Edited by Morag Styles and written by an interational team of acknowledged experts, this series provides jargon-free, critical discussion and a comprehensive guide to literary and popular texts for children. Each book introduces the reader to a major genre of children's literature, covering key authors, major works and contexts in which those texts are published. Margaret Meek and Victor Watson provide a profound and revealing examiniation of the treatment of personal development, maturation and rites of passage in literature written for children and adolescents. Including a broad survey of the theme across a number of genres and an in-depth analysis of the work of key writers, the authors work towards an answer to the question "What is a classic?" Margaret Meek is Reader Emeritus at the Institute of Education in London. Victor Watson is Assistant Director of Research at Homerton College, Cambridge.

While most scholars who study children's books are pre-occupied with the child characters and adult mediators, Vanessa Joosen re-positions the lens to focus on the under-explored construction of adulthood in children's literature. Adulthood in Children's Literature demonstrates how books for young readers evoke adulthood as a stage in life, enacted by adult characters, and in relationship with the construction of childhood. Employing age studies as a framework for analysis, this book covers a range of English and Dutch children's books published from 1970 to the present. Calling upon critical voices like Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Peter Hollindale, Maria Nikolajeva and Lorraine Green, and the works of such authors as Babette Cole, Philip Pullman, Ted van Lieshout, Jacqueline Wilson, Salman Rushdie and Guus Kuijer, Joosen offers a fresh perspective on children's literature by focusing not on the child but the adult.

The definitive book-length study of the great classics of American children’s literature, now updated for a new century. Outstanding Book of the Year Award, Children’s Literature Association Often called the Golden Age of Children’s Books, the years stretching from the Civil War to World War I were a remarkable epoch in juvenile literature, an era when the best authors on both sides of the Atlantic wrote some of their finest work primarily for children. In Audacious Kids, Jerry Griswold provides a groundbreaking and lucid study of twelve of these classic American children’s tales, including such time-honored stories as Little Women, Tom Sawyer, The Secret Garden, and The Wizard of Oz. Griswold’s most remarkable insight is that, fundamentally, these twelve books all tell essentially the same story: a child is orphaned, makes a journey, is adopted and harassed by adults, and eventually triumphs over them and comes into his or her own. Griswold, a leading figure in the study of children’s literature, also reveals that these tales emphasize motifs that are distinctly American, such as positive thinking, concern with health, and the concealment of sex and violence, and he shows how these secular parables replaced religion with psychology and preached gospels of emotional self-control and optimism. In this revised edition, which is aimed at students, scholars, and general readers, Griswold has updated the text throughout and added a new preface, introduction, and select bibliography.

Originally published in 1996. A detailed analysis of the art of children's literature covering world literature for children, children's literature as a canonical art form, the history of children's literature from a semiotic perspective, and epic, polyphony, chronotope, intertextuality, and metafiction in children's literature.

Provides articles covering children's literature from around the world as well as biographical and critical reviews of authors including Avi, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Anno Mitsumasa.