In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are grappling with the legacies of past centuries and their cascading effects upon children and all people. We realize anew how imperialism, globalization, industrialization, and revolution continue to reshape our world and that of new generations. At a volatile moment, this collection asks how twenty-first century literature and related media represent and shape the contemporary child, childhood, and youth. Because literary representations construct ideal childhoods as well as model the rights, privileges, and respect afforded to actual young people, this collection surveys examples from popular culture and from scholarly practice. Chapters investigate the human rights of children in literature and international policy; the potential subjective agency and power of the child; the role models proposed for young people; the diverse identities children embody and encounter; and the environmental well-being of future human and nonhuman generations. As a snapshot of our developing historical moment, this collection identifies emergent trends, considers theories and critiques of childhood and literature, and observes how new technologies and paradigms are destabilizing past conventions of storytelling and lived experience.

This 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 Looking at classic texts for young audiences and at less widely-read and unpublished material (across genres including poetry, fiction, historical fiction or biography, picturebooks, and children’s television), essays foreground the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 spectacle, self, and specularity across the twentieth-century; question tropes of childhood; explore identity and displacement in narrating history and culture; and elevate children as makers of literary culture. A major intent of the volume is to approach literary culture not just as produced by adults for consumption by children but also as co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers.

The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period’s newly established children’s book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

Building on recent critical work, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of the nature and forms of medieval and early modern childhoods, viewed through literary cultures. Its five groups of thematic essays range across a spectrum of disciplines, periods, and locations, from cultural anthropology and folklore to performance studies and the history of science, and from Anglo-Saxon burial sites to colonial America. Contributors include several renowned writers for children. The opening group of essays, Educating Children, explores what is perhaps the most powerful social engine for the shaping of a child. Performing Childhood addresses children at work and the role of play in the development of social imitation and learning. Literatures of Childhood examines texts written for children that reveal alternative conceptions of parent/child relations. In Legacies of Childhood, expressions of grief at the loss of a child offer a window into the family’s conceptions and values. Finally, Fictionalizing Literary Cultures for Children considers the real, material child versus the fantasy of the child as a subject.

Over twenty years after the publication of her groundbreaking work, Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels, Roberta Seelinger Trites returns to analyze how literature for the young still provides one outlet in which feminists can offer girls an alternative to sexism. Supplementing her previous work in the linguistic turn, Trites employs methodologies from the material turn to demonstrate how feminist thinking has influenced literature for the young in the last two decades. She interrogates how material feminism can expand our understanding of maturation and gender—especially girlhood—as represented in narratives for preadolescents and adolescents. Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature applies principles behind material feminisms, such as ecofeminism, intersectionality, and the ethics of care, to analyze important feminist thinking that permeates twenty-first-century publishing for youth. The structure moves from examinations of the individual to examinations of the individual in social, environmental, and interpersonal contexts. The book deploys ecofeminism and the posthuman to investigate how embodied individuals interact with the environment and via the extension of feministic ethics how people interact with each other romantically and sexually. Throughout the book, Trites explores issues of identity, gender, race, class, age, and sexuality in a wide range of literature for young readers, such as Kate DiCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park. She demonstrates how shifting cultural perceptions of feminism affect what is happening both in publishing for the young and in the academic study of literature for children and adolescents.

Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods explores the construction of the child and the development of texts for children in the nineteenth century through the application of fresh theoretical approaches and attention to aspects of literary childhoods that have only recently begun to be illuminated. This scope enables examination of the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. The century was also distinctive for the rise of the children’s magazine, and this book broadens the definition of literary cultures to include magazines produced both by, and for, young people. The volume examines how the child and family are conceptualised, how children are positioned as readers in genres including the domestic novel, school story, Robinsonade, and fantasy fiction, how literary childhoods are written and politicised, and how childhood intersects with perceptions of animals and the natural environment. The range of chapters in this collection and the texts they consider demonstrates the variability and fluidity of literary cultures and nineteenth-century childhoods.

This volume examines changing boundaries between childhood and adulthood in British society and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century − where these age boundaries are widely debated, policed, and contested − to investigate alternatives to conventional ideas of growing up. Building on observations, especially in children’s literature criticism, that human growth is shaped by a grand narrative that privileges adulthood, and on terminologies of non-normative growth, particularly in queer theory, this monograph develops growing sideways as a concept that queers this grand narrative by destabilising childhood and adulthood, and the boundaries between them. The concept is refined through close readings of twenty-first century British children’s literature, television series, film, and participatory events, troubling age boundaries via specific strategies in three conceptual areas: appearance, play, and space. Exploring power structures around age and gender, this monograph traces growing sideways as a distinct and important alternative discourse of human growth.