Product Description: Many children learn from a young age to tell the truth. They also learn that some lies are necessary in order to survive in a world that paradoxically values truth-telling, but practises deception. This book examines this paradox by considering how deception is often a necessary means of survival for individuals, families, governments, and animals...read more

This book demonstrates how contemporary children's texts draw on utopian and dystopian tropes in their projections of possible futures. The authors explore the ways in which children's texts respond to social change and global politics. The book argues that children's texts are crucially implicated in shaping the values of their readers.

Bringing together the voices of leading and emerging scholars, this book provides an innovative and accessible guide to using theory to study children's literature and film.  Integrating key theoretical approaches and thinkers from across feminism, ecocriticism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism, the book shows how these can be used as tools to analyse a range of contemporary children's literature and film texts.  The book will be at the cutting-edge of scholarship, combining new approaches to not only locate children's texts within changing social, cultural and political contexts, but also to help navigate a changing 'post-theory' era.

Product Description: This engaging study examines diverse genders and sexualities in a wide range of contemporary fiction for children and young people. Mallan's insights into key dilemmas arising from the texts' treatment of romance, beauty, cyberbodies, queer, and comedy are provocative and trustworthy, and deliver exciting theoretical and social perspectives...read more

Product Description: By examining the cultural spaces occupied by youth―spaces represented in texts produced for youth, about youth, and in some cases by youth―contributors to this volume present challenging ways of applying critical ideas and theoretical frameworks to the crucial issues that surround youth and the cultures they inhabit as evidenced in their literature, magazines, computer games, films, television programs, popular music, and fashion...read more