Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods

“Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods is a timely intervention into children’s literature and childhood studies, bringing together robust readings of a range of texts within the context of recent developments in theoretical approaches. The collection includes essays by a number of notable scholars in the field as well as newer voices. The collection will be of use for a wide range of scholars: the question of how childhood is constructed and how scholars can account for the range of childhood experiences is a central one for both disciplines.” 

— Lucy Pearson, Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University,UK and the author of The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970 (Ashgate, 2013)

Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods collection of essays offers innovative methodological and disciplinary approaches to the intersection of Anglophone literary cultures with children and childhoods across the twentieth century. In two acts of re-centering, the volume focuses both on the multiplicity of childhoods and literary cultures and on child agency. Looking at classic texts for young audiences and at less widely-read and unpublished material (across genres including poetry, fi ction, historical fi ction and biography, picturebooks, and children’s television), essays foreground the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts, explore challenges to received notions of childhood, and emphasize the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects. Chapters frame themes of self and specularity across the twentieth-century; question tropes of childhood; explore issues of identity and displacement in narratives of history and culture; and elevate children as makers of literary culture. The volume approaches literary culture not as solely produced by adults for consumption by children but as also co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers.