Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Children's & Young Adult Literature

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...

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Enterprising Youth examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children's perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The essays in this book reveal the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order, or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The question, then, is whether the business of telling children's stories becomes an adult enterprise of conservative indoctrination, or...

This two-volume critical history of French children's literature from 1600 to the present helps bring awareness of the range, quality and importance of French children's literature to a wider audience. The works of a number of French writers, notably La Fontaine, Charles Perrault, Jules Verne and Saint-Exupery were, and continue to be, widely translated and adapted, and have influenced the development of the genre in other countries.

Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture proposes new theoretical frameworks for understanding the contradictory ways masculinity is represented in popular texts consumed by boys in the United States. The popular texts boys like are often ignored by educators and scholars, or are simply dismissed as garbage that boys should be discouraged from enjoying. However, examining and making visible the ways masculinity functions in these texts is vital to understanding the broad array of works that make up children's culture and form dominant versions of masculinity. Such popular...

This is the first full-length study of South African English youth literature to cover the entire period of its publication, from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Jenkins' book focuses on what made the subsequent literature essentially South African and what aspects of the country and its society authors concentrated on. What gives this book particular strength is its coverage of literature up to the 1960s, which has until now received almost no scholarly attention. Not only is this earlier literature a rewarding subject for study in itself, but it also throws...

The Outside Child, In and Out of the Book is situated at the intersection between children's literature studies and childhood studies. In this provocative book, Christine Wilkie-Stibbs juxtaposes the narratives of literary and actual children/young adults to explore how Western culture has imagined, defined, and dealt with their outsider status - whether orphaned, homeless, refugee, victims of abuse, or exploited - and how processes of economic, social, or political impoverishment are sustained and naturalized in regimes of power, authority, and domination.

In five...

Soviet literature in general and Soviet children's literature in particular have often been labeled by Western and post-Soviet Russian scholars and critics as propaganda. Below the surface, however, Soviet children's literature and culture allowed its creators greater experimental and creative freedom than did the socialist realist culture for adults. This volume explores the importance of children's culture, from literature to comics to theater to film, in the formation of Soviet social identity and in connection with broader Russian culture, history, and society.

Into the Closet examines the representation of cross-dressing in a wide variety of childrens fiction, ranging from picture books and junior fiction to teen films and novels for young adults. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the different types of cross-dressing found in childrens narratives, raising a number of significant issues relating to the ideological construction of masculinity and femininity in books for younger readers.

Many literary and cultural critics have studies the cultural significance of adult...