Consumable Reading and Children's Literature explores how multisensory experiences enhance early childhood literacy practices through material and sensory interactions. Embodied engagements that focus on the gustatory experience and, in particular, the sense of taste are investigated by studying food-related narratives. Children’s literature and different reading scenarios involving consumable objects, packages, tableware and utensils are scrutinized. Surfaces, the underlying mechanisms that support children’s literature, are considered in connection to emerging media and groundbreaking technologies. The interdisciplinary nature of this work draws on material and surface science, human-computer interaction, arts and food studies. As innovation and everyday materials meet, the potential of hybrid narratives mimicking synesthesia emerges with discussions on cross-modal learning. This monograph will inspire the interest of not only students, teachers, scholars of children’s literature and child development but also researchers and practitioners across various artistic and scientific disciplines.

Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde is the first study that investigates the intricate influence of the avant-garde movements on children’s literature in different countries from the beginning of the 20th century until the present. Examining a wide range of children’s books from Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the USA, the individual chapters explore the historical as well as the cultural and political aspects that determine the exceptional character of avant-garde children’s books. Drawing on studies in children’s literature research, art history, and cultural studies, this volume provides comprehensive insights into the close relationships between avant-garde children’s literature, images of childhood, and contemporary ideas of education. Addressing topics such as the impact of exhibitions, the significance of the Bauhaus, and the influence of poster art and graphic design, the book illustrates the broad range of issues associated with avant-garde children’s books. More than 60 full-color illustrations demonstrate the impressive variety of design in avant-garde picturebooks and children’s books.

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.

Food is a signifier of power for both adults and children, a sign of both inclusion and exclusion and of conformity and resistance. Many academic disciplines—from sociology to literary studies—have studied food and its function as a complex social discourse, and the wide variety of approaches to the topic provides multidisciplinary frames for understanding the construction and uses of food in all types of media, including children’s literature. Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature is a survey of food’s function in children’s texts, showing how the sociocultural contexts of food reveal children’s agency. Authors Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard examine texts that vary from historical to contemporary, noncanonical to classics, and Anglo-American to multicultural traditions, including a variety of genres, formats, and audiences: realism, fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, YA novels, and film. Table Lands offers a unified approach to studying food in a wide variety of texts for children. Spanning nearly 150 years of children’s literature, Keeling and Pollard’s analysis covers a selection of texts that show the omnipresence of food in children’s literature and culture and how they vary in representations of race, region, and class, due to the impact of these issues on food. Furthermore, they include not only classic children’s books, such as Winnie-the-Pooh, but recent award-winning multicultural novels as well as cookbooks and even one film, Pixar’s Ratatouille.

Children’s Cultures after Childhood introduces theoretical concepts from new materialist and posthumanist childhood studies into research on children’s literature, film, and media texts with attention to the entanglements of which they are part. Thirteen chapters by international contributors from diverse disciplinary fields (literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, and childhood studies) offer a cross-section of empirical and theoretical approaches sharing an inspiration in the notion of “after childhoods”, proposed by Peter Kraftl, a children’s geographer, to conceptualize theoretical and methodological orientations in research on children’s lives and on past, present, and future childhoods. This interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to scholars working in children’s literature and culture studies, education, and childhood studies.

Some have enormous teeth, others the deadly skill to catch their prey without making a sound! National Geographic Kidsbrings readers some of their favorite deadly and carnivorous animals in one convenient package with National Geographic Readers: Predators Collection. Howling wolves, chomping sharks, sneaky spiders, and toothy tigers all have the need to feed, and have developed amazing ways to catch their prey. Fascinating animal information is accompanied by wonderful photographs to ensure that kids' natural curiosity is both satisfied AND inspired.

Annual of The Modern Language Association Division on Children’s Literature and The Children’s Literature Association ARTICLES: Perry Nodelman Speculations on the Characteristics of Children’s Fiction; Roderick McGillis The Pleasure of the Process; Thomas Travisano Of Dialectic and Divided Consciousness; Margaret R. Higonnet A Pride of Pleasures; Perry Nodelman The Urge to Sameness; Kenneth Kidd Boyology in the Twentieth Century; Marilynn Olson Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque; Peter Hollindale Plain Speaking; Hamida Bosmajian Doris Orgel’s The Devil in Vienna; Joseph Stanton Maurice Sendak’s Urban Landscapes. VARIA: Andrea Immel James Pettit Andrews’s "Books" (1790); Penny Mahon "Things by Their Right Name"; Phyllis Bixler The Lion and the Lamb. IN MEMORIAM: R. H. W. Dillard In Memoriam: Francelia Butler, 1913–1998; John Cech In Mansfield Hollow: For Francelia; Eric Dawson Francelia’s Dream. REVIEWS: Anita Tarr "Still so much work to be done"; Gillian Adams A Fuzzy Genre; Kenneth Kidd Crosswriting the School Story; Raymond E. Jones A New Salvo in the Literary Battle of the Sexes; Stephen Canham From Wonderland to the Marketplace; Jan Susina Dealing with Victorian Fairies; Gregory Eiselein Reading a Feminist Romance; Anne K. Phillips The Wizard of Oz in the Twentieth Century; June Cummins "Where the Girls Are"—and Aren’t; Deborah Stevenson Letters from the Editor; Hamida Bosmajian Dangerous Images; Roberta Seelinger Trites The Transactional School of Children’s Literature Criticism. DISSERTATIONS OF NOTE: Mary Mayfield and Rachel Fordyce