Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature – serie

While most scholars who study children’s books are pre-occupied with the child characters and adult mediators, Vanessa Joosen re-positions the lens to focus on the under-explored construction of adulthood in children’s literature. Adulthood in Children’s Literature demonstrates how books for young readers evoke adulthood as a stage in life, enacted by adult characters, and in relationship with the construction of childhood. Employing age studies as a framework for analysis, this book covers a range of English and Dutch children’s books published from 1970 to the present.Calling upon critical voices like Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Peter Hollindale, Maria Nikolajeva and Lorraine Green, and the works of such authors as Babette Cole, Philip Pullman, Ted van Lieshout, Jacqueline Wilson, Salman Rushdie and Guus Kuijer, Joosen offers a fresh perspective on children’s literature by focusing not on the child but the adult.

The connection between childhood and poetry runs deep. And yet, poetry written for children has been neglected by criticism and resists prevailing theories of children’s literature. Drawing on Walter Ong’s theory of orality and on Iain McGilChrist’s work on brain function, this book develops a new theoretical framework for the study of children’s poetry. From Tongue to Text argues that the poem is a multimodal form that exists in the borderlands between the world of experience and the world of language and between orality and literacy – places that children themselves inhabit. Engaging with a wide range of poetry from nursery rhymes and Christina Rossetti to Michael Rosen and Carol Ann Duffy, Debbie Pullinger demonstrates how these ‘tactful’ works are shaped by the dynamics of orality and textuality.

Metaphysics of Children’s Literature is the first sustained study of ways in which children’s literature confronts metaphysical questions about reality and the nature of what there is in the world. In its exploration of something and nothing, this book identifies a number of metaphysical structures in texts for young people—such as the ontological exchange or nowhere in extremis—demonstrating that their entanglement with the workings of reality is unique to the conditions of children’s literature. Drawing on contemporary children’s literature discourse and metaphysicians from Heidegger and Levinas, to Bachelard, Sartre and Haraway, Lisa Sainsbury reveals the metaphysical groundwork of children’s literature.Authors and illustrators covered include: Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Mac Barnett, Ron Brooks, Peter Brown, Lewis Carroll, Eoin Colfer, Gary Crew, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Imme Dros, Sarah Ellis, Mem Fox, Zana Fraillon, Libby Gleeson, Kenneth Grahame, Armin Greder, Sonya Hartnett, Tana Hoban, Judy Horacek, Tove Jansson, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Elaine Konigsburg, Norman Lindsay, Geraldine McCaughrean, Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Edith Nesbit, Mary Norton, Jill Paton Walsh, Philippa Pearce, Ivan Southall, William Steig, Shaun Tan, Tarjei Vesaas, David Wiesner, Margaret Wild, Jacqueline Woodson and many others.

The act of imagining lies at the very heart of children’s engagements with literature and with the plots and characters they encounter in their favorite stories. The Courage to Imagine is a landmark new study of that fundamental act of imagining. Roni Natov focuses on the ways in which children’s imaginative engagement with the child hero figure can open them up to other people’s experiences, developing empathy across lines of race, gender and sexuality, as well as helping them to confront and handle traumatic experience safely. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches from the psychological to the cultural and reading a multicultural spectrum of authors, including works by Maya Angelou, Louise Erdrich, Neil Gaiman and Brian Selznick, this is a groundbreaking examination of the nature of imagining for children and re-imagining for the adult writer and illustrator.

150 years after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published, Lewis Carroll’s eponymous heroine has become one of the most familiar figures in the cultural landscape. The enduringly iconic figure of the Victorian child, Alice has inspired countless fashion designers, illustrators and stylists. The ‘Alice Look’ has been embraced across the world, by young and old alike, and by both the feted and the forgotten.Fashioning Alice is the first book to chart the emergence of Alice as a style icon. Kiera Vaclavik traces the evolution of Alice’s visual identity in the nineteenth century and explores the myriad ways in which she was dressed – on the page, on the stage, and in the home. The book also draws on historical sources to examine amateur performance and play not just in the UK but in the USA, Japan and Australia. Illustrated throughout, Fashioning Alice is a ground-breaking exploration of Alice’s visual career that offers a compelling case study of the intersections between fashion and fiction.

