The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature

Time has passed since 'having a PhD in children's literature' was a funny joke in You've Got Mail. Children's literature research is now one of the most dynamic fields of literary criticism and of education, and has a bright future ahead - as children's writers and publishers invent yet more forms of literature for young people, and researchers find yet more sophisticated ways of exploring them. This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children's literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children's poetry, picturebooks and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature.

Clémentine Beauvais is a Lecturer in Education at the University of York. She has worked on politically committed literature for children, on existentialist theorisations of children's literature, and more recently on the history and cultural sociology of child giftedness. She is the author of The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children's Literature (2015).

Maria Nikolajeva is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and director of the Cambridge Research and Teaching Centre for Children's Literature. She was the president of the International Research Society for Children's Literature 1993-97 and received the International Grimm Award for lifetime achievement in children's literature research. Her most recent books are Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young People (2010) and Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children's Literature (2014).