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This award-winning book, now available in paperback, is designed to challenge the view that children's literature is innately conservative - that it lags behind writing for adults. By looking at a range of texts, past and present, it shows that children's literature is in fact a playground in which radical and innovative texts are devised. Developments in children's literature have not gone uncontested, particularly when a controversial children's book also wins a major literary prize. But to date there has been no focused examination of how far conventional boundaries have been breached in children's literature, or what it means that the boundaries between writing for adults and children are increasingly blurred. Neither has the cultural debt owed to children's literature as a source of innovation and assimilation of new ideas in writing, illustration and narrative experimentation been acknowledged. Radical Children's Literature begin this process by exploring how writing for children redirects the way in which genres, texts and new technologies interact creatively with childhood and youth culture.
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Author's Note xi
1 Breaking Bounds: The Transformative Energy of Children's Literature 1
2 Breaking the Frame: Picturebooks, Modernism, and New Media 24
3 And None of It Was Nonsense 45
4 Useful Idiots: Interactions Between Youth Culture and Children's Literature 68
5 Self-harm, Silence, and Survival: Despair and Trauma in Children's Literature 88
6 Baby, You're the Best: Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary Juvenile Fiction 114
7 Frightening Fiction: The Transformative Power of Fear 131
8 Back to the Future? New Forms and Formats in Juvenile Fiction 155
Conclusion: The Foundations of Future Fictions 180
Notes 184
Bibliography 193
Index 208
Overview
This award-winning book, now available in paperback, is designed to challenge the view that children's literature is innately conservative - that it lags behind writing for adults. By looking at a range of texts, past and present, it shows that children's literature is in fact a playground in which radical and innovative texts are devised. Developments in children's literature have not gone uncontested, particularly when a controversial children's book also wins a major literary prize. But to date there has been ...