1st Edition
Children’s Literature in Place Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture
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.
Introduction
Section I: Place, Space, and Identity
1. "Xanadu Hidden in the Heart of Bootle": Place and Foreignness in The Unforgotten Coat
Ben Screech
2. Skiing and Being Swedish: Taking a Cold Look at Winter Picturebooks
Björn Sundmark
3. Cows on the Cover: Dairy Queen and Regional Literature
Rhonda Brock-Servais
4. John Green’s Peopled Places and Abandoned Spaces
Michael J. Martin
Section II: Aesthetics of Place
5. Confronting "Un-London": Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy and the Rejection of Nostalgic Landscapes
Heather K. Cyr
6. Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World
Catherine Olver
7. A Sleuthing Place: Child Detectives and Their Offices
Chris McGee
Section III: (Dis)Placement and Mobility
8. "Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want": The Contingent Mobilities of Literary Adolescence
Caroline Hamilton-McKenna
9. Whirlpooling Feminist Rage: Gang Rape-Revenge in Foul is Fair and The Nowhere Girls
Amber Moore
10. A Town Should Have Twenty-Five People: Harriet M. Welsch’s Small-Town New York City
Emma K. McNamara
11. How to Develop a Children’s Culture Study Abroad Program in Three Easy Steps
Jennifer M. Miskec
Section IV: Place Attachment
12. Making Home: The Queer Ecological Possibilities of Children’s Picturebooks
Kathleen Forrester
13. Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story: Country, Multimodality, and Living Space
Melanie Duckworth
14. Re-placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene: Carole Lindstroms’s We Are Water Protectors
Hatice Bay
15. Beyond the Eco-Warrior Child in Children’s Literature
Meghan M. Sweeney
Section V: Spectrality and Memory
16. Dearly Departed: The Arrival’s Spectral Refugee
Katharine Slater
17. Someone’s Missing: The Spectral Landscape of Martial Law in Selected Children’s Picturebooks from the Philippines
Jose Monfred C. Sy
18. Charlotte Temple, a Literary Landmark, and Nineteenth-Century Notions of Adolescence
Ivy Linton Stabell
Section VI: Placing Readers
19. Space, Place, and Readers: Understanding Setting as "Placing-in-Process"
Margaret Mackey
20. Child and Teen Demographics in Movement through the Fantastic Place of London
Madison McLeod
21. Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation
Smiljana Narančić Kovač
22. Canon Out of Place: Centering Lived Realities in Neurodivergent Middle Grade Literature
Jennifer Slagus
Section VII: Virtual and Archival Spaces
23. "The Ickabog Illustration Competition": Showcasing Reader Responses and a Transnational Poetics of Place
Željka Flegar
24. Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature: From Mysterious Dusty Libraries to Cities Made of Books
Maretta Sidiropoulou
25. Pilgrimages in the First Season of The Flying House Anime Series
Lance Weldy
26. An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations for Young People Elizabeth Garri
Biography
Željka Flegar is an Associate Professor at the University of Osijek in Croatia, where she teaches and does research in English language and literature, media, and drama. She has published articles on the linguistic and narrative aspects of children’s literature and culture, adaptations, and popular media. She co-edited, with Ivana Moritz, the collection Children and Languages Today: First and Second Language Literacy Development (2019). Since 2020, Flegar has been a member of the editorial board of Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Longwood University, USA (2021).
Jennifer M. Miskec is a Professor of English at Longwood University in Virginia, USA, where she co-directs the Children’s Literature English Major Concentration and Children’s Literature Minor and teaches several children’s and young adult literature and culture courses. Miskec also leads children’s culture study abroad programs to Croatia and Serbia and to South Africa. Miskec’s scholarly work is primarily centered on studies of contemporary American children’s and YA literature. Miskec co-edited, with Annette Wannamaker, a collection of essays on Early Readers, The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers (Routledge, 2016). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb, Croatia (2019) and a Fulbright Specialist at Simon Fraser University, Canada (2022).
