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.
By Macarena García-González
June 27, 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 skepticism revising tensions between ethical, aesthetical and pedagogical ...
Edited
By Sabine Planka, Corina Löwe
May 22, 2025
Our language is full of 'sweet' terms to describe situations (‘a bittersweet moment’), things (‘popcorn brain’), behaviour (‘to have a sweet tooth’), or even loved ones (‘sweety’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘honey’) that are originally not linked to food. What seems to be common to almost all cultures, is ...
Edited
By Mateusz Świetlicki, Anastasia Ulanowicz
March 24, 2025
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Children’s Literature showcases the work of prominent scholars of children’s literature from Ukraine and the diaspora as it traces the history of books written, marketed for, and circulating among young people since the rise of Ukraine’s nationhood in the nineteenth century. ...
Edited
By Lucia Hodgson, Allison Giffen
February 28, 2025
This edited collection contends that the figure of the child is foundational to the workings of biopolitical power yet remains undertheorized. The study of nineteenth-century biopolitics offers a theoretical framework that promises to increase our understanding of how modern democracies manage ...
By Arya Priyadarshini, Suman Sigroha
February 18, 2025
Through critical textual analysis of the trauma narratives for young readers written in English on political conflicts and the violation of humanitarian values, this book recovers the response to trauma from the margins of the survivor spectrum. By focusing on the experiences of Syrian and ...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
By Angel Daniel Matos
October 01, 2024
The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature is a provocative meditation on emotion, mood, history, and futurism in the critique of queer texts created for younger audiences. Given critical demands to distance queer youth culture from narratives of violence, sadness, and hurt that have ...
By Chris McGee
September 18, 2024
Detective Fiction for Young Readers is an examination of contemporary mystery stories for children and young adults. This volume explores how the conventions, rules, and expectations of adult mystery fiction have filtered down, so to speak, especially in the past several decades, to writing for ...
By Elly McCausland
May 31, 2024
Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and ...