Project MUSE®: The Lion and the Unicorn - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Lion and the Unicorn.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1977) through current issueLatest Articles: The Lion and the UnicornTWOProject MUSE®The Lion and the Unicorn1080-65630147-2593Latest articles in The Lion and the Unicorn. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Children's Literature and Digital Humanities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980313
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Literary scholarship in the twenty-first century has been reshaped in various ways by the implementation of tools and methods from digital humanities (DH). Digital archives have helped to make texts and images more widely available, and several come with tools that support scholars in their research: from simple search functions and PDFs to fully downloadable text files, metadata and databases, and hyperlinks with contextual information. Digital databases support researchers in exploring trends and drawing links between source materials. So-called distant reading methods have laid bare aspects and trends that usually escape human attention (Moretti). Computer programs can assist humans in detecting aspects that are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallIntroduction: Children's Literature and Digital Humanities2026-02-01text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Children's Literature and Digital Humanities2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®300952026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Analyzing Representation and Youth Agency with the Environmental Comics Database
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980314
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The accelerating global climate crisis and other environmental issues have increasingly disrupted the lives of children and teenagers worldwide. In the face of these daunting challenges, youth have emerged as the new face of the contemporary environmental movement. Frequently referred to as "Generation Greta" after Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, these children and teens have garnered widespread praise for their advocacy. For instance, fourteen-year-old Mari Copeny received the Changemaker Award at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards for raising awareness of the Flint water crisis (Grein). The following year, the youth-led environmental organization Mother Nature Cambodia won the Right Livelihood Award, also
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallAnalyzing Representation and Youth Agency with the Environmental Comics Database2026-02-01text/htmlen-USAnalyzing Representation and Youth Agency with the Environmental Comics Database2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®700872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Charting the Composition of British Series of Children's Classics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980315
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The concept of a classic remains of considerable interest and importance within the context of British children's literature. Following policy reforms, classic texts occupy a central position in the English primary curriculum and are recommended as books that should be used in literacy lessons because of their perceived value; successive education secretaries have positioned classics as crucial for improving children's literacy skills and reducing educational inequality (Gove; Morgan). Classics are equally valued by publishers, as children's departments of British bookshops feature crowded shelves and standalone displays of classics that are populated by different editions of individual texts. The presence, or even
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallCharting the Composition of British Series of Children's Classics2026-02-01text/htmlen-USCharting the Composition of British Series of Children's Classics2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®799412026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Educational or Entertaining? Topic Preferences in Best-Selling Chinese and British Picture Books
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980316
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Preschool children learn about the wider world through picture book reading (Hunt et al. 11), so analyzing picture book consumption can ascertain the information and messages they receive (Amos and Amos 9). The content of picture books can be clustered and identified as topics and themes such as realistic fiction, fantasy, nonfiction, and other genres (Brenna et al.). Usually, prevailing topics flow and vary between countries and cultures due to diverse social and cultural influences (Patten 476). Themes might also change over time, based on the publisher's initiative, market response, social policies, or significant cultural or historical events.The UK picture book industry has a rich heritage of picture books
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallEducational or Entertaining? Topic Preferences in Best-Selling Chinese and British Picture Books2026-02-01text/htmlen-USEducational or Entertaining? Topic Preferences in Best-Selling Chinese and British Picture Books2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®1478312026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Readers Negotiating Genre: Semantic Space in Children's Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980317
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The inquiry into the nature of literary genre is vast and elusive, lacking definitive answers. As far back as 1938, the Russian philologist Boris Yarkho astutely observed the absence of a systematic approach to genre study, affecting both genre definitions and classifications (50). This observation remains relevant today, as the understanding of literary genres continues to present challenges. In this article, we explore children's literature genres using computational methods to assess their potential in modeling theoretical genre concepts while acknowledging the absence of definitive resolutions.James Gifford argues that we gain more from fluid definitions than we lose from rigid categorization. Leiderman notes
