This article examines the tension between agency and commodification in adolescent authorship, centring on Chun Shu’s autobiographical novel Beijing Doll (2002) and its transnational reception. It explores how Chun Shu’s literary identity was framed as an authentic expression of adolescent rebellion while being simultaneously shaped and constrained by market forces. Through editorial mediation and commercial packaging, her voice was both amplified and disciplined to fit gendered and national expectations. The novel’s protagonist, Lin Jiafu, negotiates sexual agency through shifting relationships, complicating dominant discourses that position girlhood between innocence and fully realized autonomy. Rather than a fixed achievement, agency emerges as an ongoing process of assertion, adaptation, and defiance. Finally, the article examines Beijing Doll as a contested space where global and domestic forces converge: Western markets commodify Chun Shu’s defiant narrative, while domestic critiques seek to regulate her voice within national discourse. By foregrounding the ideological stakes of adolescent self-expression, this article highlights how Beijing Doll disrupts conventional narratives of female agency and reveals the uneven power dynamic shaping young female authors in a globalized literary landscape.
Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) delineates young Jackie’s aspirations to become a writer interspersed with her family history and the larger political fabric of the United States. The memoir recounts a brief period of her childhood and concludes with multiple histories converging to build a promising future. This article employs the theoretical framework of microhistory to analyze Woodson’s memoir. Microhistory engages with the intricacies of individual lives to complement the epistemic murk created by the grand narratives of history. The article treats the memoir as a microhistorical record to inspect the period’s social dynamics and how it painted a Black girl child’s world. It concludes by commenting on the significance of childhood memories in understanding history.
This article examines the social, political and gendered representations of male caregivers/nannies in postcolonial Bengal through the children’s novella Holde Pakhir Palok ( The Golden Feather) and the “family” film Galpo Holeo Satyi ( Stranger Than Fiction) while remaining informed about the popular depiction of nannies in contemporary US literature for young people. Through a critical lens that engages caste, class, and gender, the study interrogates how male caregivers occupy a complex, liminal space in Bengali households while engaging in emotional and/or educational labour. Drawing on theories of intersectionality, masculinity studies, and decolonization, the analysis demonstrates how caregiving becomes a site for challenging hegemonic binaries of education/manual labour, masculinity/domesticity, and authority/servitude. The article also considers how such caregivers are often rendered non-threatening through the erasure of their sexuality, echoing colonial anxieties around non-binary and intersex identities. Ultimately, these texts suggest that Bengali male caregivers, although marginalized, play central roles in constructing moral and emotional childhoods. The study underscores the importance of further archival and theoretical work on male domestic labour in Indian children’s literature.
This article examines how picture books about autism act as a form of autism advocacy reliant on key epistemological assumptions. Picture books emerge as a crucial location for analyzing complex debates about power dynamics and story-making within autism advocacy circles at large. Focusing especially on parent-authors, the author argues that this advocacy encodes a specific epistemological approach that constructs rather than describes a certain kind of (abnormal) autistic subject. In this way, picture books about autism offer important opportunities to examine how epistemological and hermeneutical injustices become embedded in textual and visual forms in children’s literature. However, the author contrasts deficit-based autism advocacy narratives with more recent picture books by autistic authors and neurodiversity supporters that enact autistic self-advocacy and provide new ways of knowing and thinking about autistic story-making.
In this article, the author explores how A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge (2012 ) disrupts prevailing assumptions about gender, language, and social forces. Through the genre of young adult (YA) dystopian fantasy, Hardinge subverts and interrogates the ideologies that shape reality. Using close textual analysis, the author investigates how A Face Like Glass uses the quest motif to present the liminality of the protagonist, Neverfell, as she leaves her childhood behind and ventures toward her new and unknown future. Applying language theory, feminist poststructuralism, and YA scholarship, the author considers how the notion of the outsider is troubled and dominant norms are challenged, particularly through the novel’s extensive metaphorical language. Through the character of Neverfell, Hardinge reflects how the construction of subjectivity is fluid and continually in process, much like discourse itself.
This article presents results from a larger study of so-called author schools for children in Denmark. The focus is to explore children's articulations of "freedom" or being "free" when writing stories and poetry in these author schools, which are free-time fiction-writing activities taught and mentored by professional adult authors. In an analysis of selected excerpts of empirical material, the article connects children's notions of freedom to theoretical conceptualizations of agency from both childhood studies and rhetoric. The empirical method is explorative and ethnographic, guided by the following research questions: What characterizes children's experiences of being "free" as writers in the context of Danish author schools, and how can these experiences be understood and conceptualized in terms of agency? To address these questions, the article elaborates on four aspects of children's perceived agency: (a) kinship as a foundation for agency, (b) agency as relational dynamics in the instructional context, (c) agency as the significance of individual choice of expression, and (d) agency as the drive toward affecting a possible reader. This study is anchored in children's literature research through the interest in children as authors, their production of texts, and the specific context around these texts. The purpose of the article is twofold: first, it contributes with empirically grounded knowledge about children's perspectives on "freedom" and agency in writing within the context of author schools for children. Second, it discusses how and why an interdisciplinary theoretical approach to agency is necessary for understanding and generating this knowledge about child authors and their perspectives.
Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy depicts a world of precarity. Through her construct of the authoritarian Capitol, Collins outlines a particular brand of totalitarian rule that operates not predominantly through fear, as might typically be expected within dystopian fiction, but through denying its citizens the opportunity to form trust bonds. Key to this strategy is the Capitol's manipulation of foodways: both actual foodstuffs, and the cultural and political systems surrounding their acquisition and consumption. Reading the trilogy and its foodways through the lens of trust theory, this article argues for a new interpretation of Collins's dystopia. Exploring the shifting control of food in The Hunger Games enables us to witness the micro-negotiations and transitions of trust that take place within the trilogy, which are closely linked to its emphasis on embodiment, community, and self-knowledge. The close connection between such negotiations and the figure of the child or adolescent, and the cultural work he or she is invoked to perform, suggests the significant value of trust as a critical tool through which we might nuance the operations of dystopian and utopian modes within the young adult novel.a
This article considers the young witch figure in three recently published children's visual texts: Phoebe Wahl's picturebook Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Forest (2021), Kat Leyh's graphic novel Snapdragon (2020), and Wendy Xu's graphic novel Tidesong (2021). Witches in children's literature are often associated with the idea of liminality, but their liminality between nature and culture has received less scholarly attention. Delineating young witches and their interconnection with the natural world, the selected texts demonstrate the young witch figure's relationships with different aspects of nature: the forest, the wild animals living in it, those living in urban areas, and those living in the sea. Reading the visual texts through Donna Haraway's posthumanist theory and Lawrence Buell's ecocritical framework, this paper argues that there is an emerging trend within children's literature: stories about young witches now tend to depict how girls develop or strengthen their recognition of and respect for the subject status of wild animals and the environment.
The 2018 original cast of Frozen: The Broadway Musical included Black performer Aisha Jackson as the alternate for the role of Anna. I argue that Jackson's live performances as Anna, from 2018 to 2020, celebrate Black artistry and Black girlhood, enabling Black fan communities to see themselves mirrored in a Disney Princess, even one not originally written as Black. The significance of spotlighting Jackson's embodiment of Princess Anna grows from the extended invisibilization of Blackness in youth narratives. Jackson's performances as Anna allow for a Black main character and a Black artist/creator to be visibilized in the Frozen franchise. This article strives to centre and archive Black performance and contextualize Frozen: The Broadway Musical as an afro-fabulative affiliate of Black Broadway. I turn to Tavia Nyong'o's articulations of afro-fabulation to read Black performance through Black performance scholarship, and I understand afro-fabulation's insistent presencing of Blackness as an example of bringing the dark fantastic onto centre stage and into the spotlight.
In an age of unprecedented ambiguity and uncertainty, children must develop critical thinking skills to navigate a complex and ever-changing world. Interactive narratives such as metafiction offer a powerful tool for cultivating these skills. This article draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogue, which emphasizes the intersubjective nature of meaning-making, to analyze two metafictive children's novels-The Bad Beginning (2001) by Daniel Handler, and The Name of This Book Is Secret (2018) by Raphael Simon-to explore how metafictive elements in these children's novels can foster dialogues and encourage dialogic thinking. Through a close reading of these novels, this study examines how metafictive elements, such as direct address to the reader, the subversion of traditional narrative conventions, and the inclusion of playful and interactive elements, encourage readers to question assumptions. By transforming the reading experience into a collaborative process of meaning-making, these novels not only entertain but also empower young readers to become active participants in a dynamic and ever-evolving dialogue with the text and the world around them. This research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that explores the unique potential of metafiction to cultivate critical thinking, creativity, and a lifelong love of reading in children.
New to picture-book research, this article considers the phenomenon of YouTube "read-aloud" channels. Unlike other "BookTube" channels which focus on reviews and recommendations, these channels consist of adults reading other people's copyrighted stories in their entirety, sometimes with the addition of graphics or sound effects, but often with no transformation of the original work beyond the reader's dramatized voice. Nevertheless, read-aloud channels can garner millions of views, and have turned YouTube into perhaps the largest online repository through which picture-books can be accessed in their entirety without paywalls.This article therefore considers how YouTube read-alouds remediate picture-book reading. I offer a case study of two popular read-aloud channels, @AwniesHouse and @KidTimeStoryTime. My analysis considers branding, audience, recommendations, and how the channels' video structures mediate interaction with the material texts they feature. Locating YouTube read-alouds within the existing research, I demonstrate how these videos diverge from other forms of book adaptation, and from other modes of oral picture-book reading. I therefore conclude that YouTube read-alouds are a distinct form of picture-book engagement, with unique affordances and limitations which particularly affect the stasis, tactility, and interactivity of picture-book reading.
