The Ministry of Education and Culture in Zimbabwe has introduced an intervention into the school curricula to complement the already existing mechanisms in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The literature in this programme is said to be designed to develop children's knowledge of HIV/AIDS and to maximise both individual and community commitment to the…

This article provides a close reading of Geraldine McCaughrean's award-winning novel, "The White Darkness". It argues that this is a key text in the increasing debate about "crossover" literature. Whereas, traditionally, adolescent books were seen to offer compensatory fantasies to the adolescent reader, McCaughrean's text goes…

"The Outsiders" if often credited with marking the emergence of YA literature. It was written by a teenager and was intended to represent honestly the difficult lives of other young adults. Despite the novel's audience and purpose and its potentially provocative acknowledgment of the problems of social class, "The Outsiders"…

Visual aspects of 12 collections of children's writing that were published in South Africa between 1986 and 2003 are considered. The covers, illustrations, facsimiles of original writing and artwork, fonts, colours and author credits create images of childhood and youth and provide clues to the purposes for which the collections were made and…

The Harry Potter series focuses upon the toilet as a site for heroic action and a threshold between worlds as well as a more traditional place for boys to be bullied and girls to weep. This article offers a Kristevan reading of the toilets as abject in Harry Potter, and shows how this concept helps us make sense of wider issues within the series,…

Louis Sachar's novel "Holes" (US, 1998; UK, 2000) has received much praise from both critics and child readers, who love the complex tall tale he has woven about two boys whose lives are connected by fate and an almost magical legacy of ancestral curses and obligations. Because the novel is not (on many levels) realistic, and relies heavily on…

This paper seeks to explore issues of immigration and Otherness through a study of the first of Michael Bond's Paddington books. I will argue that this book and those which follow in the series, intended for a readership of young children, deal with the issue of immigration at a more subtle level than more recent books which are largely aimed at…

The secondary worlds created in fantasy encourage the reader to compare and contrast the real world with the imaginary. In this way, fantasy as a genre can be transformative. In this article, the dystopia created in "The Giver" (1993) by Lois Lowry is examined as a metaphor for racism. After exploring the young adult novel as mystical fantasy in…

This paper examines six recent retellings of Robin Hood and concentrates on the representation of class, religion and gender in the texts. The question is asked: "what values do the texts implicitly or explicitly arm?" The idea that Robin Hood retellings are systematic of a socially and politically conservative ideology is interrogated by…

In this article, we examine a set of 26 children's books on HIV/AIDS published between 1989-1999 to identify the ways in which these texts construct HIV/AIDS and people living with HIV/AIDS. We explore how this marginalized group is depicted in these books, and how well-meaning teachers may in fact be reproducing dominant discourses about HIV/AIDS…

Mary Norton's "The Borrowers" has a complicated narrative framework, through which the story of the small people, the Borrowers, is told. Once we find that the embedded story is carefully set at the turn of the nineteenth century, parallels with Burnett's "The Secret Garden" are recognized, in which a lonely Anglo-Indian child experiences some…

Changes in television technology have fostered changes in how we view fiction on television. This article explores some of these changes in the context of the teenage series, "Felicity" (WBTV, 1998-2002). It draws comparisons with the experience of reading series fiction in print, referring to the children's print series, "The Beverly Gray College…

The now late great Max Velthuijs was filmed in April 2004 discussing his work with Victoria de Rijke and Howard Hollands, who began the interview expecting Max to be working under certain artistic and cultural influences, none of which seemed to be the case! Max describes what brought him home to Andersen Press, the freedom of children's…

While stories with a depressing message are now common for teenagers, resistance to them remains where smaller children are concerned. But is this more a case of the publishers and providers concerned protecting their own particular image of childhood? This article looks at the case for books that also convey a sense of sadness to infants,…

An increased awareness of the gendered traditions of physical activity portrayed in vintage book series for girls and boys may provide teachers with a deeper understanding of (still) current ideological assumptions affecting female and male participation in sport and recreational activity. This article explores a unique girls' fiction series about…