2006–2016, was published in 2019. Melanie’s interest in youth literature and book culture extends beyond academia. She was a judge on the UKYA book prize and the Scottish Teenage Book Prize, and is on the Advisory Boards for the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) Reflecting Realities project, the Pop-up Pathways into Children’s Publishing project, and Literature Alliance Scotland, and works with a number of cultural organizations across the United Kingdom.
Rebecca Rogers is the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Tutorial Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Her research and teaching focus on literacy studies, preparing teachers to be culturally and linguistically responsive, and critical discourse studies.
Ivy Linton Stabell is Associate Professor of English at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, where she teaches children’s, young adult, and early American literature. Her research centers on nonfiction for and by children; her essays have appeared in Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, and several books.
Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. is a poet and scholar of American poetry and children’s literature. He directs the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at San Diego State University, where he is a professor of English and comparative literature. Thomas has published numerous essays and two books, Poetry’s Playground (2007) and Strong Measures (2007). He has also co-edited two collections, Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards (2016) and All-of-a-Kind: Remembering June Cummins (2020). You can find Joseph on Twitter @josephsdsu.
Doris Villarreal is an assistant professor of literacy education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She has 13 years of bilingual elementary classroom teaching experience in urban public schools. Her experiences as a bilingual elementary teacher in Texas have led to her interests in the improvement and support of educational programs that serve students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Her research interests include hybrid language practices in linguistically and culturally diverse teaching contexts with a focus on Latinx children as well as literacy teacher education.
Elizabeth A. Wheeler is Professor of English and founding Director of the Disability Studies Minor at the University of Oregon. Her 2019 book HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth analyzes the politics of disability in public space in contemporary British and American young adult and children’s literature. Her scholarship has appeared in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Children’s Literature Quarterly, Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities, and Constructing the (M)other: Narratives of Disability, Motherhood, and the Politics of Normal.
Vivian Yenika-Agbaw was Professor of Literature & Literacies at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in children’s/adolescent literature in the department of Curriculum and Instruction. She is the author of Representing Africa in Children’s Books: Old and New Ways of Seeing and co-editor of several books, including Children and Deaf Culture in Children’s Literature and Other Modes of Representations (forthcoming).
Introduction
Karen Coats, Deborah Stevenson, and Vivian Yenika-Agbaw
The academic study of children’s literature rests on a diverse set of ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. Scholars, educators, and cultural critics have explored fundamental but often hidden assumptions about what children’s literature is, what it teaches (or hides from) its readers, whose voices and perspectives are heard and valued and whose are silenced or devalued; the search for answers has become as diverse as the questions, sometimes following from, sometimes leading, trends in the literature itself. Children’s literature scholars around the world have been joining in increasingly robust conversations that seek to expand awareness of the richness that can be found in texts for the young, texts that bury themselves deeply in the heart and surely prove foundational to the development of a culture’s sense of what is normal and what is aspirational, what is useful and what is beautiful, what should be preserved and what is best left in the past.
The criticism of children’s literature has expanded exponentially since Sarah Trimmer began her review journal, The Guardian of Education (1802–1806), to include engaged discussion with nearly every school of literary and cultural theory, making Companions like this one indispensable in navigating the critical landscape. Indeed, the Companion genre has experienced a publishing boom in recent years, but unlike Companions that can limit their focus to literature of a time period, a specific topic, form, genre, or single book, or even a way of thinking, a Companion to children’s literature has a broad remit; one that is too broad, in fact, for comprehensive coverage of all the many ways children’s literature has been defined and thought to matter over time and across cultures. Like the editors of other Companions to children’s literature, we’ve had to make choices to keep the volume focused, manageable, and useful. The chapters in this volume fall into a few broad categories to provide a sampling of the various ways the genres and forms of Anglophone children’s literature have developed over time, followed by some of the ways of reading that have become dominant in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
Even within this necessarily limited focus, our parameters and definitions still require some unpacking. Our view of literature comprises poetry, folklore, fiction and nonfiction that has taken the form of prose, picturebooks, dramatic performances on stage and screen, and interactive media. The modifier “children’s” imposes a limit for the chapters in this Companion to works that have been considered suitable for young people from birth to middle or late childhood; that is, we have not included discussion of texts for older readers or young adults, which have come into their own as a distinct area of inquiry. We have also limited our focus to Anglophone literature, though our authors have each accepted the challenge to be attentive to the texts, voices, and perspectives that have been too often neglected or marginalized in other overviews of the literature.
The first three sections are devoted to the history and development of the various genres and forms of children’s literature from the era before what came to be known as the Golden Age of the late nineteenth century through to the second decade of the twenty-first century. Each chapter attends to a specific form or genre, which enables focused attention to its developments and trends during the time period; reading across the section will enable scholars to see how these separate strands reflect some common assumptions and concerns about how childhood was conceived in the period while still retaining distinctive qualities and appealing to readers with diverse goals, interests, and generic preferences. The chapters that attend to the most recent time period give a useful introductory overview of how technology and global reach are changing the aesthetics and ethical concerns of contemporary children’s literature.
Following the sweep of historical developments and current trends in literary forms and genres, the chapters in the final section walk readers through ways of approaching children’s literature theoretically and methodologically in the twenty-first century. Foregrounded in these approaches is an intentional ethics of valuing all children’s lived experiences and exposing those implicit mechanisms of power that inflect literary and cultural production; such mechanisms impose a special mandate and opportunity for scholars who study works that constitute young people’s first contact with the complex world of cultural values and implicit norms depicted in images and stories.
Finally, this companion would not be what it is, or perhaps would not be at all, were it not for our co-editor Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, who passed away just as the completed manuscript was submitted. Vivian was always warm, funny, and frank, with a vast knowledge of people as well as scholarship, identifying talented contributors to this book whose essays attend to many vital subjects. Her own essay here is an example of her superb critical writing, though
