The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature ed. by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva (review)

Companions are needed both in life and literature. Old companions do not need to be rejected because new ones appear. New companions are not necessarily better than old ones, but they may be different and hence able to offer new perspectives, guide through unexplored fields, and confront or challenge with their surprising queries. This also applies to The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature, compiled and edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva. The two editors have gathered together a team of twenty-four skilled researchers, including themselves. Even though most of them are affiliated with Anglo-American institutions, they still cover a wide range of topics. The Companion is structured in three parts. The first part contains eleven chapters dealing with contemporary directions in children's literature scholarship. Amongst these, there are several related to the larger field of ecocriticism, such as the chapters on posthumanism (Flanagan), animal studies (Jaques), feminist ecocriticism (Curry), and spatiality (Carroll). The large number of chapters concerned with environmental and ecocritical issues is indicative of overall changes within the field of children's literature research. In comparison, The Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature (2009) contains only one chapter on animal and object stories and one on fantasy's alternative geography. It seems that in 2009 these two chapters were samples of "what comes next?"

The second part offers eight chapters on contemporary trends in children's and young adult literature, covering themes of great current interest, such as seriality (Kümmerling-Meibauer), translation (Lathey), and picturebooks in foreign language learning contexts (Mourão). It also covers chapters on what may be the most difficult field to circumscribe, namely digital or multimodal children's literature. More (technically) descriptive than literary explorative, these chapters may prove to be difficult for inexperienced students. Perhaps the field itself has grown too vast and disparate to be covered within a few chapters.

The editors, Beauvais and Nikolajeva, state that their companion first of all seeks to "capture the most recent trends and phenomena in children's and young adult literature itself as well as international research; to anticipate the possible new avenues that research can take" (5). While the current trends and phenomena are considered in the first two parts, new avenues are explored in the third and final part, called "Unmapped Territories." Among the contributors to this part are, in addition to the editors themselves, three scholars who also authored other chapters in the volume (Kokkola, Joosen, and Flanagan). The nine chapters that constitute this part are generally shorter and more suggestive than the other chapters. The topics covered range from distant reading to evolutionary criticism and genetic studies. Regardless of the compelling labels, some of the proposed territories turn out to be less unmapped than one might initially think.

Several chapters in the volume could be put forward as outstanding examples of academic thinking and writing; Vanessa Joosen's chapter on age studies in children's literature is a case in point. Its purpose is "to explore how any age influences the human body, mind and behavior and how relationships between generations are shaped" (79). Joosen clearly states the focus of the chapter, maps the theoretical framework, and provides the readers with an instructive close reading of a selected children's book. Finally, the author calls upon other scholars to pay attention to age in children's literature: "children's literature studies needs to draw more on age studies to address the construction of age for young readers if it does not want to reproduce age-related prejudice naively" (88).

It has been a true delight for the reviewer to discover The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature to be an up-to-date, wide-ranging, and future-oriented companion that can be recommended to a broad audience. It is an inspiring encouragement to map new territories of children's literature or to carefully reconsider and nuance those already sketched.