ABSTRACT
Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations.
Offering five distinct sections, this volume:
- Familiarizes students and beginning scholars with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature
- Describes the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children
- Considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content
- Maps how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice
- Explores the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature
Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|86 pages
Concepts and Tools
chapter 5|11 pages
The Monster at the End of This Book
Posthumanism and New Materialism in the Scholarship of Children's Literature
chapter 7|13 pages
Research with Young Readers
Participatory Approaches in Children's Literature Studies
part II|85 pages
Media and Genres
part III|98 pages
Identities
chapter 23|12 pages
Whatever Common People Do
Social Class in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Children's Fiction
part IV|101 pages
Border Crossings
part V|113 pages
Institutions