Project MUSE®: Children's Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Children's Literature.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1972) through current issueLatest Articles: Children's LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Children's Literature1543-33740092-8208Latest articles in Children's Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960685
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During the weeks of winter break that I had set aside to work on the peritext of this volume, I fell ill. With little ability to concentrate, and the final table of contents needed imminently for our editorial assistant to submit to Johns Hopkins University Press on deadline, I considered keeping things simple by organizing the essays either in the order accepted or in chronological order based on the primary texts under discussion. However, it is more interesting to place the essays into some kind of conversation with each other for those readers (if there are any?) who still sit down with the hard copy and read it from cover to cover like a book, giving the writer of the foreword something thoughtful to say about
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallFrom the Editor2025-05-23text/htmlen-USFrom the Editor2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®154812026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Monstrous Guardians: Parenthood and the Gothic in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960686
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The twenty-first century has seen a major upsurge in critical attention to the growing canon of Gothic children's literature, built on the understanding that the uncanny, as it manifests in Gothic generic conventions, provides a uniquely powerful lens through which to view the processes of childhood. Such understanding necessarily invokes psychoanalysis—the unheimlich as we know it being Freudian in origin—and indeed, nearly all existing criticism of Gothic children's literature is explicitly psychoanalytical in nature. This trend, most critics agree, derives equally from the Gothic and from children's literature more generally, as each lends itself to psychoanalytical readings in ways that intersect to create
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallMonstrous Guardians: Parenthood and the Gothic in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book2025-05-23text/htmlen-USMonstrous Guardians: Parenthood and the Gothic in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®591932026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Animals, Children's Literature, and the World of Rays
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960687
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Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, Sukumar Ray, and Satyajit Ray hold a distinguished place as some of the most significant writers of Bengali children's literature.1 Scholarship on the three writers has been extensive,2 but little attention has been paid to the two points I make in this paper: that although the three writers have been studied separately, their texts have not been analyzed in conjunction with one another, and that Bengali children's literature experienced a shift from Chowdhury to Satyajit Ray3 as India moved from a colony of the British Empire to an independent nation. India's evolution from the nineteenth to the twentieth century is encapsulated in the works of the three Rays, as each Ray captures the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallAnimals, Children's Literature, and the World of Rays2025-05-23text/htmlen-USAnimals, Children's Literature, and the World of Rays2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®968172026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23To "Cultivate our Own": Constructing the Tasmanian Miniature in Louisa Meredith's Colonial Literature for Children
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960688
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This paper is multifocal. Our first objective is to reintroduce the work of the Tasmanian author, Louisa Anne Meredith to the international field of children's literature and Romanticism generally as an author worthy of study in her own right.1 Meredith's production spanned poetry, travel writing, botanical illustration, and children's literature, with the latter comprising the most generative and lucrative part of her career. Despite this, her writing for children is entirely out of print.2 Access to her work is kept alive by the archives of Australian state libraries and Tasmanian historical associations that house original prints of her texts, and because her archival materials are scattered around Australia and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallTo "Cultivate our Own": Constructing the Tasmanian Miniature in Louisa Meredith's Colonial Literature for Children2025-05-23text/htmlen-USTo "Cultivate our Own": Constructing the Tasmanian Miniature in Louisa Meredith's Colonial Literature for Children2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®1199072026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23"If You Had Not Been Put in Vinegar": Children's Authority over Time in Homemade Magazines, 1850–1925
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960689
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Children produced a vast array of homemade magazines during the period 1850–1925, which coincides with the rise in popularity of periodicals, notably ones aimed at juvenile readers; in the 1860s and 1870s alone, over one hundred new children's periodicals appeared (Lang 18). I have examined thirty-four homemade magazines and through secondary sources am familiar with twenty others.1 Child editors ranged in age from nine to seventeen, with contributors as young as four years old. The magazines were circulated by children who performed a range of editorial responsibilities as they corralled friends and siblings into writing essays, poems, and serialized stories for periodicals that were shared within social networks
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmall"If You Had Not Been Put in Vinegar": Children's Authority over Time in Homemade Magazines, 1850–19252025-05-23text/htmlen-US"If You Had Not Been Put in Vinegar": Children's Authority over Time in Homemade Magazines, 1850–19252025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®1052972026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Vanquishing the Novum: Fear, Mortality, and Authentic Existence in William Sleator's Singularity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960690
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After years of neglect, William Sleator's novels are finally gaining scholarly attention as landmark works of young adult science fiction.1 Part of this attention has involved a recognition that Sleator's fiction weaves complex philosophical issues into narratives that, on the surface, merely combine memorable representations of science fiction worlds and objects with forthright ethical messages for adolescents. By investigating philosophical subjects that pertain to questions of identity and the challenges of genuine morality, Sleator's fiction complicates, in diverse and productive ways, the generic conventions of young adult science fiction. Of central importance to Sleator's approach to philosophical literature
