Children's Literature

This essay argues that the compelling figure of Mary, Queen of Scots represented in conventional schoolroom textbooks inspired Jane Austen, Queen Victoria and Marjory Fleming to write counter-narratives about her life. These examples of private writing both absorb and resist the ideologies of nation, gender and causation that official histories promote.

The cultivated garden, centered on the arbor and bordered by fences, was seen as a training ground for children in moral tales written in late 18th and early 19th century England, and through the lessons learned in that safe space their unruly temperaments could be transformed into the moral order of a virtuous life.

Discussing "orientalism" in Eight Cousins, this essay investigates how Rose's encounters with foreign objects and others condition Rose to understand herself as both exoticized and superior. Linking the transition from girlhood to womanhood to the movement from excluded immigrant to American citizen, Eight Cousins explores female citizenship as a negotiation between assimilation and defiance of convention.

Readers frequently have wondered if Oscar Wilde's fairy tales were intended for adults or for children. Through its analysis of "The Devoted Friend" (1888), this essay describes Wilde's promotion of a moral code consistent with his developing socialist politics to both children and adults in Victorian England.

While it received dismal reviews from its critics, Judy Blume's novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself (1977), may be considered one of the most compelling representations of how young people approach an ultimately ineffable historical event and attempt to mourn the traumatic loss it has incurred.

This essay examines three critically neglected picturebooks of Umberto Eco and Eugenio Carmi produced between the 60s and 90s. It adopts a semiotic approach to show how these books resist dominant ideologies, arguing that the interanimation of words and images promotes the ideals of disobedience, the collectivity, and active interpretive engagement.

This essay analyzes the intersecting influences of nostalgia and the Little Golden Books in current American popular culture through the marketing, collecting, and recycling of the books' idealized images of the 1940s and '50s.

A Series of Unfortunate Events depicts a virtually genderless society, in that characters express themselves in ways largely free of male/female stereotypes; nonetheless, predatory forms of male sexuality circumscribe female agency. Intriguingly, Handler opens a space for feminine resistance to male desire through promiscuous deployments of literary allusions, which highlight female agency in subverting male desire.

Fans of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series have written new stories featuring the characters; many of these stories, called "slash," are homoerotic. This article examines a number of online slash stories, and discusses the potential for fans, especially teens, to experiment with non-heteronormative discourses through the medium of Potter fanfiction.