Radical Children's Literature

This book is designed to challenge the view that children's literature is innately conservative - that it lags behind writing for adults. By looking at a range of texts, past and present, it shows that children's literature is in fact a playground in which radical and innovative texts are devised. Developments in children's literature have not gone uncontested, particularly when a controversial children's book also wins a major literary prize. But to date there has been no focused examination of how far conventional boundaries have been breached in children's literature, or what it means that the boundaries between writing for adults and children are increasingly blurred. Neither has the cultural debt owed to children's literature as a source of innovation and assimilation of new ideas in writing, illustration and narrative experimentation been acknowledged. Radical Children's Literature begins this process by exploring how writing for children redirects the way in which genres, texts and new technologies interact creatively with childhood and youth culture.