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallVanquishing the Novum: Fear, Mortality, and Authentic Existence in William Sleator's Singularity2025-05-23text/htmlen-USVanquishing the Novum: Fear, Mortality, and Authentic Existence in William Sleator's Singularity2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®1002442026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23The Mad Woman in the Barnyard: Revealing the Role of Advertising in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960691
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In our opinion, nobody has done justice, artistically, to advertising [ … ].Though the bucolic barnyard on the saltwater farm in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952) seems worlds away from swanky, smoke-and-cocktails midcentury Manhattan, White himself was at home in both spaces. His Maine gentleman farmer existence was financed by the witty, urbane essays he penned for The New Yorker and later Harper's.1 Though much has been written about White as an American essayist, grammarian (Elements of Style, with William Strunk Jr., 1959), and writer of children's novels (in addition to Charlotte's Web, he also wrote Stuart Little, 1945, and The Trumpet of the Swan, 1970), critics have dealt only glancingly with the two
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallThe Mad Woman in the Barnyard: Revealing the Role of Advertising in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web2025-05-23text/htmlen-USThe Mad Woman in the Barnyard: Revealing the Role of Advertising in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®961722026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23The Dark Matter of Children's "Fantastika" Literature: Speculative Entanglements by Chloé Germaine (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960692
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Spending time immersed in this erudite, densely researched, and well-presented exploration of the ways in which a select corpus of young adult fantasy novels analogize and illuminate various aspects of new materialist theories has made me contemplate the multiple meanings of the word "review." Germaine's "diffractive" readings of the fiction through the philosophies and, reciprocally, the philosophies through the fiction, provide ample opportunity to re-view one's own understandings and stances about the implications of the material turn that has swept across multiple disciplines in the first decade of the twenty-first century. To write this review, I read or reread most of the YA fiction Germaine cites; I also
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallThe Dark Matter of Children's "Fantastika" Literature: Speculative Entanglements by Chloé Germaine (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USThe Dark Matter of Children's "Fantastika" Literature: Speculative Entanglements by Chloé Germaine (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®197742026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23The Edinburgh History of Children's Periodicals ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Beth Rodgers, and Michelle J. Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960693
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In their introduction to The Edinburgh History of Children's Periodicals, editors Kristine Moruzi, Beth Rodgers, and Michelle J. Smith explain their project's goals, writing "we hope to better understand children's periodicals and their role in the production and dissemination of ideas about children and childhood. Children's periodicals offer an entry into the experiences and values that are either ascribed to or defined by that group" (8). This book provides an expansive range of essays on the history of children's periodicals, and it makes contributions to studies of childhood and children's print cultures. Its essays cover many time periods and cultures, ranging from examinations of children's periodicals of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallThe Edinburgh History of Children's Periodicals ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Beth Rodgers, and Michelle J. Smith (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USThe Edinburgh History of Children's Periodicals ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Beth Rodgers, and Michelle J. Smith (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®218222026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Tending to the Past: Selfhood and Culture in Children's Narratives about Slavery and Freedom by Karen Michele Chandler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960694
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As Karen Michele Chandler notes (4–5), she borrows the title of her study from Lucille Clifton's poem "i am accused of tending to the past" where Clifton describes the past as something—a living creature, even—that one can shape to form into history. Clifton's imagery of the very aliveness of the past formed as a living creature encompasses the power of history-telling. This recognition that our understanding of the past—of "history"—is something that is created and does not inherently exist on its own is central in Chandler's Tending to the Past. The history-shaping that Chandler examines is in representations of slavery and Reconstruction, and in that regard, she focuses on a curated selection of film and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallTending to the Past: Selfhood and Culture in Children's Narratives about Slavery and Freedom by Karen Michele Chandler (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USTending to the Past: Selfhood and Culture in Children's Narratives about Slavery and Freedom by Karen Michele Chandler (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®143222026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Teaching Black Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism ed. by KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Michele Chandler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960695
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Contemporary critical theories of literature, race, gender, class, rhetoric, reading, and culture intersect throughout KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Michele Chandler's book Teaching Black Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism. The foundational premise of the book is situated upon Rudine Sims Bishop's metaphor asserting that Black American literature for youth can serve as an "anchor, compass, and sail" (358).The volume elevates a Black literary aesthetic within middle and high school classrooms and speculative fiction as an antiracist instructional tool for young adult readers. It includes fifteen chapters that address racialization in real and imaginary realms, specifically explorations of Black
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallTeaching Black Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism ed. by KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Michele Chandler (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USTeaching Black Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism ed. by KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Michele Chandler (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®162492026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Coloring into Existence: Queer of Color Worldmaking in Children's Literature by Isabel Millán (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960696
