and have thus focused primarily on the genre of science-fiction (a category into which my own recently published monograph, Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The Posthuman Subject, which was published in 2014, falls), Jaques’ monograph offers its readers a much broader and more exploratory argument about the origins of posthumanism in children’s books and films."- Victoria Flanagan, Macquarie University

• Introduction: The Child, the Book and the Posthuman Ethic Part I: Animal 1. Creature 2. Pet Part II: Environment 3. Tree 4. Water Part III: Cyborg 5. Robot 6. Toy Conclusion: A Question: Who are you?