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallReaders Negotiating Genre: Semantic Space in Children's Literature2026-02-01text/htmlen-USReaders Negotiating Genre: Semantic Space in Children's Literature2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®884492026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse at Scale and in the Archives: Distant Viewing, Automated Annotation, and Formal Aesthetics in 10,516 Comic Strips
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980318
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Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse (1979–2008) is a long-running comic strip about the lives and tribulations of the Patterson family, who live in a fictional suburb of Toronto, Ontario. Johnston's strip has been both critically and commercially successful, earning industry awards throughout its forty-year syndicated run in over two thousand newspapers globally, even spawning animated specials and television series in the process. Critical attention has rightly been paid to Johnston's contributions in regard to key themes, prominent characters within the Patterson family, and significant storylines.1But, with For Better or For Worse completed, there remains an opportunity to consider the strip in its entirety
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallLynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse at Scale and in the Archives: Distant Viewing, Automated Annotation, and Formal Aesthetics in 10,516 Comic Strips2026-02-01text/htmlen-USLynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse at Scale and in the Archives: Distant Viewing, Automated Annotation, and Formal Aesthetics in 10,516 Comic Strips2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®939552026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Forum: Digital Resources in Children's Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980319
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One of the barriers to entry into digital humanities (DH) is often the onerous and time-consuming nature of assembling a digital data set. Depending on the size of the corpus and the availability of texts, amassing, cleaning, and preparing data can add years of work to a project. For beginners, this often means stumbling through the process, making costly errors or assumptions which can cause setbacks or an increased workload. Further, assembling a dataset often requires networking and collaborating with others; collaborating with institutions that hold materials can be immensely rewarding but can also add layers of bureaucracy and institutional delays to the process.At the same time, it has become increasingly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallForum: Digital Resources in Children's Literature2026-02-01text/htmlen-USForum: Digital Resources in Children's Literature2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®74902026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Digitization of Frankfurt Goethe University's Self-Contained Children's Book Collections
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980320
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The children's book collections of the JCS University Library's Digital Collections are a collection of retro-digitized children's books from four historical, self-contained collections (Benjamin, Hobrecker, Rümann, von der Marwitz).Size: Around 2.6 TB. 260,000 pages in around 800 already-published volumes.Period: Late seventeenth century to early twentieth century.Language(s): English, French, German.Format(s): jpeg files or PDFMetadata: Descriptive; for example, primarily bibliographic metadata and structural data are available via IIIF or as METS/MODS (OAI-PMH Interface).Usage rights: The files are published under the Public Domain Mark 1.0 and thus can be used freely.Location:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallDigitization of Frankfurt Goethe University's Self-Contained Children's Book Collections2026-02-01text/htmlen-USDigitization of Frankfurt Goethe University's Self-Contained Children's Book Collections2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®279522026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Digitizing African American Children's Poetry in Chicory Magazine
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980321
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Chicory was a magazine that published the mostly unedited poetry, writing, and art of working-class African American residents of Baltimore, Maryland, from 1966–83.Size: 148 issues of Chicory magazine, 249 gigabytesPeriod: 1966–83Language(s): English, SwahiliFormat(s): PDF, TIFF, text filesMetadata: Metadata includes identifier, title, creator, subject, description, publisher, holding institution, collection, issue date, file type, format, rights, access rights, and language.Usage Rights: This item may be protected under Title 17 of the US Copyright Law. It is made available by Enoch Pratt Free Library for noncommercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please visit
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallDigitizing African American Children's Poetry in Chicory Magazine2026-02-01text/htmlen-USDigitizing African American Children's Poetry in Chicory Magazine2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®235722026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980322
