Four British Fantasists explores the work of four of the most successful and influential of the generation of fantasy writes who rose to prominence in the "second Golden Age" of children's literature in Britain: Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Penelope Lively.

Explores the work of four of the successful of the generation of fantasy writers who rose to prominence in the second Golden Age of children's literature in Britain.

Susan and her brother Colin are catapulted into a battle between good and evil for possession of a magical stone of great power that is contained in her bracelet. Reissue.

A comprehensive study of children's fantasy literature across the English-speaking world, from the sixteenth century to the present.

Applying a range of critical approaches to works by authors including Susan Cooper, Catherine Fisher, Geraldine McCaughrean, Anthony Horowitz and Philip Pullman, this book looks at the formative and interrogative relationship between recent children's literature and fashionable but controversial aspects of modern Paganism.

Using an innovative auto-ethnographic approach to investigate the otherness of the places that make up the childhood home and its neighbourhood in relation to memory-derived and memory-imbued cultural geographies, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home is concerned with childhood spaces and children's perspectives of those spaces and, consequentially, with the personalised locations that make up the childhood family home and its immediate surroundings (such as the garden, the street, etc.). Whilst this book is primarily structured by the author's memories of living in his own Welsh childhood home during the 1970s - that is, the auto-ethnographic framework - it is as much about living anywhere amid the remembered cultural remnants of the past as it is immersing oneself in cultural geographies of the here-and-now. As a result, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home is part of the ongoing pursuit by cultural geographers to provide a personal exploration of the pluralities of shared landscapes, whereby such an engagement with space and place aid our construction of cognitive maps of meaning that, in turn, manifest themselves as both individual and collective cultural experiences. Furthermore, touching upon our co-habiting of ghost topologies, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home also encourages a critical exploration of children’s spirituality amid the haunted cultural and geographical spaces and places of a house and its neighbourhood: the cellar, hallway, parlour, stairs, bedroom, attic, shops, cemeteries, and so on.

Children’s literature today is dominated by the gothic mode, and it is in children’s gothic fictions that we find the implications of cultural change most radically questioned and explored. This collection of essays looks at what is happening in the children’s Gothic now when traditional monsters have become the heroes, when new monsters have come into play, when globalisation brings Harry Potter into China and yaoguai into the children’s Gothic, and when childhood itself and children’s literature as a genre can no longer be thought of as an uncontested space apart from the debates and power struggles of an adult domain. We look in detail at series such as The Mortal Instruments, Twilight, Chaos Walking, The Power of Five, Skulduggery Pleasant, and Cirque du Freak; at novels about witches and novels about changelings; at the Gothic in China, Japan and Oceania; and at authors including Celia Rees, Frances Hardinge, Alan Garner and Laini Taylor amongst many others. At a time when the energies and anxieties of children’s novels can barely be contained anymore within the genre of children’s literature, spilling over into YA and adult literature, we need to pay attention. Weird things are happening and they matter.