In the social context of China's rural-urban migration, a varied set of forces has increasingly challenged the conventional assumptions used to underpin the notion of home as a space fixed in geography and one's lineage. This essay calls into question the essentialist values associated with home, and explores new realities and representations of…

Novels from the "Dear Canada" series of historic fiction, published by Scholastic Canada, currently populate the shelves of school classrooms and libraries across Canada. This study explores two "Dear Canada" novels that chronicle significant moments in Atlantic Canadian history: Janet McNaughton's novel (Flame and ashes: The…

The article is a comparative analysis of three films focusing on anti-religious and religious propaganda (targeting both Orthodoxy and sectarianism) and featuring children among the main characters: "The Miracle Worker" (1960), "Armageddon" (1962) and "Serafima's Extraordinary Journey" (2015). The three films feature…

In this study of Jill Paton Walsh's one time-slip novel, I attempt to show how she reinvents the genre by giving as much prominence to the dislocated present as she does to the sufferings of children caught up in the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Where previous time-slip authors had concentrated on the past, she addresses clearly unwelcome…

Since the publication of the first young adult novel to deal with issues of sexual identity, John Donovan's ("1969") "I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip", over 200 novels have been published centered around gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) characters and conflicts (Cart and Jenkins, "2006", "The Heart has…

This paper offers a comparative analysis of two characters belonging to the tradition of empowered "spinster" in children's fiction, namely Mary Poppins and Ms Wiz, from the perspective of gender politics and child/adult interactions. A distinction is made between the figure portrayed in P. L. Travers' texts and the Disney film starring Julie…

Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", the first novel to be published simultaneously for the UK adult and children's market, exemplifies the phenomenon of crossover literature better perhaps than the "Harry Potter" series, whose appeal to a dual-aged audience had caught the publishing industry by…

Carol Ann Duffy's three volumes of children's poetry are important and interesting because they emerge from the work of a writer whose adult poetry has persistently associated childhood with dark and difficult areas of experience. This article explores what happens to such challenging material when a poet of major significance changes the focus of…