While most scholars who study children’s books are pre-occupied with the child characters and adult mediators, Vanessa Joosen re-positions the lens to focus on the under-explored construction of adulthood in children’s literature. Adulthood in Children’s Literature demonstrates how books for young readers evoke adulthood as a stage in life, enacted by adult characters, and in relationship with the construction of childhood. Employing age studies as a framework for analysis, this book covers a range of English and Dutch children’s books published from 1970 to the present.Calling upon critical voices like Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Peter Hollindale, Maria Nikolajeva and Lorraine Green, and the works of such authors as Babette Cole, Philip Pullman, Ted van Lieshout, Jacqueline Wilson, Salman Rushdie and Guus Kuijer, Joosen offers a fresh perspective on children’s literature by focusing not on the child but the adult.

Following the material turn in the humanities, this book brings perspectives from science and ecology into dialogue with children’s fiction written and published in the UK and the USA in the 21st century. It develops the concept of entanglement, which originated in 20th-century quantum physics but has been applied to cultural critique, through a reading of Fantastika literature. Surveying a wide-ranging scope of literary texts, this book covers the gothic, fantasy, the Weird, and other forms of speculative fiction to argue that Fantastika positions entanglement as an ethical imperative that transforms our imaginative relationship with materiality. In so doing, it synthesizes perspectives from a similarly diverse range of areas, including ecology, physics, anthropology, and literary studies, to examine the storied matter of children’s Fantastika as ground from which we might begin to imagine an as-yet-unrealised future that addresses the problems of our present.

Focusing on the mythological narratives that influence Irish children’s literature, this book examines the connections between landscape, time and identity, positing that myth and the language of myth offer authors and readers the opportunity to engage with Ireland’s culture and heritage. It explores the recurring patterns of Irish mythological narratives that influence literature produced for children in Ireland between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. A selection of children’s books published between 1892, when there was an escalation of the cultural pursuit of Irish independence and 2016, which marked the centenary of the Easter 1916 rebellion against English rule, are discussed with the aim of demonstrating the development of a pattern of retrieving, re-telling, remembering and re-imagining myths in Irish children’s literature. In doing so, it examines the reciprocity that exists between imagination, memory, and childhood experiences in this body of work.

2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title and shortlisted for the ESSE book awards 2020, for Literatures in the English LanguageChildhood books play a special role in reading histories, providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers’ memoirs, autobiographical accounts of reading, and interviews with readers, Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember, revisit, and sometimes forget, these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon, Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of children’s literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives.

A 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleLiterature’s Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children’s literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.

Focusing on the mythological narratives that influence Irish children’s literature, this book examines the connections between landscape, time and identity, positing that myth and the language of myth offer authors and readers the opportunity to engage with Ireland’s culture and heritage. It explores the recurring patterns of Irish mythological narratives that influence literature produced for children in Ireland between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. A selection of children’s books published between 1892, when there was an escalation of the cultural pursuit of Irish independence and 2016, which marked the centenary of the Easter 1916 rebellion against English rule, are discussed with the aim of demonstrating the development of a pattern of retrieving, re-telling, remembering and re-imagining myths in Irish children’s literature. In doing so, it examines the reciprocity that exists between imagination, memory, and childhood experiences in this body of work.

Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children’s books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurants in Tokyo, the Japanese have a close and multifaceted relationship with British children’s literature. In this, the first comprehensive study to explore this engagement, Catherine Butler considers its many manifestations in print, on the screen, in tourist locations and throughout Japanese popular culture. Taking stock of the influence of literary works such as Gulliver's Travels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Tom's Midnight Garden, and the Harry Potter series, this lively account draws on literary criticism, translation, film and tourist studies to explore how British children’s books have been selected, translated, understood, adapted and reworked into Japanese commercial, touristic and imaginative culture. Using theoretically informed case studies this book will consider both individual texts and their wider cultural contexts, translations and adaptations (such as the numerous adaptations of British children’s books by Studio Ghibli and others), the dissemination of distinctive tropes such as magical schools into Japanese children’s literature and popular culture, and the ways in which British children’s books and their settings have become part of way that Japanese people understand Britain itself.

