Introduction

Abstract

The last decade has seen an unprecedented growth in the attention given to children’s literature, both within the academy and beyond it. Following from such spectacular individual successes as those of Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling, children’s books in general have assumed an increasingly high profile, topping best-seller lists and contending for major literary prizes from which they would not long ago have been excluded by definition. This shift in cultural attitudes towards children’s literature is a phenomenon that has attracted attention in itself, highlighting the dual readership of children’s literature, and the different motives, perspectives, and values that adult and child readers may bring to it. For these and other reasons, the status of children’s literature as an academic field has been dramatically enhanced, with a growing number of scholars, books, journals, conferences, and research centres being devoted to the subject. It is now a vigorous and diverse area taught throughout the English-speaking world at undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral level, in English departments and in centres for the study of childhood, besides its longstanding role as a component of degrees in Education, Library, and Information Studies.