Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Eleanor Spencer is Principal of Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne, where she is also an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communications, teaching on the English and Theatre Studies programme. She is the recipient of a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship and was Visiting Fellow in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century British and American poetry, and children’s and Young Adult fiction. Her recent publications include the New Casebook on American Poetry since 1945 (2016), and essays in Sylvia Plath in Context (2019) and A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry 1960−2015 (2020). Jade Dillon Craig is Associate Professor of Children’s Literature and Young Learners at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Her research interests include children’s literature, Alice studies, visual texts, cinematography, and gender studies. She has published book chapters in volumes with Palgrave Macmillan, Peter Lang, and McFarland. Her most recent publication features in Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research. Jade is a project leader for eBLINK (engelske bildebøker i norske klasserom) and co-founder of the Children’s Literature Education and Research group at NTNU (with Alyssa Magee Lowery).

Foreword

Ann Alston

Introduction: Exploding the Nuclear Family

Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig

Part I: Beyond Wicked Stepmothers and Absent(-minded) Fathers






Where Are They Now? Manifestations of (Monstrous) Mothers in Fairy Tales
Claudia Schwabe




Perspectives on Fathers and Fatherhood within Children’s Literature: A Case Study of Katya Balen’s October, October
Richard Charlesworth




‘Shrewd sound-hearted maiden aunts’: The Aunt Figure in Children’s Literature
Jane Suzanne Carroll




"What’s the point of grandpa?": Grandparents in Children’s Literature
Vanessa Joosen

Part II: Home, Nation, and Empire




Families Formed, Found and Fractured in the Children’s Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett
Elisabeth Rose Gruner




The Feral Child and the More-than-Human Family
Jessica Straley




A Gift to the Family of Britain: Depictions of African, Caribbean and Black British Families in British Children’s Literature after 1970
Karen Sands-O’Connor and Phyllis Ramage




Kinning with Picturebooks about La Frontera
Macarena García-González and Evelyn Arizpe

Part III: Growing Pains and Teenage Dreams




Bowlby, Blyton, and Child Care Issues in The Famous Five series
Nicholas Tucker




From First Born to Second Fiddle: Empathy is an Argument if Your Name is Peter Hatcher in Judy Blume’s Fudge Books
Joseph Michael Sommers




"Mum’s no fun now": Constructing the Maternal in the Family Fictions of Jacqueline Wilson
Kay Waddilove




‘Chasing the Dragon’: The Anxieties of Family in the Fiction of Melvin Burgess
Alyson Miller




A Taste for the Secret: Tracing Secretive Families in Malorie Blackman’s Fiction
Blanka Grzegorczyk




Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature: Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End, Familial Disruption, and the Space of the Home
Angel Daniel Matos

Part IV: Alternative Families in Alternative Worlds




Lost Boys, Found Boys: Masculinities and Families in J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter
Eleanor Spencer




Unhomely Domestic Spaces in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
Jade Dillon Craig




Apple to Pomegranate: Vampires and Families in the Twilight Saga
Lisa Nevarez




Breeders, Rebels and Warriors: The Oppression of Adolescent Mothers in the Young Adult Dystopias The Lone City trilogy and Gather the Daughters

Malin Alkestrand