Children’s Literature in Place

Željka Flegar is an Associate Professor at the University of Osijek in Croatia, where she teaches and does research in English language and literature, media, and drama. She has published articles on the linguistic and narrative aspects of children’s literature and culture, adaptations, and popular media. She co-edited, with Ivana Moritz, the collection Children and Languages Today: First and Second Language Literacy Development (2019). Since 2020, Flegar has been a member of the editorial board of Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Longwood University, USA (2021). Jennifer M. Miskec is a Professor of English at Longwood University in Virginia, USA, where she co-directs the Children’s Literature English Major Concentration and Children’s Literature Minor and teaches several children’s and young adult literature and culture courses. Miskec also leads children’s culture study abroad programs to Croatia and Serbia and to South Africa. Miskec’s scholarly work is primarily centered on studies of contemporary American children’s and YA literature. Miskec co-edited, with Annette Wannamaker, a collection of essays on Early Readers, The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers (Routledge, 2016). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb, Croatia (2019) and a Fulbright Specialist at Simon Fraser University, Canada (2022).

Introduction

Section I: Place, Space, and Identity

1. "Xanadu Hidden in the Heart of Bootle": Place and Foreignness in The Unforgotten Coat

Ben Screech

2. Skiing and Being Swedish: Taking a Cold Look at Winter Picturebooks

Björn Sundmark

3. Cows on the Cover: Dairy Queen and Regional Literature

Rhonda Brock-Servais

4. John Green’s Peopled Places and Abandoned Spaces

Michael J. Martin

Section II: Aesthetics of Place

5. Confronting "Un-London": Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy and the Rejection of Nostalgic Landscapes

Heather K. Cyr

6. Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World

Catherine Olver

7. A Sleuthing Place: Child Detectives and Their Offices

Chris McGee

Section III: (Dis)Placement and Mobility

8. "Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want": The Contingent Mobilities of Literary Adolescence

Caroline Hamilton-McKenna

9. Whirlpooling Feminist Rage: Gang Rape-Revenge in Foul is Fair and The Nowhere Girls

Amber Moore

10. A Town Should Have Twenty-Five People: Harriet M. Welsch’s Small-Town New York City

Emma K. McNamara

11. How to Develop a Children’s Culture Study Abroad Program in Three Easy Steps

Jennifer M. Miskec

Section IV: Place Attachment

12. Making Home: The Queer Ecological Possibilities of Children’s Picturebooks

Kathleen Forrester

13. Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story: Country, Multimodality, and Living Space

Melanie Duckworth

14. Re-placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene: Carole Lindstroms’s We Are Water Protectors

Hatice Bay

15. Beyond the Eco-Warrior Child in Children’s Literature

Meghan M. Sweeney

Section V: Spectrality and Memory

16. Dearly Departed: The Arrival’s Spectral Refugee

Katharine Slater

17. Someone’s Missing: The Spectral Landscape of Martial Law in Selected Children’s Picturebooks from the Philippines

Jose Monfred C. Sy

18. Charlotte Temple, a Literary Landmark, and Nineteenth-Century Notions of Adolescence

Ivy Linton Stabell

Section VI: Placing Readers

19. Space, Place, and Readers: Understanding Setting as "Placing-in-Process"

Margaret Mackey

20. Child and Teen Demographics in Movement through the Fantastic Place of London

Madison McLeod

21. Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation

Smiljana Narančić Kovač

22. Canon Out of Place: Centering Lived Realities in Neurodivergent Middle Grade Literature

Jennifer Slagus

Section VII: Virtual and Archival Spaces

23. "The Ickabog Illustration Competition": Showcasing Reader Responses and a Transnational Poetics of Place

Željka Flegar

24. Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature: From Mysterious Dusty Libraries to Cities Made of Books

Maretta Sidiropoulou

25. Pilgrimages in the First Season of The Flying House Anime Series

Lance Weldy

26. An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations for Young People

Elizabeth Garri