1st Edition

Engagements with Children’s and Young Adult Literature

By Lydia Kokkola, Sara Van den Bossche Copyright 2025
204 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

204 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

204 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Engagements with Children’s and Young Adult Literature offers an accessible guide to studying Children’s and Young Adult (CYA) literature, teaching readers how to read critically. This book introduces this dynamic field encompassing diverse genres, audiences, and interpretations. Lydia Kokkola and Sara Van den Bossche examine its historical, cultural, and ideological dimensions while addressing... Read more

1. Introducing CYA Literature

2. Historical Contexts of CYA Literature

3. Genres within CYA Literature

4. Narratological Approaches to CYA Literature

5. Visual Approaches to CYA Literature: Illustration, Picturebooks, and Graphic Narratives

6. Ideological Approaches to CYA Literature

7. Social Issues in and Social Approaches to CYA Literature

8. Comparative Approaches: Adaptation, Convergence, and Translation

9. Further Directions: Three Road Maps

Glossary

Works Cited

Index

Biography

Lydia Kokkola is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Oulu, Finland. She has worked on fiction portraying the Holocaust, sexuality in YA fiction, literature set in Sápmi (‘Lapland’) and a range of projects related to reading in a second language. Her current interests focus on plant sentience in CYA literature.

Sara Van den Bossche is Assistant Professor of Youth Cultures at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Her main interests are queer, feminist, ethnic-cultural, and cognitive criticism, canonisation, and adaptation. She has contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture (2023) and The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature (2011).