Exploring a history of activists writing for and about children of colour from abolition to Black Lives Matter, this open access book examines issues such as the space given to people of colour by white activists; the voice, agency and intersectionality in activist writing for young people; how writers used activism to expand definitions of Britishness for child readers; and how activism and writing about it has changed in the 21st century.From abolitionists and anti-colonialists such as Amelia Opie, Una Marson and Rabindranath Tagore; communist and feminist activists concerned with broader children’s rights including Chris Searle and Rosemary Stones; to Black Panthers and contemporary advocates for people of colour from Farrukh Dhondy to Len Garrison, Catherine Johnson and Corinne Fowler, Karen Sands-O'Connor traces how these activists translated their values for children of colour. Beginning with historical events that sparked activism and the first cultural products for children and continuing to contemporary activism in the wake of the Windrush Scandal, this book analyses the choices, struggles and successes of writers of activist literature as they tried to change Britain and British literature to make it a welcoming place for all child readers.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Exploring a history of activists writing for and about children of colour from abolition to Black Lives Matter, this open access book examines issues such as the space given to people of colour by white activists; the voice, agency and intersectionality in activist writing for young people; how writers used activism to expand definitions of Britishness for child readers; and how activism and writing about it has changed in the 21st century.From abolitionists and anti-colonialists such as Amelia Opie, Una Marson and Rabindranath Tagore; communist and feminist activists concerned with broader children’s rights including Chris Searle and Rosemary Stones; to Black Panthers and contemporary advocates for people of colour from Farrukh Dhondy to Len Garrison, Catherine Johnson and Corinne Fowler, Karen Sands-O'Connor traces how these activists translated their values for children of colour. Beginning with historical events that sparked activism and the first cultural products for children and continuing to contemporary activism in the wake of the Windrush Scandal, this book analyses the choices, struggles and successes of writers of activist literature as they tried to change Britain and British literature to make it a welcoming place for all child readers.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

The ‘golden age’ of children’s literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children’s literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children’s books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children’s literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turn of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children’s literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people’s views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities. Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit’s Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children’s fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children’s relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.

The ‘golden age’ of children’s literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children’s literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children’s books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children’s literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turn of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children’s literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people’s views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities. Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit’s Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children’s fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children’s relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.

Metaphysics of Children’s Literature is the first sustained study of ways in which children’s literature confronts metaphysical questions about reality and the nature of what there is in the world. In its exploration of something and nothing, this book identifies a number of metaphysical structures in texts for young people—such as the ontological exchange or nowhere in extremis—demonstrating that their entanglement with the workings of reality is unique to the conditions of children’s literature. Drawing on contemporary children’s literature discourse and metaphysicians from Heidegger and Levinas, to Bachelard, Sartre and Haraway, Lisa Sainsbury reveals the metaphysical groundwork of children’s literature.Authors and illustrators covered include: Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Mac Barnett, Ron Brooks, Peter Brown, Lewis Carroll, Eoin Colfer, Gary Crew, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Imme Dros, Sarah Ellis, Mem Fox, Zana Fraillon, Libby Gleeson, Kenneth Grahame, Armin Greder, Sonya Hartnett, Tana Hoban, Judy Horacek, Tove Jansson, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Elaine Konigsburg, Norman Lindsay, Geraldine McCaughrean, Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Edith Nesbit, Mary Norton, Jill Paton Walsh, Philippa Pearce, Ivan Southall, William Steig, Shaun Tan, Tarjei Vesaas, David Wiesner, Margaret Wild, Jacqueline Woodson and many others.

An exploration of the strategies used by Chinese children’s publishers to package and promote their authors, Marketing Chinese Children's Books situates these approaches within their historical, social and cultural contexts and considers what implications this may have for publishers looking to market Chinese children’s books to global audiences.Focusing on the abundant paratextual elements of many contemporary Chinese children’s books, including prefaces, interviews, book covers and author photographs, this study reveals the various constraints on the self-fashioning of popular children's authors in the People's Republic of China today. Spotlighting some of China’s best-selling children’s authors — Cao Wenxuan (the first Chinese recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award), Yang Hongying, Shen Shixi and Gerelchimeg Black Crane — Frances Weightman considers how the marketing of these authors constructs and presents them variously as academic and political authorities; friends and confidantes; or trusted guides and gatekeepers of the natural world. This is a timely study of the construction of Chinese children’s authorship coinciding with the rapid expansion of children’s literature publishing in China and its reception on the world stage.

