Radical Children’s Literature

This book challenges much of the received wisdom about children’s literature, typified by Jacqueline Rose’s claim in The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction that children’s literature is innately conservative.

Radical Children’s Literature reappraises the place of children’s literature in culture, showing it to be a creative space where writers and illustrators try out new ideas – about books, society, and the possibilities for narrative in an age of instant communication and multi-media. It looks at the stories young people are given about the world and themselves, and how these interact with changing childhoods and new technologies.

KIMBERLEY REYNOLDS is Professor of Children’s Literature in the School of English at Newcastle University, UK, and President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. Previously she founded and directed the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Roehampton University, UK. Her publications span historical, theoretical and contemporary aspects of the field.

List of Illustrations * Acknowledgements * Author’s Note * Breaking Bounds: The Transformative Energy of Children’s Literature * Breaking the Frame: Picturebooks, Modernism and New Media * And None of it was Nonsense * Useful Idiots: Interactions between Youth Culture and Children’s Literature * Self-harm, Silence and Survival: Despair and Trauma in Children’s Literature * Baby, You’re the Best: Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary JuvenileFiction * Frightening Fiction: TheTransformative Power of Fear * Back to the Future? New Forms and Formats in Juvenile Fiction * Conclusion: The Foundations of Future Fictions * Bibliography * Index