While much has been written about Irish culture’s apparent obsession with the past and with representing childhood, few critics have explored in detail the position of children’s fiction within such discourses. This book serves to redress these imbalances, illuminating both the manner in which children’s texts engage with complex cultural discourses in contemporary Ireland and the significant contribution that children’s novels and films can make to broader debates concerning Irish identity at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Through close analysis of specific books and films published or produced since 1990, Irish Childhoods offers an insight into contrasting approaches to the representation of Irish history and childhood in recent children’s fiction. Each chapter interrogates the unique manner in which an author or filmmaker engages with twentieth century Irish history from a contemporary perspective, and reveals that constructions of childhood in Irish children’s fiction are often used to explore aspects of Ireland’s past and present.

"This collection examines how attitudes to children have changed in Ireland over the centuries, and addresses how concepts of childhood in Ireland changed over time."--Goodreads.com.

A comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland, which explores how the notion of childhood fluctuated depending on class, gender, and religious identity, and presents invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.

This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of six ‘versions’ of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children’s bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.

Focusing on the mythological narratives that influence Irish children's literature, this book examines the connections between landscape, time and identity, positing that myth and the language of myth offer authors and readers the opportunity to engage with Ireland's culture and heritage. It explores the recurring patterns of Irish mythological narratives that influence literature produced for children in Ireland between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. A selection of children's books published between 1892, when there was an escalation of the cultural pursuit of Irish independence and 2016, which marked the centenary of the Easter 1916 rebellion against English rule, are discussed with the aim of demonstrating the development of a pattern of retrieving, re-telling, remembering and re-imagining myths in Irish children's literature. In doing so, it examines the reciprocity that exists between imagination, memory, and childhood experiences in this body of work.

Irish Children’s Literature and Culture looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with major genres, forms, and issues, including the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, ethnicity, and globalization. It contextualizes modern Irish children’s literature in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, as well as in relation to Irish writing for adults, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area. What constitutes a "national literature" is rarely straightforward, and it is especially complex when discussing writing for young people in an Irish context. Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as "Irish children’s literature" in comparison with Ireland’s contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. The contributors to the volume examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and children’s literature internationally, raising provocative questions about the future of the topic. Irish Children’s Literature and Culture is essential reading for those interested in Irish literature, culture, sociology, childhood, and children’s literature. Valerie Coghlan, Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin, is a librarian and lecturer. She is a former co-editor of Bookbird: An International Journal of Children's Literature. She has published widely on Irish children's literature and co-edited several books on the topic. She is a former board member of the IRSCL, and a founder member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature, Children's Books Ireland, and IBBY Ireland. Keith O’Sullivan lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin. He is a founder member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature, a former member of the board of directors of Children’s Books Ireland, and past chair of the Children’s Books Ireland/Bisto Book of the Year Awards. He has published on the works of Philip Pullman and Emily Brontë.

In the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children’s fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and of unprecedented growth in Irish children’s literature. Close readings of selected texts by five award-winning authors are linked to social, intellectual and political changes in the period covered and draw on postcolonial, feminist, cultural and children’s literature theory, highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of home and the value of children’s literature as a lens through which to view culture and society as well as an imaginative space where young people can engage with complex ideas relevant to their lives and the world in which they live. Examining the works of O. R. Melling, Kate Thompson, Eoin Colfer, Siobhán Parkinson and Siobhan Dowd, Ciara Ní Bhroin argues that Irish children’s literature changed at this time from being a vehicle that largely promoted hegemonic ideologies of home in post-independence Ireland to a site of resistance to complacent notions of home in Celtic Tiger Ireland.