Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature is the first scholarly volume on the topic, connecting children's literature to the burgeoning discipline of food studies. Following the lead of historians like Mark Kurlansky, Jeffrey Pilcher and Massimo Montanari, who use food as a fundamental node for understanding history, the essays in this volume present food as a multivalent signifier in children’s literature, and make a strong argument for its central place in literature and literary theory. Written by some of the most respected scholars in the field, the essays between these covers tackle texts from the nineteenth century (Rudyard Kipling’s Kim) to the contemporary (Dave Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series), the U.S. multicultural (Asian-American) to the international (Ireland, Brazil, Mexico). Spanning genres such as picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children’s cookbooks, contributors utilize a variety of approaches, including archival research, cultural studies, formalism, gender studies, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, race studies, structuralism, and theology. Innovative and wide-ranging, Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature provides us with a critical opportunity to puzzle out the significance of food in children’s literature.

Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature is the first scholarly volume on the topic, connecting children's literature to the burgeoning discipline of food studies. Following the lead of historians like Mark Kurlansky, Jeffrey Pilcher and Massimo Montanari, who use food as a fundamental node for understanding history, the essays in this volume present food as a multivalent signifier in children’s literature, and make a strong argument for its central place in literature and literary theory. Written by some of the most respected scholars in the field, the essays between these covers tackle texts from the nineteenth century (Rudyard Kipling’s Kim) to the contemporary (Dave Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series), the U.S. multicultural (Asian-American) to the international (Ireland, Brazil, Mexico). Spanning genres such as picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children’s cookbooks, contributors utilize a variety of approaches, including archival research, cultural studies, formalism, gender studies, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, race studies, structuralism, and theology. Innovative and wide-ranging, Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature provides us with a critical opportunity to puzzle out the significance of food in children’s literature.

Explores various facets of creating a vibrant YA reading community such as inquiry-based learning, promoting and motivating reading, collection management, understanding multiple intelligences, accepting diverse beliefs, and acting as a change agent to name a few.

This book is designed to prepare K-12 preservice and inservice teachers to address the social, cultural, and critical issues of our times through the use of multicultural children's books. It will be used as a core textbook in courses on multicultural children's literature and as a supplement in courses on children's literature and social studies teaching methods. It can also be used as a supplement in courses on literacy, reading, language arts, and multicultural education.

In order to place criticism into the discussion of children's literature, the author explores the writings of professors who have laid the groundwork in critical theory for all literature, explaining what literary criticism is, how it works, and why it is an important part of studying any literature. She introduces the prominent schools of literary criticism and shows how her students in children's literature classes, and teachers in the field, have become critics in their own right. Thebook contains brief introductions to some classroom practices which evolved from teachers reading critical theory, helping to create role models for others who wish to develop a program of critical theory in the elementary schools. The author includes extensive discussions of issues such as canon formation, realism in literature, and response theory, striving to introduce her readers to criticism to suggest its role in shaping all readers' responses to children's stories. She also encouragesthem to first be real readers who enjoy listening to the author's story before turning to someone else's theories about literature and searching for critical answers that fit their personal responses. A glossary of literary terms for new readers of criticism is included as well as an extensive bibliography for further reading on the topics discussed.

This work provides students of children's literature with a comprehensible and easy-to-use analytical tool kit, showing through concrete demonstration how each tool might best be used to examine aesthetic rather than educational approaches to children's literature. Contemporary literary theories discussed include semiotics, hermeneutics, structuralism, narratology, psychoanalysis, reader-response, feminist, and postcolonial theory, each adjusted to suit the specifics of children's literature.

Food is a signifier of power for both adults and children, a sign of both inclusion and exclusion and of conformity and resistance. Many academic disciplines—from sociology to literary studies—have studied food and its function as a complex social discourse, and the wide variety of approaches to the topic provides multidisciplinary frames for understanding the construction and uses of food in all types of media, including children’s literature. Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature is a survey of food’s function in children’s texts, showing how the sociocultural contexts of food reveal children’s agency. Authors Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard examine texts that vary from historical to contemporary, noncanonical to classics, and Anglo-American to multicultural traditions, including a variety of genres, formats, and audiences: realism, fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, YA novels, and film. Table Lands offers a unified approach to studying food in a wide variety of texts for children. Spanning nearly 150 years of children’s literature, Keeling and Pollard’s analysis covers a selection of texts that show the omnipresence of food in children’s literature and culture and how they vary in representations of race, region, and class, due to the impact of these issues on food. Furthermore, they include not only classic children’s books, such as Winnie-the-Pooh, but recent award-winning multicultural novels as well as cookbooks and even one film, Pixar’s Ratatouille.