This open access book is a unique study of the impact of lived experience on literate life, exploring how children’s reading development is affected by their home setting, and how this sense of place influences textual interpretation of the books they read. Based on qualitative research and structured around interviews with twelve participants, Space, Place and Children's Reading Development focuses on the digital maps and artistic renderings these readers were asked to create of a place (real or imagined) that they felt reflected their literate youth, and the discussions that followed about these maps and their evolution as readers. Analysing the participant’s responses, Margaret Mackey looks at the rich insights offered about the impact on childhood stability after experiences such as migration; the "reading spaces" children make based on their social relationships and domestic spheres; the creation of "textual spaces" and the significance of the recurring motif of forests in the participants’ maps; the importance of the Harry Potter novels; the basis of life-long reading habits; psychological spaces and whether readers visualize when they read. Blending theoretical perspectives on reading from many disciplines with the personal experiences of readers of diverse nationalities, languages, disciplinary interests, and life experiences, this is an enlightening account of the behaviors of readers, reading histories, and place-based reader responses to literature. By building greater understanding about the broad and subtle processes that enable people to read, this study refines the kind of questions we ask about reading and moves towards developing a multidisciplinary language for the study and discussion of reading practices in contemporary times.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

This open access book is a unique study of the impact of lived experience on literate life, exploring how children’s reading development is affected by their home setting, and how this sense of place influences textual interpretation of the books they read. Based on qualitative research and structured around interviews with twelve participants, Space, Place and Children's Reading Development focuses on the digital maps and artistic renderings these readers were asked to create of a place (real or imagined) that they felt reflected their literate youth, and the discussions that followed about these maps and their evolution as readers. Analysing the participant’s responses, Margaret Mackey looks at the rich insights offered about the impact on childhood stability after experiences such as migration; the "reading spaces" children make based on their social relationships and domestic spheres; the creation of "textual spaces" and the significance of the recurring motif of forests in the participants’ maps; the importance of the Harry Potter novels; the basis of life-long reading habits; psychological spaces and whether readers visualize when they read. Blending theoretical perspectives on reading from many disciplines with the personal experiences of readers of diverse nationalities, languages, disciplinary interests, and life experiences, this is an enlightening account of the behaviors of readers, reading histories, and place-based reader responses to literature. By building greater understanding about the broad and subtle processes that enable people to read, this study refines the kind of questions we ask about reading and moves towards developing a multidisciplinary language for the study and discussion of reading practices in contemporary times.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation and its impact on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to detail how it dominated the country’s new context of surveillance and control. Using extensive new multilingual archive material including legal and business records and US State Department files, Sophie Heywood traces both the history of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) and anti-comics activists’ efforts to prevent American ‘propaganda’ reaching the hands of children, and Hachette’s strategic and editorial responses. Children’s Publishing in Cold War France covers such events as the campaign waged against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the impact of Cold War tensions on Hachette’s publishing of Disney books and comics in French; and studies the translation of series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, where self-censorship could be a radical and creative process. Children’s Publishing in Cold War France presents a timely historical study of how states and political campaigners seek to control children’s access to culture, and the legacies of such conflicts.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Reading.

Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation and its impact on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to detail how it dominated the country’s new context of surveillance and control. Using extensive new multilingual archive material including legal and business records and US State Department files, Sophie Heywood traces both the history of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) and anti-comics activists’ efforts to prevent American ‘propaganda’ reaching the hands of children, and Hachette’s strategic and editorial responses. Children’s Publishing in Cold War France covers such events as the campaign waged against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the impact of Cold War tensions on Hachette’s publishing of Disney books and comics in French; and studies the translation of series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, where self-censorship could be a radical and creative process. Children’s Publishing in Cold War France presents a timely historical study of how states and political campaigners seek to control children’s access to culture, and the legacies of such conflicts.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Reading.

Following the material turn in the humanities, this book brings perspectives from science and ecology into dialogue with children’s fiction written and published in the UK and the USA in the 21st century. It develops the concept of entanglement, which originated in 20th-century quantum physics but has been applied to cultural critique, through a reading of Fantastika literature. Surveying a wide-ranging scope of literary texts, this book covers the gothic, fantasy, the Weird, and other forms of speculative fiction to argue that Fantastika positions entanglement as an ethical imperative that transforms our imaginative relationship with materiality. In so doing, it synthesizes perspectives from a similarly diverse range of areas, including ecology, physics, anthropology, and literary studies, to examine the storied matter of children’s Fantastika as ground from which we might begin to imagine an as-yet-unrealised future that addresses the problems of our present.

