1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture
Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations.
Offering five distinct sections, this volume:
- Familiarizes students and beginning scholars with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature
- Describes the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children
- Considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content
- Maps how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice
- Explores the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature
Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.
Introduction
PART I
Concepts and tools
Section introduction
1 Theory
Karín Lesnik-Oberstein
2 Poetics and Pedagogy
Karen Coats
3 Ethics and Historical Perspectives
Amanda K. Allen
4 Children’s Literary Geography
Björn Sundmark and Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang
5 The Monster at the End of This Book:
Posthumanism and New Materialism in the Scholarship of Children’s Literature
Megan L. Musgrave
6 Digital Humanities and Children’s Literature
Deanna Stover
7 Research with Young Readers: Participatory Approaches in Children’s Literature Studies
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
PART II
Media and genres
Section introduction
8 Picturebooks
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
9 Books for Beginners
Annette Wannamaker and Jennifer Miskec
10 Magazines
Kristine Moruzi
11 Comics for Children Across Cultures
Joseph Michael Sommers
12 Children’s Fiction: The Possibilities of Reality and Imagination
Deborah Stevenson
13 Nonfiction
Giorgia Grilli
14 Children’s Poetry
Michael Joseph
15 Theatre and Drama: Global Perspectives
Manon van de Water
16 Film
Christine Lötscher
17 Television
Debbie Olson
18 Playful Possibilities: The Rights of the Reader in a Digital Age
Angela Colvert
PART III
Identities
Section introduction
19 Age
Vanessa Joosen
20 Gender
Mia Österlund and Åsa Warnqvist
21 Nation and Citizenship
Sara Van den Bossche
22 Religion and Children’s Literature
Gabriele von Glasenapp
23 Whatever Common People Do: Social Class in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Children’s Fiction
Kimberley Reynolds and Jane Rosen
24 Race and Ethnicity in Children’s Literature
Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera
25 LGBTQ+ Discourses in Eastern and Central European Children’s Literature
Mateusz Świetlicki
26 Disability and Children’s Literature
Kimura Toshio and Yoshida Junko
PART IV
Border crossings
Section introduction
27 Translation
Emer O’Sullivan
28 Retranslation
Virginie Douglas
29 Adaptation
Anja Müller
30 Fairy Tales and Circulation: A Case Study in Poland
Weronika Kostecka
31 Children’s Literature and Transnationalism
Clare Bradford, Kristine Moruzi, and Michelle J. Smith
32 Transcultural Comparison as Method:
Korean and Hebrew Children’s Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century
Dafna Zur and Rachel Feldman
33 Marketing and Franchising
Naomi Hamer
34 Children’s Literature Websites and Fandom
Sara K. Day and Carrie Sickmann
PART V
Institutions
Section introduction
35 Book Publishing and the British Sphere of Influence in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Courtney Weikle-Mills
36 Children’s Book Publishing in Europe: A Historical Approach
Emily Bruce
37 Contemporary Asian Book Publishing
Shih-Wen Sue Chen
38 From Canon-Making to Participatory Prizing: Children’s Book and Media Awards
Ramona Caponegro and Kenneth B. Kidd
39 Children’s Literature in Schools
Etti Gordon Ginzburg
40 Libraries
Margaret Mackey
41 Book Clubs
Julie Fette and Anne Morey
42 Promoting Children’s Reading Internationally
Valerie Coghlan
43 Censorship and Shifting Contexts in Children’s Literature
Andrew Zalot
Biography
Claudia Nelson is Professor Emerita of English at Texas A&M University, USA.
Elisabeth Wesseling is Professor of Cultural Memory, Gender and Diversity and at Maastricht University, the Netherlands.
Andrea Mei-Ying Wu is Director of the Chinese Language Center and Professor of Children’s Literature and Taiwanese Literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan.
