Nelson C., Wesseling E. & Wu A. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture

Routledge, 2024. — 569 p.The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture (Routledge Literature Companions) edited by by Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu is 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 literatureMethodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field. Research into children’s literature is a field fed by and developed with diverse sources, primarily library and information science, education (pedagogy), history of education, and literary studies. The first two explore and promote the role of the text in developing emergent literacy. Education also approaches children’s literature as an instrument for inculcating social values and mores in the next generation, while the history of education explores and interrogates children’s books as sources of information about the value patterns of past generations. By comparison, literary studies analyzes writing for children as a specific literary genre, a mode of literature in its own right. The transnationalization of children’s literature also stepped up considerably in the latter decades of the twentieth century, due to causes such as postwar humanitarian idealism, the aftermath of colonialism, and the rise of globalization. But this trend within children’s literature is also caused by the pressures of the book market. Putting out an illustrated children’s book, in particular, is an expensive and therefore risky endeavor. Publishing it simultaneously in different countries through an international conglomerate of publishers is a form of risk reduction, which makes the effort to attune the book to local markets via translation and localization worthwhile. One may also partly attribute the ease with which books cross borders nowadays to contemporary multimedia culture, with story content being adapted to different media platforms that all operate transnationally.CONTENTSList of FiguresNotes on Contributors
Introduction
Elisabeth Wesseling, Andrea Mei- Ying Wu, and Claudia NelsonPART I Concepts and ToolsChildren’s Literature and Theory
Karín Lesnik- ObersteinPoetics and Pedagogy
Karen CoatsEthics and Historical Perspectives
Amanda K. AllenChildren’s Literary Geography
Björn Sundmark and Chrysogonus Siddha MalilangThe Monster at the End of This Book: Posthumanism and New Materialism in the Scholarship of Children’s Literature
Megan L. MusgraveDigital Humanities and Children’s Literature
Deanna StoverResearch with Young Readers: Participatory Approaches in Children’s Literature Studies
Justyna Deszcz- TryhubczakPART II Media and GenresPicturebooks
Bettina Kümmerling- MeibauerBooks for Beginners
Annette Wannamaker and Jennifer MiskecMagazines
Kristine MoruziComics for Children Across Cultures
Joseph Michael SommersChildren’s Fiction: The Possibilities of Reality and Imagination
Deborah StevensonNonfiction
Giorgia GrilliChildren’s Poetry
Michael JosephTheatre and Drama: Global Perspectives
Manon van de WaterChildren’s Film
Christine LötscherTelevision
Debbie OlsonPlayful Possibilities: The Rights of the Reader in a Digital Age
Angela ColvertPromoting Children’s Reading Internationally
Valerie CoghlanCensorship and Shifting Contexts in Children’s Literature
Andrew ZalotIndex