ENG 251: Children's Literature

This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children's literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children's poetry, picture books and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature.

Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature is the first comprehensive study that investigates the representation of maps in children's books as well as the impact of mapping on the depiction of landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes in children's literature. The chapters in this volume pursue a comparative approach as they represent a wide spectrum of diverse genres.

A Serious Genre: The Apology of Children's Literature is a collection of essays by scholars and academics from Romania, the United States and Turkey, who investigate the value and impact of what, since the 19th century, has been called, using an umbrella term, children's literature. The volume is the fourth in a series, which focuses on literary genres which are considered marginal or low-brow, but which have a long tradition and display remarkable versatility and popularity.

Children's Literature traces the development of the main genres of children's books one by one, including fables, fantasy, adventure stories, moral tales, family stories, school stories, children's poetry and illustrated and picture books. Grenby shows how these forms have evolved over 300 years and asks why most children's books, even today, continue to fall into one or other of these generic categories. This volume combines detailed analysis of particular key texts and a broad survey of books written for children.

Children's Literature in Context is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to children's literature and its wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues involved in the study of children's literature and its social, cultural and literary contexts. Close readings of commonly studied texts highlight major themes and ways of reading children's literature.

The most accessible approach yet to children’s literature and narrative theory, Telling Children’s Stories is a comprehensive collection of never-before-published essays by an international slate of scholars that offers a broad yet in-depth assessment of narrative strategies unique to children’s literature.   The volume is divided into four interrelated sections: “Genre Templates and Transformations,” “Approaches to the Picture Book,” “Narrators and Implied Readers,” and “Narrative Time.”