The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture

Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of the print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations. Offering five distinct sections, this volume will: • Familiarize students and beginning scholars with key concepts and main methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature. • Describe the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children. • Consider the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content. • Map how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice. • Explore the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting new issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature. Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.