Bøger i Critical Approaches to Children's Literature serien

Storying Plants in Australian Children¿s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds explores cultural and historical aspects of the representation of plants in Australian children¿s and young adult literature, encompassing colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous perspectives. While plants tend to be backgrounded as of less narrative interest than animals and humans, this book, in conversation with the field of critical plant studies, approaches them as living beings worthy of attention. Australia is home to over 20,000 species of native plants ¿ from pungent Eucalypts to twisting mangroves, from tiny orchids to spiky, silvery spinifex. Indigenous Australians have lived with, relied upon, and cultivated these plants for many thousands of years. When European explorers and colonists first invaded Australia, unfamiliar species of plants captured their imagination. Vulnerable to bushfires, climate change, and introduced species, plants continue to occupy fraught butvital places in Australian ecologies, texts, and cultures. Discussing writers from Ambelin Kwaymullina and Aunty Joy Murphy to May Gibbs and Ethel Turner, and embracing transnational perspectives from Ukraine, Poland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Storying Plants addresses the stories told about plants but also the stories that plants themselves tell, engaging with the wide-ranging significance of plants in Australian children¿s and Young Adult literature.

From Struwwelpeter to Peter Rabbit, from Alice to Bilbo-this collection of essays shows how the classics of children's literature have been transformed across languages, genres, and diverse media forms.

This book considers the English Civil Wars and the civil wars in Scotland and Ireland through the lens of historical fiction-primarily fiction for the young.

This book examines constructions of childhood in the works of Louisa May Alcott. Analyzing Alcott as a writer for twenty-first-century children, West considers Alcott's place in the children's canon and how new media and fan fiction impact readings of her works today.

Children's Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind explores ways in which children's literature becomes the object and catalyst of play that brings younger and older generations closer to one another.

While the gender and age of the girl may seem to remove her from any significant contribution to empire, this book provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, and the first detailed examination of lesser-known fiction relating the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire.

From Struwwelpeter to Peter Rabbit, from Alice to Bilbo-this collection of essays shows how the classics of children's literature have been transformed across languages, genres, and diverse media forms.

This book explores how working-class writers in the 1960s and 1970s significantly reshaped British children's literature through their representations of working-class life and culture.

This book maps the development of the boy detective in British children's literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century.

This book is about the implications of novels for young readers that tell their stories by alternating between different narrative lines focused on different characters.

This book examines a critical period in British children's publishing, from the earliest days of dedicated publishing firms for Black British audiences to the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK.

Drawing from theories of digital citizenship and posthuman theory, Digital Citizenship in Twenty-First Century Young Adult Literature considers how the imaginary forms of activism depicted in literature can prompt young people to shape their identities and choices as citizens in a digital culture

This book reveals how the period's transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, and national energies offers rich opportunities in which to analyze the relationship between identity and transformation.

Applying critical race theory to contemporary African American children's and young adult literature, this book explores one key racial issue that has been overlooked both in race studies and literary scholarship-internalised racism.

Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction is not a historical study or a survey of narrative plots, but takes a more conceptual approach that engages with the central ideas of posthumanism: the fragmented nature of posthuman identity, the concept of agency as distributed and collective and the role of embodiment in understandings of selfhood.

Examining culturally significant works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to this end.

This book explores the phenomenon of the story paper, the meanings and values children took from their reading, and the responses of adults to their reading choices. It argues for the revaluing of the story paper in the inter-war years, giving the genre a pivotal role in the development of children's literature.

Many children learn from a young age to tell the truth. They also learn that some lies are necessary in order to survive in a world that paradoxically values truth-telling, but practises deception. This book examines this paradox by considering how deception is often a necessary means of survival for individuals, families, governments, and animals.

This pioneering study is the first full-length treatment of feminism and the environment in children's literature. Drawing on the history, philosophy and ethics of ecofeminism, it examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic landscapes in young adult fiction reflect contemporary attitudes towards environmental crisis and human responsibility.

Offers new insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on a wide range of international picture books for children published between 1963 and 2008. Its chapters include metafiction; disruption to narrative conventions; interrogation of 'truths'; historiographic metafiction; difference and ex-centricity; globalisation and media.

After the first phase of industrialization in Britain, the child emerged as both a victim of and a threat to capitalism. This book explores the changing relationship between the child and capitalist society in the works of some of the most important writers of children's and young-adult texts in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

This study of the afterlife of Robinson Crusoe offers insights into the continued popularity and relevance of Crusoe's story and how modern conceptions of childhood are shaped by nostalgia and ideas of 'the popular'. Examining many adaptations in a variety of formats, it reconsiders the place Crusoe has occupied in our culture for three centuries.

Stories are told today through many formats and young interpreters bring multimedia experience to bear on every narrative format they encounter. In this book, twelve young people read a novel, watch a film and play a video game from beginning to end. Their responses inform a new framework of contemporary themes of narrative comprehension.

This book demonstrates how contemporary children's texts draw on utopian and dystopian tropes in their projections of possible futures. The authors explore the ways in which children's texts respond to social change and global politics. The book argues that children's texts are crucially implicated in shaping the values of their readers.

This volume presents key contributions to the study of ecocriticism in Nordic children's and YA literary and cultural texts, in dialogue with international classics.

This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency.

This book provides scholars, both national and international, with a basis for advanced research in children's literature in collections.

This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents.

This book highlights the multi-dimensionality of the work of British fantasy writer and Discworld creator Terry Pratchett. Taking into account content, political commentary, and literary technique, it explores the impact of Pratchett's work on fantasy writing and genre conventions.With chapters on gender, multiculturalism, secularism, education, and relativism, Section One focuses on different characters' situatedness within Pratchett's novels and what this may tell us about the direction of his social, religious and political criticism. Section Two discusses the aesthetic form that this criticism takes, and analyses the post- and meta-modern aspects of Pratchett's writing, his use of humour, and genre adaptations and deconstructions. This is the ideal collection for any literary and cultural studies scholar, researcher or student interested in fantasy and popular culture in general, and in Terry Pratchett in particular.

This volume presents key contributions to the study of ecocriticism in Nordic children's and YA literary and cultural texts, in dialogue with international classics.