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 the 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 will:
- Familiarize students and beginning scholars with key concepts and main methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children's literature.
- Describe the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children.
- Consider the production, distribution, and valuing of children's books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content.
- Map 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.
- Explore the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children's literature, highlighting new issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children's literature.
Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.
About the Author: Claudia Nelson is a professor emerita of English at Texas A&M University. In addition to having coedited multiple essay collections, she is author or coauthor of six monographs, most recently Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Literature: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals, coauthored with Anne Morey (2019). Her book Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850-1929 won the Children's Literature Association's award for the best scholarly book of 2003.
Elisabeth Wesseling is professor of cultural memory, gender and diversity and director of the Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University. She has edited two volumes on children's media (The Child Savage, 1890-2010: From Comics to Games [2016]; Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys and Games [2017]) and co-edited special journal issues for Children's Literature Association Quarterly, International Research in Children's Literature, and BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review, in addition to publishing numerous research articles.
Andrea Mei-Ying Wu is director of the Chinese Language Center and a professor of children's literature and Taiwanese literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. She has published widely on children's literature and culture and is the author of a Chinese monograph, Discourses of Subject, Gender, Place, and (Post)modern Childhood in Postwar Taiwanese Juvenile Fiction (2017). Her recent publication includes a co-edited Chinese monograph, Border-Crossings, Coming-of-Age, and In-Between: Contemporary Trends in Children's Literature Research (2022).
