This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children's literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children's poetry, picturebooks and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature.

• Introduction Where Have We Come From? Where Are We Heading?
• Part I Contemporary Directions in Children’s Literature Scholarship
  • 1 Teaching the Conflicts: Diverse Responses to Diverse Children’s Books
  • 2 Posthumanism: Rethinking ‘The Human’ in Modern Children’s Literature
  • 3 Animal Studies
  • 4 Spatiality in Fantasy for Children
  • 5 A Question of Scale: Zooming Out and Zooming in on Feminist Ecocriticism
  • 6 Age Studies and Children’s Literature
  • 7 Carnality in Adolescent Literature
  • 8 Cognitive Narratology and Adolescent Fiction
  • 9 Empirical Approaches to Place and the Construction of Adolescent Identities
  • 10 Picturebooks and Situated Readers: The Intersections of Text, Image, Culture and Response
  • 11 Re-memorying: A New Phenomenological Methodology in Children’s Literature Studies
• Part II Contemporary Trends in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
  • 12 Canons and Canonicity
  • 13 Seriality in Children’s Literature
  • 14 Counterfactual Historical Fiction for Children and Young Adults
  • 15 Pattern, Texture and Print: New Technology, Old Aesthetic in Contemporary Picturebook-Making
  • 16 Telling Stories in Different Formats: New Directions in Digital Stories for Children
  • 17 Multimodality and Multiliteracies: Production and Reception
  • 18 Serendipity, Independent Publishing and Translation Flow: Recent Translations for Children in the UK
  • 19 The Picturebook in Instructed Foreign Language Learning Contexts
• Part III Unmapped Territories
  • 20 Next of Kin: ‘The Child’ and ‘The Adult’ in Children’s Literature Theory Today and Tomorrow
  • 21 Critical Plant Studies and Children’s Literature
  • 22 Health, Sickness and Literature for Children
  • 23 Evolutionary Criticism and Children’s Literature
  • 24 The Genetic Study of Children’s Literature
  • 25 Distant Reading and Children’s Literature
  • 26 Hogwarts Versus Svalbard: Cultures, Literacies and Game Adaptations of Children’s Literature
  • 27 Hybrid Novels for Children and Young Adults
  • 28 Cyberspace and Story: The Impact of Digital Media on Printed Children’s Books
• Coda ALICE TO THE LIGHTHOUSE Revisited
• Notes on Contributors
• Index