The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature

by Clémentine Beauvais (Editor), Maria Nikolajeva (Editor)

Time has passed since 'having a PhD in children's literature' was a funny joke in You've Got Mail. Children's literature research is now one of the most dynamic fields of literary criticism and of education, and has a bright future ahead - as children's writers and publishers invent yet more forms of literature for young people, and researchers find yet more sophisticated ways of exploring them. This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children's literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children's poetry, picturebooks and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature.


Introduction, Maria Nikolajeva and Clémentine Beauvais
Part I: Contemporary directions in children’s literature scholarship
1. Teaching the conflicts: Diverse responses to diverse children’s books, Karen Coats
2. Posthumanism: Rethinking ‘the human’ in modern children’s literature, Victoria Flanagan
3. Animal studies, Zoe Jaques
4. Spatiality in fantasy for children, Jane Carroll
5. A question of scale: Zooming out and zooming in on feminist ecocriticism, Alice Curry
6. Age studies and children’s literature, Vanessa Joosen
7. Carnality in adolescent literature, Lydia Kokkola
8. Cognitive narratology and adolescent fiction, Roberta Seelinger Trites
9. Empirical approaches to place and the construction of adolescent identities, Erin Spring
10. Picturebooks and situated readers: The intersections of text, image, culture and response, Evelyn Arizpe
11. Re-memorying: A new phenomenological methodology in children’s literature studies, Alison Waller
Part II: Contemporary trends in children’s and young adult literature
12. Canons and canonicity, Anja Müller
13. Seriality in children’s literature, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
14. Counterfactual historical fiction for children and young adults, Catherine Butler
15. Pattern, texture and print: New technology, old aesthetic in contemporary picturebook-making, Martin Salisbury
16. Telling stories in different formats: New directions in digital stories for children, Junko Yokota
17. Multimodality and multiliteracies: Production and reception, Margaret Mackey
18. Serendipity, independent publishing and translation flow: Recent translations for children in the UK, Gillian Lathey
19. The picturebook in instructed foreign language learning contexts, Sandie Mourão
Part III: Unmapped territories
20. Next of kin: ‘The child’ and ‘the adult’ in children’s literature theory today and tomorrow, Clémentine Beauvais
21. Critical plant studies and children’s literature, Lydia Kokkola
22. Health, sickness and literature for children, Jean Webb
23. Evolutionary criticism and children’s literature, Maria Nikolajeva
24. The genetic study of children’s literature, Vanessa Joosen
25. Distant reading and thin description, Eugene Giddens
26. Hogwarts versus Svalbard: Cultures, literacies and game adaptations of children’s literature, Andrew Burn
27. Hybrid novels for children and young adults, Eve Tandoi, 28. Cyberspace and story: The impact of digital media on printed children’s books, Victoria Flanagan.

500 pages, Hardcover

Published October 1, 2017

About the author

I was born in Paris in 1989 and though I started to read children’s books pretty early, I somehow never stopped. As a result, I’ve become a writer, reader and student of children’s literature. I’ve now been living and studying in Cambridge (UK) for seven years and have become a doctor. Well, not the type that saves people’s lives. The type that scribbles ‘PhD’ after their name and rambles on about beauty, truth and the value of (all) literature. Worth striving for, I think! More about my academic work here.

The other thing I do is write books – children’s books, surprisingly enough. In fact, it’s not ‘the other thing’. It’s the first thing I ever did, really – long before I heard that you could actually analyse books for a living, I wanted to write books for a living. So I started writing, and ultimately getting published – in French first, and now in English as well. My first series of children’s books in English, led by self-made superheroine Sesame Seade, is being published in 2013 by Hodder Children’s Books!

I am represented by Kirsty McLachlan of David Godwin Associates.

‘How’s your name pronounced???!!!!!’

Clementeen Bovay.

But that’s not even all there is to it. My full name is Clémentine Morgane Mélusine Hécate Beauvais.

As Sesame Seade would have it: ‘Seriously! Parents!’

- from her website