What do Paddington Bear, Rupert Bear, and Winnie the Pooh have in common, besides their ursine roots? They lived in real places, as well as in the imaginations of countless generations. Those places still exist. And inveterate globetrotter Mark West has been to them all. Children's Literature Tour of Great Britain provides detailed information on 49 important sites with a strong connection to children's literature. Each chapter begins with background information about the author (or, in the cases of King Arthur and Robin Hood, the character), in particular his or her writings for children. West offers tantalizing tidbits about birthplaces, memorials, landscapes, and gift shops, and concludes with complete visitor information for would-be literary pilgrims. Photographs, most of which were taken by West, should satisfy even the most demanding armchair traveler. Many of the sites on West's Tour are geared to children. Some are clearly intended for adults. All will add depth and delight to your next excursion into the fantastic (and fascinating) world of British children's literature.

Perceptions of the Great War have changed significantly since its outbreak and children's authors have continually attempted to engage with those changes, explaining and interpreting the events of 1914-18 for young readers. British Children's Literature and the First World War examines the role novels, textbooks and story papers have played in shaping and reflecting understandings of the conflict throughout the 20th century. David Budgen focuses on representations of the conflict since its onset in 1914, ending with the centenary commemorations of 2014. From the works of Percy F. Westerman and Angela Brazil, to more recent tales by Michael Morpurgo and Pat Mills, Budgen traces developments of understanding and raises important questions about the presentation of history to the young. He considers such issues as the motivations of children's authors, and whether modern children's books about the past are necessarily more accurate than those written by their forebears. Why, for example, do modern writers tend to ignore the global aspects of the First World War? Did detailed narratives of battles written during the war really convey the truth of the conflict? Most importantly, he considers whether works aimed at children can ever achieve anything more than a partial and skewed response to such complex and tumultuous events.

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turn of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children's literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities. Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.

Children's classics from Alice in Wonderland to the works of Astrid Lindgren, Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are now generally recognized as literary achievements that from a translator's point of view are no less demanding than 'serious' (adult) literature. This volume attempts to explore the various challenges posed by the translation of children's literature and at the same time highlight some of the strategies that translators can and do follow when facing these challenges. A variety of translation theories and concepts are put to critical use, including Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, Toury's concept of norms, Venuti's views on foreignizing and domesticating translations and on the translator's (in)visibility, and Chesterman's prototypical approach. Topics include the ethics of translating for children, the importance of child(hood) images, the 'revelation' of the translator in prefaces, the role of translated children's books in the establishment of literary canons, the status of translations in the former East Germany; questions of taboo and censorship in the translation of adolescent novels, the collision of norms in different translations of a Swedish children's classic, the handling of 'cultural intertextuality' in the Spanish translations of contemporary British fantasy books, strategies for translating cultural markers such as juvenile expressions, functional shifts caused by different translation strategies dealing with character names, and complex translation strategies used in dealing with the dual audience in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

This book considers how contemporary British children’s books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public. A central assumption of this volume is that Britain’s imperial past continues to play a key role in its representations of race, identity, and history. The insistent inclusion of questions relating to colonialism and power structures in recent children’s novels exposes the complexities and contradictions surrounding the fictional treatment of race relations and ethnicity. Postcolonial children’s literature in Britain has been inherently ambivalent since its cautious beginnings: it is both transgressive and authorizing, both undercutting and excluding. Grzegorczyk considers the ways in which children’s fictions have worked with and against particular ideologies of race. The texts analyzed in this collection portray ethnic minorities as complex, hybrid products of colonialism, global migrations, and the ideology of multiculturalism. By examining the ideological content of these novels, Grzegorczyk demonstrates the centrality of the colonial past to contemporary British writing for the young.

Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children's books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurants in Tokyo, the Japanese have a close and multifaceted relationship with British children's literature. In this, the first comprehensive study to explore this engagement, Catherine Butler considers its many manifestations in print, on the screen, in tourist locations and throughout Japanese popular culture. Taking stock of the influence of literary works such as Gulliver's Travels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Tom's Midnight Garden, and the Harry Potter series, this lively account draws on literary criticism, translation, film and tourist studies to explore how British children's books have been selected, translated, understood, adapted and reworked into Japanese commercial, touristic and imaginative culture. Using theoretically informed case studies this book will consider both individual texts and their wider cultural contexts, translations and adaptations (such as the numerous adaptations of British children's books by Studio Ghibli and others), the dissemination of distinctive tropes such as magical schools into Japanese children's literature and popular culture, and the ways in which British children's books and their settings have become part of way that Japanese people understand Britain itself.