Children's Literature (edinburgh Critical Guides To Literature)

Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of literatures. The volumes will initiate and deepen the reader’s understanding of key literary movements, periods and genres, and consider debates that inform the past, present and future of literary study. Resources such as glossaries of key terms and details of archives and internet sites are also provided, making each volume a comprehensive critical guide. Each chapter focuses on one of the main genres of children’s literature: fables, fantasy, adventure stories, moral tales, family stories, the school story, and poetry. M. O. Grenby shows how these forms have evolved over three hundred years as well as asking why most children’s books, even today, continue to fall into one or other of these generic categories. Why, for instance, has fantasy been so appealing to both Victorian and twenty-first-century children? Are the religious and moral stories written in the eighteenth century really so different from the teenage problem novels of today? The book answers questions like these with a combination of detailed analysis of particular key texts and a broad survey of hundreds of children’s books, both famous and forgotten. Key Features • The first concise history of children’s literature to be published for more than a decade • Extensive coverage of children’s literature, across genres, continents and from the beginnings of the form to Harry Potter and Philip Pullman • Links close reading of texts with the historical and cultural context of their production and reception M. O. Grenby is Reader in Children’s Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He is a co-editor of Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (2008) and of The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (2008). ISBN 978 0 7486 2274 0 Cover design: Michael Chatfield M. O. Grenby Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk Edinburgh Critical Guides This critical guide provides a concise yet comprehensive history of British and North American children’s literature from its seventeenth-century origins to the present day. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Edinburgh Critical Guides M. O. Grenby Grenby CHILDREN’S LITERATURE CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Pantone 152 Children’s Literature Edi