An exploration of the serialization of children's classics by contemporary publishers, this book digs into the impact of the practice and provides new ways of reading the corpus of British children's literature from the 20th century. Amy Webster demonstrates how publishers select texts for their series, which texts they omit, which outliers are sometimes included and how a core group of works from the golden age of children's literature emerged. The text also examines how texts are abridged and transformed from publisher to publisher through close readings of The Wind in the Willows and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and how the repackaging of works within a series highlight issues and choices tied to key paratextual elements. Analysing data through distant reading and close reading of series from Ladybird, Longman, Puffin and Walker Illustrated editions, this book sheds light on how modern classics series are marked by variation and instability but also a reductive homogeneity.Through her use of quantitative and text-focused research, Webster reveals how commercial motivations have created a gulf between the canonical concepts of the classic and how the term functions as a marketing tool in British children’s publishing. With notions of what counts as a classic compromised and complicated, this book leads the call for a critical approach towards both the term ‘classic’ and to reading children’s classics that acknowledges how they are tied to the commercial enterprises of the children’s book business.

An exploration of the serialization of children's classics by contemporary publishers, this book digs into the impact of the practice and provides new ways of reading the corpus of British children's literature from the 20th century. Amy Webster demonstrates how publishers select texts for their series, which texts they omit, which outliers are sometimes included and how a core group of works from the golden age of children's literature emerged. The text also examines how texts are abridged and transformed from publisher to publisher through close readings of The Wind in the Willows and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and how the repackaging of works within a series highlight issues and choices tied to key paratextual elements. Analysing data through distant reading and close reading of series from Ladybird, Longman, Puffin and Walker Illustrated editions, this book sheds light on how modern classics series are marked by variation and instability but also a reductive homogeneity.Through her use of quantitative and text-focused research, Webster reveals how commercial motivations have created a gulf between the canonical concepts of the classic and how the term functions as a marketing tool in British children’s publishing. With notions of what counts as a classic compromised and complicated, this book leads the call for a critical approach towards both the term ‘classic’ and to reading children’s classics that acknowledges how they are tied to the commercial enterprises of the children’s book business.

Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children’s books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurants in Tokyo, the Japanese have a close and multifaceted relationship with British children’s literature. In this, the first comprehensive study to explore this engagement, Catherine Butler considers its many manifestations in print, on the screen, in tourist locations and throughout Japanese popular culture. Taking stock of the influence of literary works such as Gulliver's Travels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Tom's Midnight Garden, and the Harry Potter series, this lively account draws on literary criticism, translation, film and tourist studies to explore how British children’s books have been selected, translated, understood, adapted and reworked into Japanese commercial, touristic and imaginative culture. Using theoretically informed case studies this book will consider both individual texts and their wider cultural contexts, translations and adaptations (such as the numerous adaptations of British children’s books by Studio Ghibli and others), the dissemination of distinctive tropes such as magical schools into Japanese children’s literature and popular culture, and the ways in which British children’s books and their settings have become part of way that Japanese people understand Britain itself.

Featuring close readings of selected poetry, visual texts, short stories and novels published for children since 1945 from Naughty Amelia Jane to Watership Down, this is the first extensive study of the nature and form of ethical discourse in British children's literature.Ethics in British Children's Literature explores the extent to which contemporary writing for children might be considered philosophical, tackling ethical spheres relevant to and arising from books for young people, such as naughtiness, good and evil, family life, and environmental ethics. Rigorously engaging with influential moral philosophers, from Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, to Arno Leopold, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, and Lars Svendsen, this book demonstrates the narrative strategies employed to engage young readers as moral agents.

A 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleLiterature’s Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children’s literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.

The act of imagining lies at the very heart of children’s engagements with literature and with the plots and characters they encounter in their favorite stories. The Courage to Imagine is a landmark new study of that fundamental act of imagining. Roni Natov focuses on the ways in which children’s imaginative engagement with the child hero figure can open them up to other people’s experiences, developing empathy across lines of race, gender and sexuality, as well as helping them to confront and handle traumatic experience safely. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches from the psychological to the cultural and reading a multicultural spectrum of authors, including works by Maya Angelou, Louise Erdrich, Neil Gaiman and Brian Selznick, this is a groundbreaking examination of the nature of imagining for children and re-imagining for the adult writer and illustrator.