Clare Bradford

Robyn McCallum

Kerry Mallan

J. Stephens

New World Orders demonstrates how contemporary children's texts draw on utopian and dystopian tropes in their projections of possible futures. In examining a diverse range of international children's literature and film produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors explore the ways in which children's texts respond to social change and global politics, giving shape to children's perceived anxieties and desires. The book argues that children's texts are crucially implicated in shaping the values of their readers.

Utopian Transformations

New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature

Sharyn Pearce

Critical essays on the youth culture and its application in literature.

Texts, Images, and Identities

Youth Cultures

Roderick McGillis

Yan Wu

(Re)Imagining the world: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times considers how writers of fiction for children imagine ‘the world’, not one universal world, but different worlds: imaginary, strange, familiar, even monstrous worlds. The chapters in this collection discuss how fiction for children engages with some of the changes brought about by new technologies, information literacy, consumerism, migration, politics, different family structures, cosmopolitanism, new and old monsters. They also invite us to think about how memory shapes our understanding of the past, and how fiction engages our emotions, our capacity to empathise, and our desire to discover, and what the future may hold. The contributors bring different perspectives from education, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, childhood studies, postmodernism, and the social sciences. With a wide coverage of texts from different countries, and scholarly and lively discussions, this collection is itself a testament to the power of the human imagination and the significance of children’s literature in the education of young people. ​

Children's literature's response to changing times

(Re)imagining the World

The contributors to this volume present challenging ways of applying critical ideas and theoretical frameworks to the crucial issues that surround youth and the cultures they inhabit as evidenced in their literature, magazines, computer games, films, television programs, popular music, and fashion.

Desire, pleasure, and romance : post-feminism and other seductions -- The beauty dilemma : gendered bodies and aesthetic judgement -- Gendered cyber-bodies : the dilemma of technological 'existenz' -- Queer spaces in a straight world : the dilemma of sexual identity -- No laughing matter ... or is it? : the serio-comic dilemma of gender.

Gender Dilemmas in Children's Fiction

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book argues for the significance of theory for reading texts written and produced for young people. Integrating perspectives from across feminism, ecocriticism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism, it demonstrates how these inform approaches to a range of contemporary literature and film.

Kerry Mallan

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