Children's Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
Founding Editor and Series Editor 1994-2011: Jack Zipes
Series Editor, 2011-2018: Philip Nel
Founded by Jack Zipes in 1994, Children's Literature and Culture is the longest-running series devoted to the study of children’s literature and culture from a national and international perspective. Dedicated to promoting original research in children’s literature and children’s culture, in 2011 the series expanded its focus to include childhood studies, and it seeks to explore the legal, historical, and philosophical conditions of different childhoods. An advocate for scholarship from around the globe, the series recognizes innovation and encourages interdisciplinarity. Children's Literature and Culture offers cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections considering topics such as gender, race, picturebooks, childhood, nation, religion, technology, and many others. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Books in this series have consistently won prestigious awards, including the International Research Society for Children’s Literature Award for Best Monograph, the International Research Society for Children’s Literature Best Edited Book Award, and the Children’s Literature Association’s (CHLA) Book Award.
The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
1st Edition
By Macarena García-González
June 15, 2025
The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction centres the question of how reading fiction develops our moral imagination and our capacities to think and feel with others. The question is approached with a good dose of scepticism, revising tensions between ethical, aesthetical, and pedagogical ...
Lying, Truthtelling, and Storytelling in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Telling It Slant
1st Edition
By Anita Tarr
May 05, 2025
Even though we instruct our children not to lie, the truth is that lying is a fundamental part of children’s development—socially, cognitively, emotionally, morally. Lying can sometimes be more compassionate than telling the truth, even more ethical. Reading specific children’s books can instruct ...
Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
1st Edition
Edited
By Eleanor Spencer, Jade Dillon-Craig
December 18, 2024
Family in Children's and Young Adult Literature is a comprehensive study of the family in Anglophone children’s and Young Adult literature from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Written by intellectual leaders in the field from the UK, the Americas, Europe, and Australia, this ...
Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature
1st Edition
By Danielle E. Price
December 18, 2024
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...
Age in David Almond’s Oeuvre: A Multi-Method Approach to Studying Age and the Life Course in Children’s Literature
1st Edition
By Vanessa Joosen, Michelle Anya Anjirbag, Leander Duthoy, Lindsey Geybels, Frauke Pauwels, Emma-Louise Silva
November 28, 2024
In recent decades, age studies has started to emerge as a new approach to study children’s literature. This book builds on that scholarship but also significantly extends it by exploring age in various aspects of children’s literature: the age of the author, the characters, the writing style, the ...
Children's Literature and New York City
1st Edition
Edited
By Padraic Whyte, Keith O'Sullivan
October 14, 2024
This collection explores the significance of New York City in children’s literature, stressing literary, political, and societal influences on writing for young people from the twentieth century to the present day. Contextualized in light of contemporary critical and cultural theory, the chapters ...
Jews and Jewishness in British Children's Literature
1st Edition
By Madelyn Travis
October 14, 2024
In a period of ongoing debate about faith, identity, migration and culture, this timely study explores the often politicised nature of constructions of one of Britain’s longest standing minority communities. Representations in children’s literature influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the...
Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction: The Seeds of Memory
1st Edition
By Mateusz Świetlicki
October 08, 2024
This is the first book monograph devoted to Anglophone Ukrainian Canadian children’s historical fiction published between 1991 and 2021. It consists of five chapters offering cross-sectional and interdisciplinary readings of 41 books – novels, novellas, picturebooks, short stories, and a graphic ...
Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood: Myths and Realities
1st Edition
Edited
By Marina Balina, Larissa Rudova, Anastasia Kostetskaya
May 27, 2024
Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and ...
Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers
1st Edition
Edited
By Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Sin Wen Lau
May 27, 2024
This edited volume explores how success is conceptualized and represented in texts for young people in Asia. The essays in this collection examine how success for children relates to education, family, gender, race, class, community, and the nation. It answers the following questions: How is ...
The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature: Only the Best
1st Edition
By Elizabeth West
May 27, 2024
Publishing for children between 1930 and 1960 has been denigrated as a relatively fallow period for creativity and quality, certainly in comparison with the ‘golden ages’ of children’s literature that preceded and succeeded it. This book questions this perception by using archival evidence to argue...
Youth Fiction and Trans Representation
1st Edition
By Tom Sandercock
January 29, 2024
Youth Fiction and Trans Representation is the first book that wholly addresses the growth of trans and gender variant representation in literature, television, and films for children and young adults in the twenty-first century. Ranging across an array of media—including picture books, novels, ...