This book explores the phenomenon of the story paper, the meanings and values children took from their reading, and the responses of adults to their reading choices. It argues for the revaluing of the story paper in the inter-war years, giving the genre a pivotal role in the development of children's literature.

Explores the problem of anthropomorphism: a major bone of contention in 8th to 14th-century Islamic theology

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History explores a variety of geographical and cultural contexts to examine what literary texts, grasped as material objects and reflections on urban materialities, have to offer for urban history. The contributing writers’ approach to literary narratives and materialities in urban history is summarised within the conceptualisation ‘materiality in/of literature’: the way in which literary narratives at once refer to the material world and actively partake in the material construction of the world. This book takes a geographically multipolar and multidisciplinary approach to discuss cities in the UK, the US, India, South Africa, Finland, and France whilst examining a wide range of textual genres from the novel to cartoons, advertising copy, architecture and urban planning, and archaeological writing. In the process, attention is drawn to narrative complexities embedded within literary fiction and to the dialogue between narratives and historical change. The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History has three areas of focus: literary fiction as form of urban materiality, literary narratives as social investigations of the material city, and the narrating of silenced material lives as witnessed in various narrative sources.

Children are the future architects, clients and users of our buildings. The kinds of architectural worlds they are exposed to in picturebooks during their formative years may be assumed to influence how they regard such architecture as adults. Contemporary urban environments the world over represent the various stages of modernism in architecture. This book reads that history through picturebooks and considers the kinds of national identities and histories they construct. Twelve specialist essays from international scholars address questions such as: Is modern architecture used to construct specific narratives of childhood? Is it taken to support ‘negative’ narratives of alienation on the one hand and ‘positive’ narratives of happiness on the other? Do images of modern architecture support ideas of ‘community’? Reinforce ‘family values’? If so, what kinds of architecture, community and family? How is modern architecture placed vis-à-vis the promotion of diversity (ethnic, religious, gender etc.)? How might the use of architecture in comic strips or the presence of specific kinds of building in fiction aimed at younger adults be related to the groundwork laid in picturebooks for younger readers? This book reveals what stories are told about modern architecture and shows how those stories affect future attitudes towards and expectations of the built environment.

Examining culturally significant works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to this end.

Seriality and Texts for Young People is a collection of thirteen scholarly essays about series and serial texts directed to children and youth, each of which begins from the premise that a basic principle of seriality is repetition.

Internationalism in Children's Series brings together international children's literature scholars who interpret 'internationalism' through various cultural, historical and theoretical lenses. From imperialism to transnationalism, from Tom Swift to Harry Potter, this book addresses the unique ability of series to introduce children to the world.

In New Zealand’s France, Dr Alistair Watts investigates the origins of the New Zealand nation state from a fresh perspective — one that moves beyond the traditional bicultural view prevalent in the current New Zealand historiography. That New Zealand became British in the 1840s owes much, Dr Watts contends, to that other great colonial power of the time, France. The rich history of British antagonism towards the French was transported to New Zealand in the 1830s and 1840s as part of the British colonists’ cultural baggage, to be used in creating an old identity in a new land. Even as the British colonists sought a new beginning, this defining anti-French characteristic caused them to override the existing Māori culture with their own constructs of time and place. Leaving their signature names in the cities of Wellington and Nelson and naming their streets after Waterloo and Collingwood, the British colonisers attempted to establish a local antithesis of France through a bucolic Little Britain in the South Pacific. It was this legacy, as much as the assumed bicultural origins of modern New Zealand, that produced a Pacific country that still relies on the symbolism of the Union Jack embedded in the national flag and the totemic constitutional presence of the British Crown to maintain its national identity. This is the story of how this came about.

Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction is not a historical study or a survey of narrative plots, but takes a more conceptual approach that engages with the central ideas of posthumanism: the fragmented nature of posthuman identity, the concept of agency as distributed and collective and the role of embodiment in understandings of selfhood.