Product Description: From Puritan tracts and chapbooks to fairy tales and Victorian poems, from zombies and werewolves to ghosts and vampires, the gothic has become an important part of children's literature. This book explores how Gothicism is crucial in helping children progress through different stages of growth and development...read more

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

Product Description: This book explores representations of girlhood and young womanhood in recent English language children's fantasy by focusing on two fantastic body transformation types: invisibility and age-shifting. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory, the study discusses the tropes of invisibility and age-shifting as narrative devices representing gendered experiences...read more

Product Description: Contemporary discussions of literature have paid increasing attention to the ideologies pervading texts and to the ways in which creative literature represents the individual both as subject and as agent. "Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction" examines these matters in narratives written for children, with a special focus on language, since meanings are primarily constituted in language...read more