I am living proof that no one can predict or determine their future. When a devastating illness strikes your family, in some cases, no matter what steps you take or how you plan you will have no control over the outcome. One day, out of the blue, my father was diagnosed with cancer and then just a few months later, my husband was diagnosed with cancer as well. Watching a father and a husband battle a fatal disease together was more than a family should ever have to endure. Despite all the doctor consultations and treatment plans, nothing would suppress this insidious disease. Although they...

Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyses the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasising what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of so-called 'Golden Age' novels for children which continue to shape our understanding of what children's literature entails, including The Railway Children, The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, and mid-20th-century series...

Taking Isaac Watts's Divine Songs (1715) as its point of departure, this collection gives sustained attention to the literary, aesthetic, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of seminal works of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While attending to central figures of children's poetry such as Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reassert the literary significance of landmark - though often marginalized - poetic works written during the past three centuries. In spite of the enduring...