This chapter discusses how MacDonald’s view of childhood played a significant part in making his view of life and death. MacDonald often writes in his works and in letters to his family that we do not lament the death of anyone whom we love, because death is an entrance to ‘more life’. This view can be attributed to MacDonald’s deep devotion to his Christian faith and his affinity for the German Romantics, but the process of his arriving at this firm belief could also be related to the intimate relationship with his family that he developed in childhood. Drawing from this biographical context, the chapter details two views of children in his works: children whose purity brings them inherently closer to God and children whose innocence manifests as stubbornness and ignorance, but who can mature with the help of others. It particularly considers Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871) and The Princess and Curdie (1883) to show how remembering childhood or inventing happy memories of childhood through storytelling helps the protagonists endure hard times and heal from spiritual disease.

George MacDonald’s major novels for children can be read as demonstrating shifts in the development of English children’s literature from the perspectives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in relation to the approaches to moral education, the genre of fantasy, and awareness of social realities. Unlike his predecessors’ creations, MacDonald’s protagonists acquire agency; they engage with emotional and practical problems emanating from the immediacy of their social circumstances. The sophistication of the construction of his child characters and their interaction with their worlds, whether real or imagined, created the literary pathways for children’s writers to come, such as E. Nesbit (1858–1924), C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), and contemporary writers of fiction for children. The discussion focuses on signifying how his work relates to the history of English fiction for children through consideration of At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), Gutta-Percha Willie (1873), and The Princess and Curdie (1883).

‘Children’s Novels and the Literary Revival’ traces the rise in fiction for children in the final years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. It is possible to detect two major tendencies in Irish fiction for children in this period, sometimes overlapping in the same works. On the one hand, there is the imperialist narrative of the empire as a family, in which Ireland is cast as the errant ‘wild child’, in need of discipline; opposed to this is the Irish fiction embracing the ‘wild child’, with the mythological figure of Cuchulain as the ultimate ‘wild child’, whose defiance of authority is read as heroism. These opposed attitudes to the figure of the child polarise, as much children’s literature of the Revival period turns towards Irish mythology in the formation of national subjects, whose identity was opposed to that of a metropolitan British culture.

This chapter examines the ancient school fable as an introductory exercise in fiction. I argue that Imperial educators framed fables (especially animal fables) as paradoxically overt fictions that nonetheless model real-world hierarchies and social behavior. Drawing on Greek and Latin rhetorical treatises, such as Quintilian and the progymnasmata, I show that school fables were designed to teach students how to decode enigmatic speech, distinguish credible from incredible fiction, and conform rhetorical speech to “natural” character types. But verse fabulists like Phaedrus and Babrius weaponize this pedagogy, challenging the premise that fiction can be safely decoded. Through close readings of fables like “The Wolf and the Lamb” and “The Lion in Love,” I show how the verse fabulists subvert the educational aims of the fable, reconfiguring it as a vehicle for disillusionment rather than instruction. In doing so, they reveal the fragility of pedagogical ideals in the face of rhetorical deception. The chapter thus situates the school fable at the intersection of fiction, power, and reader competence in the Roman world.

Six: I again reverse the focus so as to reflect on the cormorant’s role as an icon of indigeneity providing an unexpected parallel to the role of its cousin the pelican, outlining the latter by way of the Australian children’s book Storm Boy and then turning back to the cormorant to show how it too has at times acquired status both as a marker of indigeneity and as a local victim of human environmental destruction, notably in images of cormorants affected by oil spills, drawing in particular on a Gulf War poem by Tony Harrison and on an image in the writing of Jean Baudrillard. I conclude by returning to the longstanding association of cormorants and China through an analysis of an advert for HSBC (‘The World’s Local Bank’), assessing the co-option by capital of the cormorant’s new-found and hard-earned sense of global belonging.

This chapter selectively draws on medieval and post-medieval Arthurian material to consider how, across time, children figure as the subjects of, and the audience for, Arthurian literature. Viewed in the context of medieval education, French romances use accounts of childhood and of enfances (knights’ youthful exploits) to explore ethical and narrative concerns, while some of their central tropes resurface in the Morte Darthur, which is relatively more diffident about childhood and youth per se, to illuminate important aspects of Malory’s art. The chapter outlines some of the culturally influential Anglophone Morte-inspired Arthuriads written for children from the nineteenth century onwards and Arthurian treatments in other child-focused texts, including fantasy writing, novels set in the fifteenth century and in Roman Britain, and Grail-inspired young adult fiction. Arthurian children’s literature, constituted by extraordinary conversations between writers across time and genre, cumulatively exemplifies the nature and creative power of Arthurian intertextuality.

Tennyson is the dominant figure in English-language versions of the Arthur story in this period, but this chapter focuses on the tradition outside of the Idylls. By the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign the Arthurian legend was not as fixed as it would be by the end of the century. Malory’s version of the story was not as dominant as Tennyson would make it. This chapter traces the way the legend was presented by such writers as Reginald Heber, Edward Bulwer Lytton, the young William Morris, R. S. Hawker and Algernon Swinburne. The chapter also considers the way in which Arthur was evaluated as a possible historical figure, looking at Arthurian scholarship as it developed through the century in the hands of such figures as Sharon Turner through to Frederick Furnivall and Thomas Wright, to Jessie L. Weston. It concludes by looking at the entry of the legend into versions for children, with a brief nod to the future of Arthur in the cinema.

