Product Description: Seamus Heaney and other eminent artists, scientists and commentators examine what happens when art is created. Is the imagination still seen as the driving force of creativity within contemporary ‘knowledge economies’? What does the artistic process say about the struggle against trite lives and trivializing education? The essays are introduced by the composer John Buckley, and former Arts Council director Ciaran Benson offers an afterword...read more

Product Description: This volume, the third collection of studies in children's literature, explores the political, social and cultural divisions that dominate children's books, ranging over Irish and international topics and texts. Articles on the fiction of Katherine Tynan, Maria Edgeworth and Somerville & Ross, as well as modern Ulster fiction and contemporary children's publishing, are indicative of the range of Irish material...read more

Ranging from the fundamental question, whether a children's literature is possible, or what its formal and contextual parameters might be, to issues of contemporary cultural studies (postcolonialism, gender, race and class) this essay collection inserts children's literature into literary, theoretical and historical debate. From English renaissance children's reading, it shifting to Shaw's Castle Blair, an ambivalent metaphor for a nineteenth-century Ireland seeking postcolonial self determination, and a study of wild Irish girls' civilising education in England in De Horne Vaizey's and Meade's novels. The book interrogates Hodgson Burnett's obsessions with childhood innocence and her problematic adult-child relationships; the golliwog transformed from a transgressive figure into a non-PC icon; and schoolboys from the Jennings series and Greyfriars to Huck Finn and Harry Potter. Blyton, Dillon, Frost, Lynch, Parkinson, Ransome, Thomas, and Whelan come under scrutiny, as does the link between food, class, national heritage, and innocence. How Frost's and Thomas's stories reflect evolving conceptions of childhood is scrutinized. Unpublished archival material complicates assumptions about Patricia Lynch and Talbot Press children's religious publications. Dillon's 'nativist' novels display transitional stages of post-colonialization, and Whelan's and Parkinson's historiography is contrasted.