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This is a collection of digitized volumes (in PDF) of the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, together with structured metadata and full text extracted from those volumes.Size: 58 volumes; +/- 48,000 children's book reviewsPeriod: 1947–2005Language(s): English (US)Format(s): PDF, CSV, textMetadata for books reviewed includes: author, title, reviewer name (if available), illustrator, publisher, date, page numbers, ISBN (sometimes more than one), list price, recommendation (1953 onward), and age level.Usage rights: Data from 1947 forward is available in open access (without a license), with the following restrictions: the most recent ten years are available only through a subscription to the Bulletin or to a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallThe Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)2026-02-01text/htmlen-USThe Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®245602026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Japanese Modern Textbook Digital Archive: The Collection Overview from the User's Perspective
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980323
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The Japanese Modern Textbook Digital Archive contains a dataset of mostly prewar Japanese school textbooks and other related educational materials.Size: 44,828 items (26,191 open-access, full-text copies)Period: Mid-nineteenth century to the 1950s.Language(s): Japanese, with small subset of foreign language textbooks (English, German).Format(s): image-based PDFMetadata: DC-NDL (RDF)Usage Rights: Copyright free under the CC BY License.Location: https://www.nier.go.jp/library/textbooks/index-en.htmlDeposit: There are three major storage locations for this material:Japanese Modern Textbook Digital Archive https://www.nier.go.jp/library/textbooks/Rare Materials Digital Collection
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallJapanese Modern Textbook Digital Archive: The Collection Overview from the User's Perspective2026-02-01text/htmlen-USJapanese Modern Textbook Digital Archive: The Collection Overview from the User's Perspective2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®425512026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01The G-Book Projects: Digital Humanities and the Promotion of Diversity in Children's Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980324
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G-Book is the first transnational European online bibliography of a wide selection of children's books that are gender positive in terms of the models they present to young people.Size: 88.6 megabytesPeriod: Books included in the bibliography were predominantly published between 1982 and 2021, with a focus on the last two decades.Language(s): Bulgarian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, English, French, German, Italian, Slovenian, and Spanish.Format(s): Image data is available in .png or .jpeg; there are text files as well as PDF and HTML files.Metadata: Bibliographic content is indexed and organized under the following headings: title, author, publisher, year of publication, keywords, age group, language. Other content
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallThe G-Book Projects: Digital Humanities and the Promotion of Diversity in Children's Literature2026-02-01text/htmlen-USThe G-Book Projects: Digital Humanities and the Promotion of Diversity in Children's Literature2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®426472026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01The Saga Archive: Mapping and Visualizing a Swedish Children's Book Series
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980325
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The Saga Archive Project documents the activities of the Swedish publishing house Svensk läraretidnings förlag (the Swedish Teachers' Magazine's Publishing House) in a relational database which will be made available online in 2026. It includes digitized archival descriptions and indexes of the physical Saga Archive, detailed bibliographies of the publishing house's publications, and a selection of digitized material from the Saga Archive and related special collections.Size: At the launch of the database in 2026, at least ten thousand pages.Period: Circa 1880s–1980s.Language(s): Swedish only. Information texts may eventually also be made available in English.Format(s): A database dump in SQL format and images in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallThe Saga Archive: Mapping and Visualizing a Swedish Children's Book Series2026-02-01text/htmlen-USThe Saga Archive: Mapping and Visualizing a Swedish Children's Book Series2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®487212026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01A Child's Garden of Data: Computational Analysis of Children's Literature with the HathiTrust Digital Library and Research Center
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980326
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The resource is a collection of volumes of children's literature found in the HathiTrust Digital Library that provides access to full-text files for computational analysis along with metadata and "Extracted Features" (such as word counts) for all volumes and pages in the collection.Size: The data set includes 936 volumes. The full-text corpus is approximately 150MB, and the "Extracted Features" data are approximately 50MB.Period: 1889–2020.Language(s): All volumes are in English, though many are translations or retellings of stories from non-English languages and cultures.Format(s): The full-text corpus is available as text files. The "Extracted Features" data are available as JSON files.Metadata: Standard
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallA Child's Garden of Data: Computational Analysis of Children's Literature with the HathiTrust Digital Library and Research Center2026-02-01text/htmlen-USA Child's Garden of Data: Computational Analysis of Children's Literature with the HathiTrust Digital Library and Research Center2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®305662026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children's Literature Danielle Russell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980327
