IRSCL

The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. Rachel Falconer. New York: Routledge, 2008. 280 pages. £75 (hardback). Within one year Routledge has published two books on crossover fiction in the Children’s Literature and Culture series. This is an indication that in the first years of the new millennium the phenomenon of adults [...]

Little Machinery. A Critical Facsimile Edition. Mary Liddell. Foreword by John Stilgoe. Critical Essay by Nathalie Op De Beeck. Detroit: Wayne state University Press, 2009. 99 pages. USD 24.95 (paperback). When I opened this little jewel of a facsimile, with its carefully-drawn illustrations representing the slim figure of an automaton with iron limbs and the [...]

The Illustrators of the Wind in the Willows 1908-2008. Carolyn Hares-Stryker. Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2009. 216 pages. USD 55 (hardback). The area of comparative illustration is a fascinating one. To see what different artists bring to a text opens up questions about why particular scenes were chosen, how well an illustrator’s style matches an author’s [...]

To See the Wizard: Politics and the Literature of Childhood. Edited by Laurie Ousley. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 440 pages. £44.99 (hardback). To See the Wizard is a large volume comprising seventeen chapters which “analyze nineteenth and twentieth century literature from America, Britain, Australia, the Caribbean, and Sri Lanka that is for and [...]

Fairy Tales Reimagined. Essays on New Retellings. Edited by Susan Redington Bobby. Foreword by Kate Bernheimer. Jefferson, NC; McFarland, 2009. 260 pages. USD 35 (paperback). What can be said about fairy tales that has not been said before? Just as fairy tales themselves are constantly retold, reworked and recycled, so is fairy-tale criticism a thriving [...]

Psychoanalytic Responses to Children’s Literature. Lucy Rollin and Mark I. West. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. 190 pages. USD 29.95 (paperback). The great promise of psychoanalysis is that it provides a master narrative – like that of Christianity and Marxism – a Grand Story that helps us come to terms with our lives, the societies we live [...]