These books are the first full-length, comprehensive study written in English of French children’s literature. They provide both an overview of developments from the seventeenth century to the present day and detailed discussion of texts that are representative, innovative, or influential best-sellers in their own time and beyond. French children’s literature is little known in the English-speaking world and, apart from a small number of writers and texts, has been relatively neglected in scholarly studies, despite the prominence of the study of children’s literature as a discipline. This project is groundbreaking in its coverage of a wide range of genres, tracing the evolution of children’s books in France from early courtesy books, fables and fairy tales, to eighteenth-century moral tales and educational drama, nineteenth-century novels of domestic realism and adventure stories and contemporary detective fiction and fantasy novels. The discussion traces the relationship between children’s literature and social change, revealing the extent to which children’s books were informed by pedagogical, moral, religious and political agenda and explores the implications of the dual imperatives of instruction and amusement which have underpinned writing for young readers throughout the centuries.

Children's literature comes from a number of different sources-folklore (folk- and fairy tales), books originally for adults and subsequently adapted for children, and material authored specifically for them-and its audience ranges from infants through middle graders to young adults (readers from about 12 to 18 years old). Its forms include picturebooks, pop-up books, anthologies, novels, merchandising tie-ins, novelizations, and multimedia texts, and its genres include adventure stories, drama, science fiction, poetry, and information books. The Historical Dictionary of Children's Literature relates the history of children's literature through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, a bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, books, and genres. Some of the most legendary names in all of literature are covered in this important reference, including Hans Christian Anderson, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, Beatrix Potter, J.K. Rowling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, and E.B. White.

Time is one of the most prominent themes in the relatively young genre of children's literature, for the young, like adults, want to know about the past. This book explores how children's writers have treated the theme and concept of time. The volume starts with the application of literary theory and additionally analyzes examples of the juvenile historical novel. In doing so, it also examines changing fashions in criticism and publishing and the pressure they exert on writers. It then considers literary adaptations of myths and archetypes, constructions of history in children's literature, colonial and postcolonial children's fiction, and the treatment of the past in the postmodern era. The book looks at literature from around the world, and the expert contributors are from diverse countries and backgrounds. While the book looks primarily at literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, it considers a broad range of historical material treated in works from that period. Included are discussions of such topics as Joan of Arc in children's literature, the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, colonial and postcolonial children's literature, the Holocaust, and the supernatural. International in scope, the volume examines history and collective memory in Portuguese children's fiction, Australian history in picture books, Norwegian children's literature, and literary treatments of the great Irish famine.

'This book presents a rigorous, hugely informative analysis of the early history of Dutch children’s literature, pedagogical developments and emerging family formations. Thoroughly researched, Dietz’s study will be essential for historians of eighteenth-century childhood, education and children’s books, both in the Dutch context and more widely.’ — Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University, UK. ‘A rich, informative, well-documented and effectively illustrated discussion of the ways Dutch eighteenth-century educators tried to transform youth into responsible readers. It does so in a wide international context and masterfully connects this process to the radical politicization and de-politicization of Dutch society in the revolutionary period.’ —Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, formerly of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and the University of California at Los Angeles, USA. This book explores how children’s literature and literacy could at once regulate and empower young people in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Rather than presenting the history of childhood as a linear story of increasing agency, it suggests that we view it as a continuous struggle with the impossibility of full agency for young people. This volume demonstrates how this struggle informed the production of books in a historical context in which the development of independent youths was high on the political agenda. In close interaction with international children’s literature markets, Dutch authors developed new strategies to make the members of young generations into capable readers and writers, equipped to organize their own minds and bodies properly, and to support a supposedly declining fatherland.

Since its inception in the 1970s, the Philosophy for Children movement (P4C) has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children’s classics, especially Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature in significant ways. Offering a novel take on this phenomenon, Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. Examining everything from the rise of French Theory in the United States to the crucial pedagogies offered in children’s picture books, from Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to studies of queer childhood, Kenneth B. Kidd deftly reveals the way in which children may learn from philosophy and vice versa.

This book offers a historical analysis of key classical translated works for children, such as writings by Hans Christian Andersen and Grimms’ tales. Translations dominate the earliest history of texts written for children in English, and stories translated from other languages have continued to shape its course to the present day. Lathey traces the role of the translator and the impact of translations on the history of English-language children’s literature from the ninth century onwards. Discussions of popular texts in each era reveal fluctuations in the reception of translated children’s texts, as well as instances of cultural mediation by translators and editors. Abridgement, adaptation, and alteration by translators have often been viewed in a negative light, yet a closer examination of historical translators’ prefaces reveals a far more varied picture than that of faceless conduits or wilful censors. From William Caxton’s dedication of his translated History of Jason to young Prince Edward in 1477 (‘to thentent/he may begynne to lerne read Englissh’), to Edgar Taylor’s justification of the first translation into English of Grimms’ tales as a means of promoting children’s imaginations in an age of reason, translators have recorded in prefaces and other writings their didactic, religious, aesthetic, financial, and even political purposes for translating children’s texts.