Bøger i Children's Literature and Culture serien

Traces the representation of West Indian characters in British children's literature from 1700 onwards, challenging traditional notions of British children's literature as mono-cultural by illuminating the contributions of colonial and postcolonial-era Black British writers.

This work focuses on George Henty's novels as a prototype of the literature that emerged with the rise of British imperialism. It also assesses the role of 19th-century literature, both in the perpetuation of stereotypes vis-a-vis Africa, and in the socialization of young adults.

In this pioneering historical study, Anne Lundin argues that schools, libraries, professional organizations, and the media together create and influence the constantly changing canon of children''s literature. Lundin examines the circumstances out of which the canon emerges, and its effect on the production of children''s literature. The volume includes a comprehensive list of canonical titles for reference.

This book offers a variety of approaches to children''s literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism.The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of "otherness" and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. Section 2 presents discussions of the colonialist mind-set in children''s and young adult texts from the turn of the century. Here works by writers of animal stories in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, works of early Australian colonialist literature, and Frances Hodgson Burnett''s A Little Princess come under the scrutiny of our postmodern reading practices. Section 3 deals directly with contemporary texts for children that manifest both a postcolonial and a neo-colonial content. In this section, the longest in the book, we have studies of children''s literature from Canada, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.

This book addresses the relationship between children and cultural memory in texts both for and about young people. The collection overall is concerned with how cultural memory is shaped, contested, forgotten, recovered, and (re)circulated, sometimes in opposition to dominant national narratives, and often for the benefit of young readers who are assumed not to possess any prior cultural memory.

In this volume, leading scholars in the field of picturebook research discusses the aesthetic and cognitive challenges of modern picturebooks. The chapters cover new topics and theoretical frameworks, such as interpictoriality, crosswriting, materiality, and cognitive narratology. Particular attention is given to wordless picturebooks, crossover picturebooks, and artists¿ books.

This collection explores the significance of New York City in children¿s literature, stressing literary, political, and societal influences on writing for young people from the twentieth century to the present day. Contextualized in light of contemporary critical and cultural theory, the chapters examine the varying ways in which children¿s literature has engaged with New York City as a city space, both in terms of (urban) realism and as an `ideä, such as the fantasy of the city as a place of opportunity, or other associations. The collection visits not only dominant themes, motifs, and tropes, but also the different narrative methods employed to tell readers about the history, function, physical structure, and conceptualization of New York City, acknowledging the shared or symbiotic relationship between literature and the city: just as literature can give imaginative `reality¿ to the city, the city has the potential to shape the literary text. This book critically engages with most of the major forms and genres for children/young adults that dialogue with New York City, and considers such authors as Margaret Wise Brown, Felice Holman, E. L. Konigsburg, Maurice Sendak, J. D. Salinger, John Donovan, Shaun Tan, Elizabeth Enright, and Patti Smith.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book visits death in children¿s literature from around the world, contributing to the fields of Childhood Studies, Children¿s Literature, and Death Studies. Considering textual and pictorial representations of death, contributors focus on death as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and/or a social construct, offering a diverse range of theoretical and cultural perspectives. Sections interrogate how classic texts have been adapted for the 21st century, how death has been politicized, ritualized, or metaphorized, visual strategies for representing death, and how death has been represented within the context of sport or play.

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, their first opportunity to engage with a work of literature on their own, to feel a sense of mastery over a text, and to experience pleasure from the act of reading independently. Using interdisciplinary approaches that draw upon and synthesize research being done in education, child psychology, sociology, cultural studies, and children''s literature, the volume visits Early Readers from a variety of angles: as teaching tools; as cultural artifacts that shape cultural and individual subjectivity; as mass produced products sold to a niche market of parents, educators, and young children; and as aesthetic objects, works of literature and art with specific conventions. Examining the reasons such books are so popular with young readers, as well as the reasons that some adults challenge and censor them, the volume considers the ways Early Readers contribute to the construction of younger children as readers, thinkers, consumers, and as gendered, raced, classed subjects. It also addresses children''s texts that have been translated and sold around the globe, examining them as part of an increasingly transnational children''s media culture that may add to or supplant regional, ethnic, and national children''s literatures and cultures. While this collection focuses mostly on books written in English and often aimed at children living in the US, it is important to acknowledge that these Early Readers are a major US cultural export, influencing the reading habits and development of children across the globe.

Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children''s Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as ''enemy'' lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children''s literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.

This is the first scholarly volume to analyze Anglophone children's book awards in historical and cultural context. With attention to both political and aesthetic concerns, it offers original and diverse scholarship on prizing practices and their consequences in Australia, Canada, and especially the US. Contributors offer both case studies of particular awards and analysis of broader trends in literary evaluation and elevation, drawing on theoretical work on canonization and cultural capital. This volume will interest scholars in literary and cultural studies, social history, book history, sociology, education, library and information science, and children's literature.

This diverse, cross-disciplinary volume examines gender construction in children's and YA literature, complementing and updating scholarship on this topic via a rich examination of core questions around gender and sexuality in classic and contemporary texts. Across genres, eras, and national literatures, the book explores how readers encounter unorthodox as well as traditional notions of gender. This volume provides an updated range of multidisciplinary and methodologically diverse analyses of critically and commercially successful children's and YA texts, contributing to the scholarship on children's and YA literature, gender and sexuality, women's studies, and other disciplines.

This book focuses on the (de)canonization processes in children's literature, considering the construction and cultural-historical changes of canons in children's literatures from the UK, US, Europe, Australia, Israel, and elsewhere. Essays assess authors and works that have encountered changing fates in the course of canon history. Particular emphasis is given to sociological canon theories, relating historical changes in the canon of children's literature not only to historical changes in concepts of childhood but to political, social, economic, cultural, and ideological shifts. The book's comparative approach is essential to assessing transnational processes in canon formation.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume represents the current state of research on picture books and other adjacent hybrid forms of　visual/verbal texts such as comics, graphic novels, and book apps, with a particular focus on texts produced for and　about young people. When Perry Nodelman’s Words about Pictures: the Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books　was published almost three decades ago, it was greeted as an important contribution to studies in children’s　picture books and illustration internationally; and based substantially on it, Nodelman has recently been named the 2015 recipient of the International Grimm Award for children’s literature criticism. In the years since Words About Pictures appeared, scholars have built on Nodelman’s groundbreaking text and have developed a range of other approaches, both to picture books and to newer forms of visual/verbal texts that have entered the marketplace and become popular with young people. The essays in this book offer ''more words'' about established and emerging forms of picture books, providing an overview of the current state of studies in visual/verbal texts and gathering in one place the work being produced at various locations and across disciplines. Essays exploring areas such as semiological and structural aspects of conventional picture books, graphic narratives and new media forms, and the material and performative cultures of picture books represent current work not only from literary studies but also media studies, art history, ecology, Middle Eastern Studies, library and information studies, and educational research. In addition to work by international scholars including William Moebius, Erica Hateley, Nathalie op de Beeck, and Nina Christensen that carries on and challenges the conclusions of Words about Pictures, the collection also includes a wide-ranging reflection by Perry Nodelman on continuities and changes in the current interdisciplinary field of study of visual/verbal texts for young　readers. Providing a look back over the history of picture books and the development of picture book scholarship, More Words About Pictures also offers an overview of our current understanding of these intriguing texts.