Kerry Mallan - Contemporary Childrens Literature and Film

The books major contribution is to showcase contemporary forms/iterations of theory, such as posthumanism, cognitive poetics, and spatiality studies. This very fine collection of essays will be of use to a wide range of students as well as to established scholars.

Kenneth Kidd, Associate Professor of English, University of Florida

A volume like this is long overdue: a single work that not only talks about literature and film alongside each other without making either seem the poor relation, but which also makes theory work in a practical, productive, and even (dare I say it) pleasurable manner. Students, and the rest of us, should benefit hugely.

David Rudd, Professor of Childrens Literature, University of Bolton

Bringing together the voices of leading and emerging scholars, Contemporary Childrens Literature and Film provides critical approaches for reading childrens literature and film. The book argues for the significance of theory for reading texts written and produced for young people and integrates a wide range of critical perspectives, including schema theory, theories of space and place, cultural globalization, feminism, ecocriticism, adaptation theory, postcolonialism, and posthumanism.

The book accessibly introduces the very latest thinking in the field and is attuned to contemporary issues and contexts. Individual chapters demystify theory and show how it can open up alternative ideas, challenge basic assumptions, and unsettle the taken-for-granted with respect to authorship, literary conventions, and the contexts in which texts for young people are produced and consumed. This will be vital reading for anyone studying or researching childrens literature and film.

Kerry Mallan is Professor in Education at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her co-edited book, Youth Cultures: Texts, Images and Identities, is an IRSCL Honour Book (2003). She is a co-author of New World Orders in Contemporary Childrens Literature (2008). Her most recent book is Gender Dilemmas in Childrens Fiction (2009).

Clare Bradford is Professor of Literature at Deakin University, Australia. Her 2001 book, Reading Race, won both the ChLA Book Award and the IRSCL Award. She is a co-author of New World Orders in Contemporary Childrens Literature (2008). Her most recent book is Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Childrens Literature (2007), which was a Childrens Literature Association Honor Book.

Engaging with Theory

Edited by

Kerry Mallan
and
Clare Bradford

Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford 2011

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First published 2011 by
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ISBN: 9780230231498 hardback
ISBN: 9780230231504 paperback

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Printed in China

Raffaella Baccolini teaches English and American Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Bologna at Forl. She has published extensively on womens literature, modernism, the Shoah, science fiction, and utopian studies. Her publications include Tradition, Identity, Desire: Revisionist Strategies in H.D.s Late Poetry (1995); Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003) and Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming (2007, both with Tom Moylan); Le prospettive di genere: Discipline, soglie, confini (2005); Constructing Identities: Translations, Cultures, Nations (2008, with Patrick Leech), Gender and Humor, Humor and Gender (forthcoming, with Delia Chiaro). She is currently working on the representation of trauma in literature and film.

Clare Bradford is Professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Her publications include are Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Childrens Literature (2001), Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Childrens Literature (2007), and New World Orders in Contemporary Childrens Literature: Utopian Transformations (2008, with Kerry Mallan, John Stephens, and Robyn McCallum). She is President of the International Research Society for Childrens Literature and, in 2009, was awarded the inaugural Trudeau International Fellowship.

David Buchbinder holds a Personal Chair in Masculinities Studies at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, where he teaches in the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts. He has edited Essays in Masculinities Studies 2002 (2003), a collection of undergraduate essays on masculinity; he has published two books, Masculinities and Identities (1994) and Performance Anxieties: Re-presenting Men (1998), and has published widely in the area of masculinities studies focusing on the cultural representations, across various genres and media, of men, masculinities, and male sexualities. He has begun work on a third book on masculinity, Studying Men and Masculinities, to be published by Routledge.

Elizabeth Bullen is Senior Lecturer at the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Her published research centres on child and youth texts and cultures in the context of globalisation, consumer capitalism, and identity. In Inside Story: Product Placement and Adolescent Consumer Identity in Young Adult Fiction, Media, Culture & Society (2009), she shows how consumerism, gender, and class become mutually constitutive. Her forthcoming book interrogates representations of social class in contemporary childrens fiction.

Kerry Mallan is Professor in Education at Queensland University of Technology is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and books on childrens literature, including