Children’s Literature and Culture

An Introduction

Rebecca Rowe

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English

Routledge
08 August 2025

Literary studies: general; Children's literature studies: general; Social & cultural history; Cultural studies

Series: Routledge Introductions to Young Adult and Children's Literature

Children’s Literature and Culture: An Introduction guides readers in the study of culture in, around, and through children’s literature. Children’s literature has long been used as a mechanism by which a culture passes its values from one generation to the next. Because of this culturally didactic purpose, children’s literature can be viewed as one of the most fruitful areas of study of any given culture. At the same time, studying the cultures from which works of children’s literature emerge and in which they circulate can also help better understand not only the ideas of childhood that underpin individual texts for children but the role they play in the construction and transmission of different cultural ideologies. This book teaches readers this double work of using culture to understand children’s literature and vice versa. This volume traces the scholarly methodologies and histories that have attended the study of each of the 20 chapters’ given subject—from the representation of race in and around children’s literature to questions of censorship to how libraries can and do shape children’s literature. In the process, it prepares readers to confidently enter and forward scholarly debates and to teach such debates to their own students.

Edited by: Rebecca Rowe
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032572697
ISBN 10: 1032572698
Series: Routledge Introductions to Young Adult and Children's Literature
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 08 August 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Rebecca Rowe is Assistant Professor of Children’s Literature at East Texas A&M University, United States. Her research focuses on how adaptations, both professional and fan-made, change character identities due to cultural, media, and audience differences. She is editor of the International Journal of Disney Studies and has articles in journals such as Children’s Literature, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, and Jeunesse, along with chapters in Fan Phenomena: Disney, Gender and Female Villains in 21st Century Fairy Tale Narratives and Lizzie McGuire to Andi Mack: The Disney Channel’s Tween Programming 2000–2019.