Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children's literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work. Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children's literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre's canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children's literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this work the author studies the role of toy characters in works ranging from older classics such as Pinocchio and Winnie the Pooh to modern texts such as The Mouse and his Child and the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes science fiction with robots and cyborgs.

Vols. for 1975- include publications cataloged by the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library with additional entries from the Library of Congress MARC tapes.

Indespensible for maintaining a strong fantasy collection, this classic guide features more than 4,800 fantasy novels and story collections that have been reviewed and recommended by at least two leading journals. New to this edition are: 1,500 new fantasy novels and collections 4,000 new sources in the research guide, which includes more than 10,500 articles, books, and disserations five new review sources added to the 24 previously cited recommendation symbols that denote superior quality numbered entries for quick reference and an expanded Subject Index Ten topical chapters range from Allegorical Fantasy and Literary Fairy Tales to Witchraft and Sorcery. Each annotated title includes extensive bibliographic references, along with reading level, major awards won, recommendation symbols, and review citations.

A collection of essays dealing with critical approaches to the evaluation of juvenile literature.