The chapter situates children’s poetry within the print culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how such poetry provides insights into the shift from a reliance on British practices and literary models to a sense of literary distinctiveness and independence. It discusses how early alphabet books developed literacy as well as inculcated social and political values. It also considers how some children’s verse disseminated the trope of the lost child in the bush, while other verse familiarised children with the Australian environment. It discusses the emergence of fairy and fantasy worlds based on distinctly Australian settings following World War I, and a growing depiction of Australian progress. The chapter discusses the pedagogic role of school readers and their role in mediating continuing connections to Britain and a specifically Australian identity. The chapter also discusses the significance of columns for children in periodicals, and how their encouragement of children to write which led to the rise of a number of child poets.

Latinx children’s and young adult literature offers Latinx children opportunities to step into another world and also see themselves represented in what they read. By giving Latinx child readers, in particular, worlds unlike and like their own, authors like Lilliam Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, and Marcia Argueta Mickelson also challenge dominant national narratives about Latinx experiences in the United States. In the stories these writers tell, young protagonists are confronted by various symptoms of US imperialism, such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. The protagonists’ journey often includes learning more about the oppressions that plague them and their communities and finding ways to dismantle said oppressions. Recognizing the role that the United States had in the forced (im)migration of many people of Latin American descent allows for a narrative shift away from the “immigration story” to a story of US imperialism and its consequences. Examining race and empire in Latinx children’s literature creates possibilities for alternative ways of knowing and existing where Latinx children can step in and out of worlds unlike and like their own.

This chapter considers how the nonsense of Lear, Carroll and Rossetti charts a course through the unknown territories of late-Victorian modernity. It explores the flourishing of nonsense in the 1870s in the context of accounts of the decade as a time when Victorian culture was forced to reckon with the changes and developments that the century had been driving towards. Focusing on puzzling geographies of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and Through the Looking-Glass, the playful exploration of new ways of knowing in Lear’s poetry and the interrogation of likeness and difference in Christina Rossetti’s works for children, it proposes nonsense as a genre well-placed to express the period’s political and epistemological uncertainties.

Abstract: This chapter examines 1870s children’s literature materially. It does this by emphasising, first, the children’s book as a material object and, second, the process of producing children’s literature within the material conditions of Victorian publishing. A discussion of the distinctive material attractions of the movable picturebook for children, such as three-dimensional pop-up pictures and manipulable mechanical figures, sets up the chapter’s focus on the value added by considering the material configuration of word and image in other books from the period. This facilitates a reassessment of well-known texts including Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Kate Greenaway’s Under the Window (1879), and Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song (1874). Features such as the distribution of illustrations across pages, the variation of editions’ content, and illustrations changing from manuscript to print restore children’s classics as materially specific objects rather than timeless texts conveyed immaterially from the 1870s to the present

This chapter provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary formation of postsecular studies and briefly outlines its influence in literary studies broadly as well nineteenth-century literary studies specifically. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women then provides a case study for the demonstration of a postsecular reading attending to the production of secularity around the novel’s bifurcated but intertwined concern with playfulness and morality.

Heralded as the decade that launched the “Golden Age” of children’s literature, the 1860s saw the growth of fairy tales, fantasy, and imperial romance, and concerns about education and empire. The 1860s major children’s fantasy works, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market[GK2] [GK3](1862), Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies [GK4](1863), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [GK5](1865), share striking similarities. The trope of unstable ground in these texts offers insight into the anxieties of the era with implications for education and imperial stewardship. The unearthing of fossils along with debates over Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species[GK6] (1859) created unease about the unknown and disrupted established knowledge about the timeline for creation. Carroll’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s texts reveal uncertainties of science (especially the newly articulated domains of geology, paleontology, archeology, and geography), the inadequacies of education, and the legacy of empire. In their hands, unstable ground is not only a plot device and a metaphor, but a warning.

This chapter argues that two works of Victorian children’s literature – Alfred Elwes’s The Adventures of a Bear (1853) and The Adventures of a Dog (1854) – capture the complex politics of selfhood in relation to animality and law. They also demonstrate the trope of transformation from animal to human: the dog becomes a trusted policeman (or equivalent) and the bear ends up a blind beggar. In both cases, the choice of animals as protagonists allows for a frank discussion of violence, gender, and class conflict.

This chapter examines reference used by and with children and explores creative and playful uses of reference. Following an overview of how uses of reference develop as children’s language skills develop, we discuss the significance of the tendency for children to underspecify their intended referent in the use of referring expressions as compared to adults who do not do this, but who will sometimes overspecify the referent. Drawing on a broad range of examples, we examine evidence of how children quickly get to a stage where they can exploit reference for their own purposes or just to have fun. The atypical use of referring expressions in children’s literature is discussed and we examine the reasons for the authors’ deliberate exploitations of known conventions in relation to reference.