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In February 2024, a sixteen-year-old Indigenous nonbinary teenager named Nex Benedict died a day after multiple classmates attacked them in a girls' bathroom at their high school in Oklahoma. In the days and weeks following Nex's tragic death, Indigenous and queer of color activists took to social media to decry the violence that nonbinary, trans, and queer Indigenous youth face within settler colonial systems that rarely, if ever, hold perpetrators accountable or see LGBTQIA+ and Two-Spirit children as worthy of saving. Crimes such as these force us to grapple with notions of futurity, prompting scholars Angel Daniel Matos and Jon M. Wargo to ask the following pointed questions: "Which children, which young
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallColoring into Existence: Queer of Color Worldmaking in Children's Literature by Isabel Millán (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USColoring into Existence: Queer of Color Worldmaking in Children's Literature by Isabel Millán (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®175642026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Welcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros's Writings by Cristina Herrera (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960697
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We are welcomed to Cristina Herrera's genre-defying academic monograph, Welcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros's Writings (2024), with the notation that in order to fulfill her scholarly heart's yearning to write about the literary works of Michele Serros, she had to write about Oxnard and, for Herrera, "Oxnard meant pain, rejection, trauma, a past I wanted to leave firmly in the past" (xii). It is not often that a scholar places their emotional cards on the table, largely because, as Herrera points out, to convey emotions, to offer the self as a viable form of knowledge production, means "disrupting the tendency within 'traditional' literary scholarship to separate the author
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallWelcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros's Writings by Cristina Herrera (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USWelcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros's Writings by Cristina Herrera (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®227922026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability by Mary Zaborskis (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960698
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Mary Zaborskis's work on queer childhoods in the context of a range of state and religiously run boarding schools for underprivileged populations in nineteenth- to early twentieth-century North America is both needed and timely. As an institution, the boarding school has accompanied varying forms of policymaking around who has access to full citizenship. As Erving Goffman has asserted, the boarding school is an example of the "total institution" that, as "part residential community, part formal organization" (qtd. in Zaborskis 12), effectively removes the individual from their social and familial spheres and relocates them within an institutional setting. Unlike the prison system, however, the boarding school is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallQueer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability by Mary Zaborskis (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USQueer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability by Mary Zaborskis (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®163032026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Liminal Spaces in Children's and Young Adult Literature: Stories from the In Between ed. by Mark I. West (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960699
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The 2024 volume Liminal Spaces in Children's and Young Adult Literature, edited by Mark I. West, brings together a selection of chapters, divided into two parts. Tackling similar ground to Elizabeth Goodenough's 2003 collection Secret Spaces of Childhood but further developing this theme, the book posits that liminal spaces, as they apply to childhood, may be simultaneously public and private, secret and open. The spaces presented in the book range from libraries and gardens to roads, to take a few examples. Objects also play a part, including cars and suitcases. Authors such as Paula T. Connolly consider how children's writers represent abject human states, such as homelessness, as liminal experiences. Part 1
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallLiminal Spaces in Children's and Young Adult Literature: Stories from the In Between ed. by Mark I. West (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USLiminal Spaces in Children's and Young Adult Literature: Stories from the In Between ed. by Mark I. West (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®167102026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderland and Looking-Glasses by Catherine Butler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960700
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British children's literature has played a critical role in shaping the development of Japanese children's literature as a genre since the late nineteenth century. However, scholarly discourses in both Englishspeaking and Japanese contexts have overlooked this fact. Catherine Butler's British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderland and Looking-Glasses (2023) provides a comprehensive examination of translation, adaptation, and transformation of British children's literature within Japan, emphasizing its influence on the Japanese cultural industry as well as the evolution of Japanese children's literature. A key objective of Butler's work is to expand the scope of English and Japanese scholarship on the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallBritish Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderland and Looking-Glasses by Catherine Butler (review)2025-05-23text/htmlen-USBritish Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderland and Looking-Glasses by Catherine Butler (review)2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®190752026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23Contributors and Editors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960701
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Karen Coats is professor of education and director of the Centre for Research in Children's Literature at the University of Cambridge. She is also a visiting associate professor for the MA program in Children's Literature at Hollins University and professor emerita of English at Illinois State University, where she taught children's and young adult literature for twenty-one years.Lorinda B. Cohoon is an associate professor of English at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses in part on nineteenth-century children's literature and culture.Paula T. Connolly is a professor and the coordinator of Children's Literature Programs in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/214/image/coversmallContributors and Editors2025-05-23text/htmlen-USContributors and Editors2025-05-232025TWOProject MUSE®82212026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-05-23