A young Anglo-Saxon woman is travelling across an empty East Anglian landscape. She’s dressed as a man, for safety. But when her only companion is murdered, she knows she faces discovery, and almost certainly much worse.In the Napoleonic period, a little boy has to walk several miles to market, on his own, for the first time.In the present day, a mixed-race teenage girl – along with her best friend Rob – faces the difficulties of extreme shyness and mutism.There is ...

This book investigates the 'series' in children's literature. The works of several well-known children's authors - UK and the US, traditional and contemporary - are analyzed, and using these examples, the book explores the special nature and appeal of series writing for children. As well as providing an historical overview of the series, the author raises important questions about the nature of literary criticism applied to children's literature.

It is impossible to reflect upon children's books without considering the children who read them. Where Texts and Children Meet explores the ways in which children make meaning of the various texts they meet both in and out of school.Eve Bearne and Victor Watson have brought together chapters on all the major issues and topics in children's literacy including:* the meaning and relevance of terms such as literature and classic texts* an analysis of new genres ...

Opening the Nursery Door is a fascinating collection of essays inspired by the discovery of a tiny archive: the nursery library of Jane Johnson 1707-1759, wife of a Lincolnshire vicar. It has captured the scholarly interest of social anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, educationalists and archivists as it has opened up a range of questions about the nature of childhood within English cultural life over three centuries: the texts written and read to children, the multif...

Never has contemporary fiction been more widely discussed and passionately analysed; recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of reading groups and in the interest of a non-academic readership in the discussion of how novels work. Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, 'Elements of Fiction', John Mullan examines novels mostly of the last ten years, many of which have become firm favourites with reading groups. He reveals the rich resources of novelistic technique, settingrecent f...

Creative Writing is a complete writing course that will jump-start your writing and guide you through your first steps towards publication.Suitable for use by students, tutors, writers’ groups or writers working alone, this book offers:a practical and inspiring section on the creative process, showing you how to stimulate your creativity and use your memory and experience in inventive waysin-depth coverage of the most popular forms of writing, in ex...

Some of the most innovative and spell-binding literature has been written for young people, but only recently has academic study embraced its range and complexity. This Companion offers a state-of-the-subject survey of English-language children's literature from the seventeenth century to the present. With discussions ranging from eighteenth-century moral tales to modern fantasies by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the Companion illuminates acknowledged classics and many more neglected w...

Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental—the creation of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie disputes these assumptions in Cruelty and Laughter, a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, Dickie uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy.Delving into an enormo...

First published in 1985, Between Men was a decisive intervention in gender studies, a book that all but singlehandedly dislodged a tradition of literary critique that suppressed queer subjects and subjectivities. With stunning foresight and conceptual power, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work opened not only literature but also politics, society, and culture to broader investigations of power, sex, and desire, and to new possibilities of critical agency.Illuminating with uncanny...

The extraordinary works of the three sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë have entranced and challenged scholars, students, and general readers for the past 150 years. This Companion offers a fascinating introduction to those works, including two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century - Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. In a series of original essays, contributors explore the roots of the sisters' achievement in early nineteenth-century Haworth, and the chi...

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern w...

The nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented expansion in the reading public and an explosive growth in the number of books and newspapers produced to meet its demands. These specially commissioned essays examine not only the full range and variety of texts that entertained and informed the Victorians, but also the boundaries of Victorian literature: the links and overlap with Romanticism in the 1830s, and the roots of modernism in the years leading up to the First World War. The Compani...