Given increased attention toward nonfiction and informational texts due to recent educational reforms in the nation, it is critical to examine how various cultural identities are depicted in nonfiction children's picture books. Focusing on the Orbis Pictus honor and awarded texts (n = 60) from 1990 to 2019, this article reports the findings of a…

A long-asked question in children's literature studies is how the child reads the very same book we (adults) have read. In 1984, Peter Hunt argued for a "childist criticism" proposing that young readers' multiple individual responses to literature should inform adults' critical practice. In this article, I propose that affect theory and…

Theodore Taylor's "The Cay" received a great deal of criticism upon its publication in 1969 for its racism, yet it has remained in American public school curricula for over fifty years. Defenders of the novel have argued that it advocates for color-blindness, a position that has helped entrench it in schools. Meanwhile, few critics have…

The article is mainly concerned with philosophical interpretations of Astrid Lindgren's Karlson books. Inspired by Gaare and Sjaastad's reading of Pippi Longstocking, the article discusses the philosophical ideas embedded in Lindgren's books about Pippi Longstocking, stressing, in particular, Lindgren's implicit critique of Western culture. Next,…

Students in the English Language Arts classroom have access to more author commentary than ever. While following authors on social media may deepen students' engagement with their assigned reading, it also threatens to subdue students' own interpretations of the authors' texts. This essay explains how educators can introduce basic aspects of…

This article reconsiders Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" 50 years after its initial UK publication, and over a hundred years since Dahl's birth. It suggests that the book has often been misinterpreted, in that the work is more critical of modern capitalism than is often recognised, capturing a post-World War II shift in…

One of the particularly challenging aspects of children's literature lies in its ethics. The intended audience of children's literature is often perceived to be morally malleable, and particularly vulnerable to narrative strategies. This why it is of high importance to consider the moral contents which children's narratives attempt to communicate…

Where and how do I belong? As Erin Spring (2016a) notes in her examination of space, place, and youth engagement with literature, "young adult fiction is fraught with implications for identity, of which place often takes center stage" (p. 432). Yet despite the ubiquity of adolescent characters' negotiations within and across physical and…

The early reception of D.B.C. Pierre's "Vernon God Little" (2003) has been characterized by comparisons with two canonical literary antecedents: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" (1991/1951) and, at a greater remove, Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884). The three novels capitalize on the…

The Great Terror of 1936--1938 and mass deportations of "enemies of the people" between the 1930s and the 1950s are among signature atrocities committed by Stalinist Russia. Claiming the lives of several million Soviet citizens and foreign nationals, these executions and deportations were a silenced topic until the collapse of the Soviet…

Written and published during World War II, Eleanor Estes's "Rufus M". (1943) is set during the time of American involvement in World War I, the war of the author's own childhood. Despite the fact that the book was named a Newbery Honor title, many critics have found it unsatisfyingly unstructured and episodic. I argue, however, that the…

This article considers alternatives to the established constructivist approaches to children's literature, exploring instead the potential of two relatively recent areas of inquiry, cognitive poetics and evolutionary literary criticism. The article questions the assumption, implied if not directly expressed by Peter Hollindale in "Signs of…

This paper examines the changing presentation of teachers in the post-Mao era. The image of teachers was almost sacred in traditional Confucian society until Mao Zedong launched China's Cultural Revolution in 1966, when children were encouraged to use the pretext of class struggle to critique and even to attack their teachers. As such, restoring…

This article uses the Japanese television anime series "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" (2011) as a case study through which to problematise the relationship between two prominent traditions within children's literature criticism: narratology, with its vocabulary of implied readers and textual address; and reception studies, which typically…

School stories in contemporary China, which target a pre- and early-adolescent readership, frequently evoke representations of girlhood and boyhood in normative gender terms. The present article considers issues of femininity and gender in "Tomboy Dai An" ("Jia Xiaozi Dai An"), one among a series of commercially successful…