Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature brings a fresh perspective to a central literary question— Who speaks?— by examining a variety of represented silences. These include children who do not speak, do not yet speak effectively, or speak on behalf of others. A rich and unexamined literary archive explores the problematics of children who are literally silent or metaphorically so because they cannot communicate effectively with adults or peers. This project centers children’s literature in the question of voice by considering disability, gender, race, and ecocriticism. Children’s literature rests on a paradox at the root of its own genre: it is produced by an adult author writing to a constructed idea of what children should be. By reading a range of contemporary children’s literature, this book scrutinizes how such texts narrate the child’s journey from communicative alterity to a place of empowered adult speech. Sometimes the child’s verbal enclosure enables privacy and resistance. At other times, silence is coerced or imposed or arises from bodily impairment. Children may act as intermediaries, speaking on behalf of species that cannot. Recently, we have seen children exercise their voices on the world stage and as authors. In all cases, the texts analyzed here reveal speech as a minefield to be traversed. Children who talk too much, too little, or with insufficient expertise pose problems to themselves and others. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, they attempt to hold adults to account— inside and outside the text. Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature addresses this underconceptualized subject in what will be an important text for scholars of children’s literature, childhood studies, English, disability studies, gender studies, race studies, ecopedagogy, and education.

Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children's Literature brings a fresh perspective to a central literary question-- Who speaks?-- by examining a variety of represented silences. These include children who do not speak, do not yet speak effectively, or speak on behalf of others. A rich and unexamined literary archive explores the problematics of children who are literally silent or metaphorically so because they cannot communicate effectively with adults or peers. This project centers children's literature in the question of voice by considering disability, gender, race, and ecocriticism. Children's literature rests on a paradox at the root of its own genre: it is produced by an adult author writing to a constructed idea of what children should be. By reading a range of contemporary children's literature, this book scrutinizes how such texts narrate the child's journey from communicative alterity to a place of empowered adult speech. Sometimes the child's verbal enclosure enables privacy and resistance. At other times, silence is coerced or imposed or arises from bodily impairment. Children may act as intermediaries, speaking on behalf of species that cannot. Recently, we have seen children exercise their voices on the world stage and as authors. In all cases, the texts analyzed here reveal speech as a minefield to be traversed. Children who talk too much, too little, or with insufficient expertise pose problems to themselves and others. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, they attempt to hold adults to account-- inside and outside the text. Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children's Literature addresses this underconceptualized subject in what will be an important text for scholars of children's literature, childhood studies, English, disability studies, gender studies, race studies, ecopedagogy, and education.

Internationell antologi om tystnad och att bli tystad i barn- och ungdomslitteratur.

Children’s Literature in Place: Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture is an edited collection dedicated to individual, international, and interdisciplinary considerations of the places and spaces of children’s literature, media, and culture, from content to methodology, in fictional, virtual, and material settings. This volume proposes a survey of the changing landscapes of children’s culture, the expected and unexpected spaces and places that emerge as and because of children’s culture. The places and spaces of children’s literature are varied and diverse. By making place studies a guiding principle, this book builds on the impressive body of international research on place in children’s literature, media, and culture to bring together and provide a comprehensive overview of how to study place in children’s and young adult literature. This volume provides a wide range of approaches and international perspectives of place in children’s literature, media, and culture and contributes to this growing and relevant field by showcasing various scholarly aspects and approaches to children’s literature, and the place of children’s literature in the context of international scholarship.

Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and American adventure texts for children over the past 150 years reveals a host of complexities occluded by the term, and the ways in which adults invoke adventure as a means of attempting to get to grips with the nebulous figure of ‘the child’. Writing about adventure also necessitates writing about risk, and this book argues that adults have historically used adventure to conceptualise the relationship between children and risk: the risks children themselves pose to society; the risks that threaten their development; and how they can be trained to manage risk in socially normative and desirable ways. Tracing this tendency back to its development and consolidation in Victorian imperial romance, and forward through various adventure texts and media to the present day, this book probes and investigates the truisms and assumptions that underlie our generalisations about children’s love for adventure, and how they have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.

Family in Children's and Young Adult Literature is a comprehensive study of the family in Anglophone children’s and Young Adult literature from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Written by intellectual leaders in the field from the UK, the Americas, Europe, and Australia, this collection of essays explores the significance of the family and of familial and quasi-familial relationships in texts by a wide range of authors, including the Grimms, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Rudyard Kipling, Enid Blyton, Judy Blume, Jaqueline Wilson, Malorie Blackman, Melvin Burgess, J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, and others. Author-based and critical survey essays explore evolving depictions of LGBTQIA+ and BAME families; migrant and refugee narratives; the popular tropes of the orphan protagonist and the wicked stepmother; sibling and intergenerational familial relationships; fathers and fatherhood; the anthropomorphic animal and surrogate family; and the fractured family in paranormal and dystopian YA literature. The breadth of essays in Family in Children's and Young Adult Literature encourages readers to think beyond the outdated but culturally privileged ‘nuclear family’ and is a vital resource for students, academics, educators, and practitioners.

Even though we instruct our children not to lie, the truth is that lying is a fundamental part of children’s development—socially, cognitively, emotionally, morally. Lying can sometimes be more compassionate than telling the truth, even more ethical. Reading specific children’s books can instruct child readers how to be guided by an etiquette of lying, to know when to tell the truth and when to lie. Equally important, these stories can help prevent them from being prey to those liars who are intent on taking advantage of them. Becoming a critical reader requires that one learn how to lie judiciously as well as to see through others’ lies. When humans first began to speak, we began to lie. When we began to lie, we started telling stories. This is the paradox, that in order to tell truthful stories, we must be good liars. Novels about child-artists showcased here illustrate how the protagonist embraces this paradox, accepting the stigma that a writer is a liar who tells the truth. Emily Dickinson’s phrase “telling it slant” best expresses the vision of how writers for children and young adults negotiate the conundrum of both protecting child readers and teaching them to protect themselves. This volume explores the pervasiveness of lying as well as the necessity for lying in our society; the origins of lying as connected to language acquisition; the realization that storytelling is both lying and truthtelling; and the negotiations child-artists must process in order to grasp the paradox that to become storytellers they must become expert liars and lie-detectors.