The style of Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" arises from an alternative vision and choice of values characteristic of romance. Romance seeks fulfillment beyond the consequences of everyday relationships and the constrictions of ordinary life. Causal relationships give way to lists of independent items, unmotivated outcomes, and…

The first full biography of Ursula Moray Williams has been published to mark the centenary of her birth. In this article, its author, Colin Davison, assesses her work in the context of her life, paying particular attention to the way that her extraordinary childhood influenced her writing. He also examines new evidence about where her ideas came…

The myth of home is what distinguishes children's literature from adult novels (Wolf 1990). Nodelman and Reimer ("The Pleasures of Children's Literature," 2003) write that while "the home/away/home pattern is the most common story line in children's literature, adult fiction that deals with young people who leave home usually ends with the child…

In recent years, reading scholars have increasingly attended to children's responses to picturebook page breaks, reasoning that the inferences young readers make during the turning of the page are central to understanding how children construct continuous narratives in semiotically rich texts. In this paper I argue that comics (including comic…

This article is an attempt to contribute to the conversation about "go[ing] beyond all kinds of binary thinking" (Lenz Taguchi, "Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: introducing an intra-active pedagogy," 2010, p. 50), especially the binary which positions "adults" and "children" as being powerful and powerless,…

An increasingly prevalent and accessible form of hybrid nonfiction picture books blends factual information with poetry or poetic devices to create literary nonfiction. This important form of hybrid text has been sparsely examined. This article addresses three questions about poetic nonfiction picture books: first, how might we categorize picture…

In this article, we want to present and analyse the picture book "The World has no Corners" (2006/1999) by the Norwegian author and illustrator Svein Nyhus. The book represents a new trend in Norwegian picture books for children by inviting the readers into a world of thinking and wondering about existential topics such as life and death, growing…

Given its stance against organised religion, it is perhaps not surprising that Philip Pullman's award-winning trilogy "His Dark Materials" has, alongside the plaudits and praise, invited controversy and debate. Jacobs ("The Weekly Standard, 2000"), for instance, views the "anti-Christian" theme in Pullman's work as both misleading and dishonest,…

This article explores the importance of place and story in the life and work of Joan Aiken (1924-2004), with a focus on the Armitage Family short stories. It explores the fluid relationship between books, storytelling and place in Joan Aiken's childhood and looks at her close relationship with the landscape of the Sussex Downs. Particular…

This article examines the connections between posthumanism and narrative form in Philip Pullman's "Clockwork." Beginning with an account of Pullman's materialism, it argues that the novel represents consciousness and agency as emergent properties of matter, a position that manifests itself first in the tale's figurative language and later in the…

Louisa May Alcott's juvenile fiction is often focused on aspects of children's lives that were also topics of reform in nineteenth century America. In "Jack and Jill" and "Eight Cousins," Alcott presents an idealized picture of child-centered learning, building on three central principals: (1) Good teachers are sympathetic and understanding of…

The purpose of this paper is to propose some ways of reading two wordless picture storybooks which have recently been published, by Suzy Lee and Bernardo Carvalho respectively. The objective is to analyse the ways in which the visual discourse can create an effective narrative using a variety of pictorial strategies. These works were not idly…

Combining feminist and narratological perspectives, this paper examines the construction of subjectivity in two young adult novels with a range of narratorial positions. The investigation is grounded in Robyn McCallum's work on intersubjectivity, in which interrelationships affecting subjectivity are only possible when the narrative permits a…

This qualitative case study explores the nature of reading engagement, taking a reader response approach to analysing and discussing the experiences and perspectives of real readers. The paper reports a collaborative research project in which a group of five primary-age children and a group of five adults of different ages were asked to read and…

This article argues that if we paid attention to the local situation of a reader the way we attend to the life story of an author, we might gain a very different understanding of children's literacy. It explores the literate approaches of a single child exploring a single theme--the settler culture as represented in a variety of materials…