Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture: A Mosaic of Criticism
This collection of essays explores a wealth of topics in children’s and young adult literature and culture. Contributions about picture-books include analyses of variants of the folktale “The Little Red Hen” and bullying. Race and gender are explored in essays about picture-books featuring children as consumable objects, about books focused on African American female athletes, and about young adult dystopian fiction. Gender itself is further explored in articles about Monster High, Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts, and The Hunger Games and Divergent.
Essays about fantasy literature include an exploration of environmentalism in Rick Riordan’s The Heroes of Olympus, a discussion of Severus Snape as a Judas figure, an explication of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, and an analysis of ghosts and nationalism in Eva Ibbotson’s The Haunting of Granite Falls. An essay about Horrible Histories explores television, genre, and the way history is coded. Other contributions explore how teaching literature to reluctant readers can be effective through multimodal texts and how Harry Potter has played a role in the popularity of young adult literature for adult readers.
Amie A. Doughty is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the State University of New York, College at Oneonta, where she teaches classes in linguistics, children’s literature, fantasy, and science fiction. The Chair of the Children’s Literature and Culture Area of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, she is the author of the books Folktales Retold: A Critical Overview of Stories Updated for Children and “Throw the book away”: Reading versus Experience in Children’s Fantasy.
"[S]ome of the chapters in Doughty's book offer particularly valuable ways of engaging with children's and young adult fiction, and the collection as a whole is a useful step along the path of children's literature and culture research."
Blanka Grzegorczyk University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK International Research in Children's Literature, 10:1 (2017)
Jennifer Bean
Rebecca A. Brown
Staci Poston Conner
Harry Eiss
Tom Grochowski
Lindsey Hanlon
Dawn Heinecken
Sarah Hentges
Deidre A. Johnson
Joyce Litton
Bréanna J. McDaniel
Patrice A. Oppliger
Josh Thompson
Aedon Young
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