New Directions in Childhood Studies

James M. Curtis is instructor of English at Louisiana State University Shreveport.

Introduction, “Constructing the 21st Century Child”

James Curtis

Part I: Picturing a New Kind of Childhood

Chapter One: “Rainbows in the Window: Static Childhood in COVID-19 Picture Books”

Cara Byrne and Kristin Kondrlik

Chapter Two: “Picturing Political Agency in Childhood: Visual Rhetoric of Child Activism and

Identity in Children’s Literature”

Meghan Whitfield

Chapter Three: “[Re]Interpreting the Deaf Child’s Solitude: A Counternarrative to Cece Bell’s El

Deafo”

S. Leigh Ann Cowan

Part II: The Rule of Law and Transgressive Constructions of American Childhood

Chapter Four: “Because What You Don’t Know Can Kill You: Law, YA Lit, and the American

Adolescent Today”

Jamie M. Fine

Chapter Five: “These Are the Rooms We’re Not Supposed to Go In…But Let’s Go Anyway!”:

Celebrating the Mobile Child, Embracing Nontraditional Kinship Structures, and Deconstructing

Neglect in The Florida Project”

Joseph V. Giunta

Part III: Technology and the Posthuman Child

Chapter Six: “Roblox and the Value in Suspending Playbor Time”

Sumaria Butt

Chapter Seven: “Happy Endings, Only $1.99: Uncovering the Corruption of Fairytales in Hope:

The Other Side of Adventure and its Online Legacy”

Imogen Nutting and Ryan Twomey

Part IV: The 21st Century and the Necessity of Trauma-Informed Narratives

Chapter Eight: “The New ‘Normal’”: Cancer and Childhood in Rob Harrell’s Wink

Allyson Wierenga

Chapter Nine: “The Trauma of Childhood and Emerging into Adulthood in A Court of Thorns

and Roses”

Kirsten Bilger and Michael G. Cornelius

About the Contributors