This book builds upon and contributes to the growing academic interest in feminism within the field of children's literature studies. Christie Wilkie-Stibbs draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan in her analysis of particular children's literature texts to demonstrate how a feminist analysis opens up textual possibilities that may be applied to works of children's fiction in general, extending the range of textual engagements in children's literature through the application of a new poststructural critical apparati.

Recycling Red Riding Hoodexamines contemporary retellings of the world's best-known fairy tale in a large corpus of international children's texts, many of which have never been translated into English. The book addresses a new area in children's literary theory and criticism: intertextuality and the retold story. It examines narrative techniques, such as hybrid genres and metaliterary play, that have rarely been applied to children's literature.

While white racism has global dimensions, it has an unshakeable lease on life in South African political organizations and its educational system. Donnarae MacCann and Yulisa Maddy here provide an analysis of South African children's literature during the key decade around Nelson Mandela's release from prison. Their research demonstrates that the literature of this period was derived from the same milieu - intellectual, educational, religious, political, and economic - that brought white supremacy to South Africa during colonial times. This volume contributes to the study of children's...

This work examines how the Holocaust is represented in fiction for children and young adults. Kokkola takes on the perspective of the contemporary child, who lacks personal knowledge of the Holocaust, and explores how the unspeakable can be represented for young readers. She also questions why children want to read Holocaust Fiction and how they negotiate the boundary between fact and fiction.

This is a collection of original essays about how Shakespeare and how his plays are increasingly being used as a means of furthering literacy, language arts, creative and dramatic learning for children in and out of the classroom. It is divided into three sections comprising essays by well-known children's book authors, literary scholars, and teachers, respectively, who approach the subject from a wide range of perspectives.

The Making of the Modern Child explores how the concept of childhood in the Victorian era was constructed through the ideological work performed by children's literature, as well as pedagogical writing and medical literature of the era. The author ties the evolution of the idea of the child to the growth of the middle class, which used the figure of the child as a symbol in its various calls for social reform.

From creepy picture books to Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and countless vampire series for young adult readers, fear has become a dominant mode of entertainment for young readers. The last two decades have seen an enormous growth in the critical study of two very different genres, the Gothic and children's literature.

The Gothic, concerned with the perverse and the forbidden, with adult sexuality and religious or metaphysical doubts and heresies, seems to represent everything that children's literature, as a genre, was designed to keep...

In this controversial study of postwar German's children's books, Zohar Shavit reveals a troubling perspective on the German understanding of the Holocaust.

British author Diana Wynne Jones has been writing speculative fiction for children for more than thirty years. A clear influence on more recent writers such as J. K. Rowling, her humorous and exciting stories of wizard's academies, dragons, and griffins-many published for children but read by all ages-are also complexly structured and thought provoking critiques of the fantasy tradition. This is the first serious study of Jones's work, written by a renowned science fiction critic and historian. In addition to providing an overview of Jones's work, Farah Mendlesohn also examines Jones's...

"It is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives"--Graham Greene
"The luminous books of our childhood will remain the luminous books of our lives."--Joyce Carol Oates
Writers, as they often attest, are deeply influenced by their childhood reading. Salman Rushdie, for example, has said that The Wizard of Oz "made a writer of me." Twice-Told Tales is a collection of essays on the way the works of adult writers have been influenced by their childhood reading. This fascinating volume includes theoretical essays on Salman Rushdie and the Oz books, "Beauty and the...