Talking-animal tales have conveyed anticruelty messages since the 18th-century beginnings of children's literature. Yet only in the modern period have animal characters become true subjects rather than objects of human neglect or benevolence. Modern fantasies reflect the shift from animal welfare to animal rights in 20th-century public discourse. This revolution in literary animal-human relations began with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and continued with the work of Kenneth Grahame, Hugh Lofting, P.L. Travers and E. B. White. Beginning with the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, this book examines ways in which animal characters gain an aura of authority through using language and then participate in reversals of power. The author provides a close reading of 10 acclaimed British and American children's fantasies or series published before 1975. Authors whose work has received little scholarly attention are also covered, including Robert Lawson, George Selden and Robert C. O'Brien.

In her reappraisal of canonical works such as Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, Wind in the Willows, and Peter Rabbit, Tess Cosslett traces how nineteenth-century debates about the human and animal intersected with, or left their mark on, the venerable genre of the animal story written for children. Effortlessly applying a range of critical approaches, from Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theory, she raises important questions about the construction of the child reader, the qualifications of the implied author, and the possibilities of children's literature compared with literature written for adults. Perhaps most crucially, Cosslett examines how the issues of animal speech and animal subjectivity were managed, at a time when the possession of language and consciousness had become a vital sign of the difference between humans and animals. Topics of great contemporary concern, such as the relation of the human and the natural, masculine and feminine, child and adult, are investigated within their nineteenth-century contexts, making this an important book for nineteenth-century scholars, children's literature specialists, and historians of science and childhood.

Despite Kipling's popularity as an author and his standing as a politically controversial figure, much of his work has remained relatively unexamined due to its categorization as 'children's literature.' Sue Walsh challenges the apparently clear division between 'children's' and 'adult' literature, suggesting new directions for postcolonial and childhood studies and interrogating the way biographical criticism on children's literature in particular has tended to supersede and obstruct other kinds of readings.

Upon publication, Anita Silvey’s comprehensive survey of contemporary children’s literature, Children’s Books and Their Creators, garnered unanimous praise from librarians, educators, and specialists interested in the world of writing for children. Now The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators assembles the best of that volume in one handy, affordable reference, geared specifically to parents, educators, and students. This new volume introduces readers to the wealth of children’s literature by focusing on the essentials — the best books for children, the ones that inform, impress, and, most important, excite young readers. Updated to include newcomers such as J. K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket and to cover the very latest on publishing and educational trends, this edition features more than 475 entries on the best-loved children’s authors and illustrators, numerous essays on social and historical issues, thirty personal glimpses into craft by well-known writers, illustrators, and critics, and invaluable reading lists by category. The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators summarizes the canon of contemporary children’s literature, in a practical guide essential for anyone choosing a book for or working with children.

Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature brings a fresh perspective to a central literary question— Who speaks?— by examining a variety of represented silences. These include children who do not speak, do not yet speak effectively, or speak on behalf of others. A rich and unexamined literary archive explores the problematics of children who are literally silent or metaphorically so because they cannot communicate effectively with adults or peers. This project centers children’s literature in the question of voice by considering disability, gender, race, and ecocriticism. Children’s literature rests on a paradox at the root of its own genre: it is produced by an adult author writing to a constructed idea of what children should be. By reading a range of contemporary children’s literature, this book scrutinizes how such texts narrate the child’s journey from communicative alterity to a place of empowered adult speech. Sometimes the child’s verbal enclosure enables privacy and resistance. At other times, silence is coerced or imposed or arises from bodily impairment. Children may act as intermediaries, speaking on behalf of species that cannot. Recently, we have seen children exercise their voices on the world stage and as authors. In all cases, the texts analyzed here reveal speech as a minefield to be traversed. Children who talk too much, too little, or with insufficient expertise pose problems to themselves and others. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, they attempt to hold adults to account— inside and outside the text. Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature addresses this underconceptualized subject in what will be an important text for scholars of children’s literature, childhood studies, English, disability studies, gender studies, race studies, ecopedagogy, and education.

"Abbott offers a fruitful new way to read science fiction, one that also greatly enriches our understanding of western history and its impact on our collective imagination. Detailing the overlap of science fiction and western fiction - especially relating to their mutual interest in and concerns about frontier expansionism - he reveals an unsuspected common ground that informs the writings of both camps." "Reviewing the work of many Hugo and Nebula Award winners, as well as drawing upon popular film and television series (like the Buck Rogers serials), Abbott's study journeys across the far reaches of science fiction's universe."