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…

Histories of lexicography acknowledge that the original purpose of English dictionary-making was pedagogical. Although children's dictionaries are widely regarded as a 20th-century genre, several dictionaries were specifically developed for children as early as the 18th and 19th centuries. Moreover, these dictionaries were ideologically adapted…

Afrofuturism often acts as an experiential portal that guides readers to reflect on the current state of the world, to hypothesize about the trajectory of society, and to challenge any possible future that continues the subjugation of Black people. As a genre that is concerned with the elevation and liberation of Black people, Afrofuturism aligns…

This paper explores the American Girl book series and its relation to the history of American education and the school's role in the creation of the ideal American girl. Focused on the Kirsten Larson series of American Girl books, this paper explores how the settler grammars that characterize Kirsten's encounters with an "Indian girl"…

Female characters in many African folktales are often perceived as voiceless and peripheral, playing the role of passive advisors and nurturers in contrast to the physically stronger and more active male characters. Some African scholars have disagreed with this perception, asserting that the female characters are stronger than their male…

Situated within the changing economic and political contexts of China's modernization and globalization, children's fantasy novels prove to be apt vehicles for exploring the plights and challenges that women and girls face in the new millennium in China. This article provides a feminist critique of two contemporary Chinese children's fantasy…

Over the past two decades children's picture books dealing with the Australian experience during the First World War have sought to balance a number of thematic imperatives. The increasingly sentimentalised construct of the Australian soldier as a victim of trauma, the challenge of providing a moral lesson that reflects both modern ideological…

This paper reads the U.K. Government's "fundamental British values" project alongside two children's Gothic novels, "Coram Boy" (2000) by Jamila Gavin and "City of Ghosts" (2009) by Bali Rai. In 2011 the U.K. Government outlined what it described as "fundamental British values" (FBV), making it a requirement…

Though critics have debated the gendered ideologies at work in the ballet book genre, discussion so far has overlooked how race shapes the meanings of such stories and the ways that stereotypes about black females have caused them to be excluded from representation in both the world of classical dance and ballet stories. This essay provides a…

This article discusses contemporary American school stories that appear to advocate learning and literacy as a democratic good, but actually undermine democratic possibilities by teaching young readers to think of academic inquiry as a means to selfish, petty ends. Since "learning" and "literacy" are catchwords for educators…

This article examines four prominent young adult novels about bisexual protagonists: Julie Anne Peters's "It's Our Prom (So Deal With It)" (2012), Brent Hartinger's Double Feature: "Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies/Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies" (2007), Lili Wilkinson's "Pink" (2009), and Sara Ryan's…

This article examines the political polarization between Republicans and Islamists in Turkey as reflected in the peritexts of recent translations of world children's literature. This is reflected in terms of van Dijk's notions of an us vs them binarism, where a positive in-group is opposed to a negative out-group representation. In this way, the…

This paper considers the issue of child agency in Mildred D. Taylor's 1976 novel "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" using a critical corpus linguistics framework based on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. The novel has long received praise for its portrayal of child agency in a hostile racist society as well as its depiction of a…

The purpose of the present study is to investigate how contemporary Korea and its culture are portrayed in children's picture books published in the United States. Our analysis of the representation of Korean culture in text and illustrations was based on a sample of 33 picture books written in English and published in the US between 1990 and…

In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Bahamas was simultaneously celebrated and denounced in the US. Damaging facts about Columbus and the impact of his voyages were aired along with demands for truth and change. This study analyzes the power relationships and political ideology of picturebooks about Columbus published…