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Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children's Literature expands the existing scholarship on the subject by exploring not only the tangible dimensions of space but also its metaphorical implications. The edited collection is comprised of nine chapters divided into three sections, with the child protagonist's spatial agency and her creation of resistant spaces as the overarching themes explored by the contributors. The volume is commendable for presenting fresh perspectives on space in works of children's literature with which the book's intended audience is most likely familiar.In an insightful introduction, Danielle Russell underscores the multilayered significance of space and its physical, cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallContaining Childhood: Space and Identity in Children's Literature Danielle Russell (review)2026-02-01text/htmlen-USContaining Childhood: Space and Identity in Children's Literature Danielle Russell (review)2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®106062026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01The Velveteen Rabbit at 100 ed. by Lisa Rowe Fraustino (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980328
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The Velveteen Rabbit at 100 provides a rich array of thoughtfully researched and contextualized analyses of Margery Williams's 1922 children's book. Its chapters address the book's illustrations, its adaptations across cultures, and its engagement with concepts of materiality, ontology, and relationality. It also contains innovative essays that incorporate queer studies readings as well as inspiringly disruptive perspectives that critique the oppressive functions and "traditions" of Whiteness in this text and other children's "classics" (Hinton 225).Lisa Rowe Fraustino's substantive introduction to The Velveteen Rabbit at 100 provides a thorough overview of this text's significance in the cultural imaginations of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallThe Velveteen Rabbit at 100 ed. by Lisa Rowe Fraustino (review)2026-02-01text/htmlen-USThe Velveteen Rabbit at 100 ed. by Lisa Rowe Fraustino (review)2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®123012026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Queer Oz: L. Frank Baum's Trans Tales & Other Astounding Adventures in Sex & Gender by Tison Pugh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980329
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In his nuanced reading of John Donovan's 1969 young adult novel I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, Derritt Mason argues for "a model for creative and potentially subversive reading practices," one that acknowledges "the pleasurable perversions of queer childhood" (42). Although children's and young adult literature critics are increasingly turning toward engagements with overtly queer texts—books with characters whose sexuality and/or gender are acknowledged on page as not straight or cisgender—Mason's call reminds us that locating queerness in other kinds of textual longings is still a practice that bears fruit(s). This work of locating the queer question mark is taken up by Tison Pugh, whose book Queer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallQueer Oz: L. Frank Baum's Trans Tales & Other Astounding Adventures in Sex & Gender by Tison Pugh (review)2026-02-01text/htmlen-USQueer Oz: L. Frank Baum's Trans Tales & Other Astounding Adventures in Sex & Gender by Tison Pugh (review)2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®106822026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01At Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Jennifer Griffiths (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980331
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In the opening pages of At Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post-Civil Rights Era Jennifer Griffiths poses an essential question about the plays and novels she brings together in her chapters. As she analyzes works which explore the lives of young, Black artists navigating their worlds and personal and creative selves in a post-civil rights environment, Griffiths asks, "What do these literary texts offer us when we consider the transitional post-civil rights period through the lens of a transitional stage in individual development?" (5). In her close-readings of her selections' protagonists and through consistent grounding of their stories in the nonfictional contexts that inspired them
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallAt Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Jennifer Griffiths (review)2026-02-01text/htmlen-USAt Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Jennifer Griffiths (review)2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®108872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Enduring Questions: Using Jewish Children's Literature in Classrooms by David Bloome et al. (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980332
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Enduring Questions encapsulates, albeit unintentionally, many of the tensions within the field of Jewish Studies in the twenty-first century. The authors organize the book around large philosophical questions such as "What is Love?" (Chapter 3) and "What is Evil?" (Chapter 6) in service of their argument that Jewish children's literature can and should be used in classrooms "as an opportunity for all children, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to be philosophers and engage in dialogue and debate about enduring questions" (5). The book also leans heavily on an argument about "Jewish" as a category of diversity and the need for Jewish children's books as part of a multicultural education, drawing on the #WeNeedDiverseBooks
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/201/image/coversmallEnduring Questions: Using Jewish Children's Literature in Classrooms by David Bloome et al. (review)2026-02-01text/htmlen-USEnduring Questions: Using Jewish Children's Literature in Classrooms by David Bloome et al. (review)2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®87992026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01