This collection of essays offers innovative methodological and disciplinary approaches to the intersection of Anglophone literary cultures with children and childhoods across the twentieth century. In two acts of re-centering, the volume focuses both on the multiplicity of childhoods and literary cultures and on child agency. Looking at classic texts for young audiences and at less widely-read and unpublished material (across genres including poetry, fiction, historical fiction or biography, picturebooks, and children’s television), essays foreground the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts, explore challenges to received notions of childhood, and emphasize the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects. Chapters frame themes of spectacle, self, and specularity across the twentieth-century; question tropes of childhood; explore identity and displacement in narrating history and culture; and elevate children as makers of literary culture. A major intent of the volume is to approach literary culture not just as produced by adults for consumption by children but also as co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are grappling with the legacies of past centuries and their cascading effects upon children and all people. We realize anew how imperialism, globalization, industrialization, and revolution continue to reshape our world and that of new generations. At a volatile moment, this collection asks how twenty-first century literature and related media represent and shape the contemporary child, childhood, and youth. Because literary representations construct ideal childhoods as well as model the rights, privileges, and respect afforded to actual young people, this collection surveys examples from popular culture and from scholarly practice. Chapters investigate the human rights of children in literature and international policy; the potential subjective agency and power of the child; the role models proposed for young people; the diverse identities children embody and encounter; and the environmental well-being of future human and nonhuman generations. As a snapshot of our developing historical moment, this collection identifies emergent trends, considers theories and critiques of childhood and literature, and observes how new technologies and paradigms are destabilizing past conventions of storytelling and lived experience.

Building on recent critical work, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of the nature and forms of medieval and early modern childhoods, viewed through literary cultures. Its five groups of thematic essays range across a spectrum of disciplines, periods, and locations, from cultural anthropology and folklore to performance studies and the history of science, and from Anglo-Saxon burial sites to colonial America. Contributors include several renowned writers for children. The opening group of essays, Educating Children, explores what is perhaps the most powerful social engine for the shaping of a child. Performing Childhood addresses children at work and the role of play in the development of social imitation and learning. Literatures of Childhood examines texts written for children that reveal alternative conceptions of parent/child relations. In Legacies of Childhood, expressions of grief at the loss of a child offer a window into the family’s conceptions and values. Finally, Fictionalizing Literary Cultures for Children considers the real, material child versus the fantasy of the child as a subject.

Children in Culture is one of the first fully multi- and interdisciplinary collections of essays on theoretical approaches to childhood and formulates and presents new and exciting ideas about the construction of childhood as a cultural identity. The ten original chapters have been written especially for this volume by some of the most eminent writers on childhood in their fields: psychology (Valerie Walkerdine; Rex and Wendy Stainton Rogers), history (Jenny Bourne Taylor; Kimberly Reynolds; Paul Yates), critical theory (Erica Burman), literary criticism (Margarida Morgado; Sara Thornton), children's literature criticism (Karin Lesnik-Oberstein; Stephen Thomson), and film and drama theory (Joe Kelleher).

Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods explores the construction of the child and the development of texts for children in the nineteenth century through the application of fresh theoretical approaches and attention to aspects of literary childhoods that have only recently begun to be illuminated. This scope enables examination of the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. The century was also distinctive for the rise of the children’s magazine, and this book broadens the definition of literary cultures to include magazines produced both by, and for, young people. The volume examines how the child and family are conceptualised, how children are positioned as readers in genres including the domestic novel, school story, Robinsonade, and fantasy fiction, how literary childhoods are written and politicised, and how childhood intersects with perceptions of animals and the natural environment. The range of chapters in this collection and the texts they consider demonstrates the variability and fluidity of literary cultures and nineteenth-century childhoods.

The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period’s newly established children’s book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

Children’s Cultures after Childhood introduces theoretical concepts from new materialist and posthumanist childhood studies into research on children’s literature, film, and media texts with attention to the entanglements of which they are part. Thirteen chapters by international contributors from diverse disciplinary fields (literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, and childhood studies) offer a cross-section of empirical and theoretical approaches sharing an inspiration in the notion of “after childhoods”, proposed by Peter Kraftl, a children’s geographer, to conceptualize theoretical and methodological orientations in research on children’s lives and on past, present, and future childhoods. This interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to scholars working in children’s literature and culture studies, education, and childhood studies.

A COMPANION TO CHILDREN'S LITERATURE A collection of international, up-to-date, and diverse perspectives on children's literary criticism A Companion to Children's Literature offers students and scholars studying children's literature, education, and youth librarianship an incisive and expansive collection of essays that discuss key debates within children's literature criticism. The thirty-four works included demonstrate a diverse array of perspectives from around the world, introduce emerging scholars to the field of children's literature criticism, and meaningfully contribute to the scholarly conversation. The essays selected by the editors present a view of children's literature that encompasses poetry, fiction, folklore, nonfiction, dramatic stage and screen performances, picturebooks, and interactive and digital media. They range from historical overviews to of-the-moment critical theory about children’s books from across the globe. A Companion to Children's Literature explores some of the earliest works in children's literature, key developments in the genre from the 20th century, and the latest trends and texts in children's information books, postmodern fairytales, theatre, plays, and more. This collection also discusses methods for reading children's literature, from social justice critiques of popular stories to Black critical theory in the context of children's literary analysis.

Drawing evidence from transatlantic literary texts of childhood as well as from nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s and family card, board, and parlor games and games manuals, Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play aims to reveal what might be thought of as "playful literary citizenship," or some of the motivations inherent in later nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American play pursuits as they relate to interest in shaping citizens through investment in "good" literature. Tracing play, as a societal and historical construct, as it surfaces time and again in children’s literary texts as well as children’s literary texts as they surface time and again in situations and environments of children’s play, this book underscores how play and literature are consistently deployed in tandem in attempts to create ideal citizens – even as those ideals varied greatly and were dependent on factors such as gender, ethnicity, colonial status, and class.

While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on individual memory. Rather, it is associated through contemporary convergence culture with the commodities of one's youth as they are recycled from one media platform to another. Essays in the volume's first section identify recurrent patterns in the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children's toys and media, providing context for section two's exploration of childhood nostalgia in memorial practices. In these essays, the contributors suggest that childhood toys and media play a role in the construction of s the imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that define nations and nationalism. Eschewing the dichotomy between restorative and reflexive nostalgia, the essays in section three address the ethics of nostalgia in terms of child agency and depictions of childhood. In a departure from the notion that childhood nostalgia is the exclusive prerogative of narrative fiction, section four looks for its traces in the child sciences. Pushing against nostalgia's persistent associations with wishful thinking, false memories, and distortion, this collection suggests nostalgia is never categorically good or bad in itself, but owes its benefits or defects to the ways in which it is brought to bear on the representation of children and childhood.