Sponsored by the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, this volume features a selection of ten papers compiled from the Center's second national conference, accompanied by a detailed introduction. Presented by scholars from diverse backgrounds, the essays center on the emerging, interdisciplinary field of print culture. They examine children's literature and related print materials from a cultural perspective and discuss the influence of ideological, political, and material factors on the reader. Moreover, the authors join a cultural debate over the nature of childhood in specific historical periods.

What are the components of youth cultures today? This encyclopedia examines the facets of youth cultures and brings them to the forefront. Although issues of youth culture are frequently cited in classrooms and public forums, most encyclopedias of childhood and youth are devoted to history, human development, and society. A limitation on the reference bookshelf is the restriction of youth to pre-adolescence, although issues of youth continue into young adulthood. This encyclopedia addresses an academic audience of professors and students in childhood studies, American studies, and culture studies. The authors span disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and folklore. The Encyclopedia of Youth Cultures in America addresses a need for historical, social, and cultural information on a wide array of youth groups. Such a reference work serves as a corrective to the narrow public view that young people are part of an amalgamated youth group or occupy malicious gangs and satanic cults. Widespread reports of bullying, school violence, dominance of athletics over academics, and changing demographics in the United States has drawn renewed attention to the changing cultural landscape of youth in and out of school to explain social and psychological problems.

This collection of essays explores the cultural significance of children’s reading by analyzing a series of Anglo-American case studies from the eighteenth century to the present. Marked by historical continuity and technological change, children’s reading proves to be a phenomenon with broad influence, one that shapes both the development of individual readers and wider social values. The essays in this volume capture such complexity by invoking the conception of “mediation” to approach children’s reading as a site of interaction among individual people, material texts, and institutional networks. Featuring a range of scholarly perspectives from the disciplines of literature, education, graphic design, and library and information science, this collection uncovers both the intricacies and wider stakes of children’s reading. The books, public programs, and archives that focus explicitly on children’s interests and needs are powerful arenas that give expression to the key ideological investments of a culture.

Michelle Ann Abate examines a variety of texts that offer information, ideology, and even instructions on how to raise kids right, not just figuratively, but politically. Highlighting the works of William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, and others, she brings together such diverse fields as cultural studies, literary criticism, political science, childhood studies, brand marketing, and the cult of celebrity. --from publisher description.

Children's literature takes many forms - works adapted for children in antiquity, picture books and pop-ups - and now includes the latest online games and eBooks. This vast and amorphous subject is both intimately related to other areas of literary and cultural investigation but also has its own set of concerns, issues and challenges. From familiar authors including Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl, classic books such as Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and The Secret Garden, to modern works including Harry Potter and the Twilight series, thisVery Short Introduction provides an overview of the history of children's literature as it has developed in English, whilst at the same time introducing key debates, developments, and figures in the field. Raising questions about what shape the future of literature for children should take, and exploring the crossover with adult fiction, Reynolds shows that writing for children - whether on page or screen - has participated in shaping and directing ideas about culture, society and childhood. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In this pioneering historical study, Anne Lundin argues that schools, libraries, professional organizations, and the media together create and influence the constantly changing canon of children's literature. Lundin examines the circumstances out of which the canon emerges, and its effect on the production of children's literature. The volume includes a comprehensive list of canonical titles for reference.

World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, these volumes will offer insights into new cartographies – the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multilingual local – that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will interrogate existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.

Young Adult Resources Today: Connecting Teens with Books, Music, Games, Movies, and More is the first comprehensive young adult library services textbook specifically written for today’s multidimensional information landscape. The authors integrate a research-focused information behavior approach with a literature-focused resources approach, and bring together in one volume key issues related to research, theory, and practice in the provision of information services to young adults. Currently, no single book addresses both YA information behaviors and information resources in any detail; instead, books tend to focus on one and give only cursory attention to the other. Key features of this revolutionary book include its success in: Integrating theory, research, and practice Integrating implications for practice throughout the book Integrating knowledge of resources with professional practice as informed by research Integrating both print and electronic formats throughout—within the resource chapters (including websites and social media) Latham and Gross accomplish all this while, paying particular attention to the socially constructed nature of young adulthood, diversity, YA development, and multiple literacies. Their coverage of information landscapes covers literature (with detailed coverage of both genres and subgrenres), movies, magazines, web sites, social media, and gaming. The final chapter cover navigating information landscapes, focusing on real and virtual YA spaces, readers’ advisory, programming, and collaboration. Special attention is paid to program planning and evaluation.

Empire's daughters traces the interconnected histories of girlhood, whiteness, and British colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the study of the Girls’ Friendly Society. The society functioned as both a youth organisation and emigration society, making it especially valuable in examining girls’ multifaceted participation with the empire. The book charts the emergence of the organisation during the late Victorian era through its height in the first decade of the twentieth century to its decline in the interwar years. Employing a multi-sited approach and using a range of sources—including correspondences, newsletters, and scrapbooks—the book uncovers the ways in which girls participated in the empire as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators of colonial knowledge and also how they resisted these prescribed roles and challenged systems of colonial power.

Many of us grew up exploring fascinating worlds--in books, films, and, most importantly, our imaginations--places filled with mythological characters and magical landscapes where we had stunning experiences punctuated by the harmless pleasures that any child's mind can conjure. These worlds sometimes end up in our childhood fictions, which have in turn shaped countless imaginations and childhood adventures. The essays in this book attempt to comprehend the worlds of children's progressive fiction--from how they are created to how they affect readers. This book explores what happens when speculative genres (fantasy, horror, and science fiction) and imaginative spaces collide headlong with the realities and surrealities of modern childhood. It moves back and forth between Oz, Wonderland, Redwall and Fear Street, and explores series such as Nancy Drew, Inkheart, The Mortal Instruments, the Miss Peregrine series and more. Many of these works feature children who must save the day--to stop the bad guy, kill the monster, complete the quest and rescue adults--leading us to wonder if fantastic spaces in children's progressive fiction are really helping kids prepare to save the world rather than helping them temporarily escape it.