This selection of papers by early career researches at the University of Cambridge, UK, reflects a variety of approaches to children’s literature, but they all share some common features. Firstly, children’s literature scholarship is viewed as a part of literary studies, even though educational dimensions of children’s literature cannot be totally dismissed. The implication is that scholars are free to employ a wide range of literary theories adapting them to the specifics of texts written and marketed for a young audience. Secondly, “children’s literature” is understood in a broad sense, encompassing texts from picturebooks to young adult novels.

This article conducts a semiotic analysis of the postmodern features in Ziraldo’s Brazilian picturebook The Panel Boy (O Menino Quadradinho). The narrative follows a boy who lives inside a comic book until he is forced to enter a world of prose, leaving behind the images, colors, and sounds of comics to adapt to a new form of storytelling. Blending the conventions of the picturebook, comic book, and prose, the story employs ambiguous representations that generate uncertainty and indeterminacy. Self-reflexive and metafictive, The Panel Boy features a protagonist who reflects upon and comments on the nature of these different fictional forms. Furthermore, the text incorporates intertextual and intervisual allusions that situate the narrative within both fine and commercial art, implicitly addressing their relationship and foregrounding the reader’s role in attributing meaning through contextual connections. The article concludes by questioning whether the limitations imposed by the power imbalance between child readers and adult authors or mediators within children’s literature allow for the existence of a truly postmodern picturebook.

This paper explores the role of bread and the figure of the baker in The Hunger Games, the first novel in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy. A selective survey of the history of bread and its significance in Western culture is intertwined with close analysis of Collins’ representation of bread and the character of Peeta, “the boy with the bread.” For centuries, bread has occupied a unique position in the European collective consciousness, often symbolizing the difference between life and death. Although this acute awareness of starvation and redemption through bread has largely receded in the modern world, its enduring presence in literature for children and young people suggests the persistence of this folk consciousness. In Western culture, bread continues to function as a site of power struggle, emblematic of freedom from want and oppression, and, through Christianity, freedom from death itself. The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to situate Collins’ use of bread symbolism within a sociohistorical and literary context; and second, to establish a critical understanding of the baker in general, and Peeta in particular, as a highly significant literary character.

This paper examines the relationship between the narrative text and illustrations in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as illustrated by John Tenniel, and Dodgeson’s self-illustrated manuscript of Alice Under Ground. By situating Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a text in dialogue with Darwinian economics and theories of evolution, this paper argues that Tenniel and Carroll’s illustrations depict the impossibility of maintaining innocence and the state of childhood in a world overrun by consumption, riddled with unstable Darwinian economics and theories, and corrupted by inefficient and arbitrary authoritarian institutions. Indeed, the interplay between text and image ultimately suggests that these systems regulating Victorian England will inevitably force the child to enter an absurd world where everyone is mad, or adopt an adult rationalist view, both choices curtailing the possibility of the carefree, innocent child.

Crossover literature generally refers to works that blur the boundaries between child and adult readership, transgressing age categories. Yet crossover can also signify boundary crossing in broader generic and sociocultural senses. This article argues that a text’s crossover potential lies more in its mode of representation than in its subject matter, and that this potential becomes especially significant when the text is translated into another language. By focusing on crossover as a transgression of sociocultural boundaries, the study suggests that investigations of crossover literature must situate texts within their contexts of production and reception. These arguments are illustrated through close analysis of Jimmy Liao’s picturebooks When the Moon Forgot and The Sound of Colors, alongside their English translations—particularly examining how themes of loneliness, family relationships, and death are rendered differently in the Chinese and English versions.

The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book written by Rudyard Kipling have been generally accepted as the classic of children’s literature by readers, but interpreted as classic of general literature by scholars. Consequently, the image of Mowgli is always misinterpreted as the European-centered colonizers, and the phrase “The Law of the Jungle” that is repeatedly mentioned in the stories is misread as the proof that Kipling preaches colonialism or imperialism through writing with the theory of post-colonialism. In this paper, I attempt to reread the “wolf-boy stories” in Kipling’s jungle stories with the method of ethical literary criticism, and hold that Mowgli’s transformation from a wolf in the jungle to a member of human society is allegoric in that it symbolizes the children’s socialization from a natural being to a social being, that is, a process in which children acquire social norms and behavior codes, and develop ethical awareness so that they may live harmoniously with others in human society. Mowgli’s initiation is ethically educational to child readers in that it helps child reader to understand that the essential difference between animal and human lies not in the physical appearance, but in the ethical awareness that is unique to human beings.

Similar to China’s drive for modernization, the emergence and flourishing of children’s literature in China has been directly influenced by the European and American scholars and writers. The development of the views on children’s literature of Zhou Zuoren, founder of the theory of Chinese children’s literature, distinctly reflects a direct influence from the United States. This influence is divided into two aspects. First, Zhou Zuoren echoes the American view on children’s literature represented by Granville Stanley Hall that “children’s rights should be protected” and “children are different from adults physically and psychologically”. On this foundation, Zhou develops his child-oriented view of children’s literature. This view allows children to grow up through a natural course and guides them when necessary, so that they won’t do anything they are not ready for. Second, Zhou Zuoren draws strength from studies of the applications of many American scholarly theories, including those of Porter Lander MacClintock and H. E. Scudder, and reveals more clearly the stylistic features of children’s literature from the perspective of literary education in elementary schools. The American pedology and studies on literary education in elementary schools exerted a profound influence on Zhou Zuoren, and played a pivotal role in the development of his child-oriented view of children’s literature.

Within the framework of postcolonial studies of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Edward Said, the paper critically examines the entanglements of colonial and racial trajectories in The Last of the Mohicans in order to subvert traditional critical assumptions which categorized the novel as an adventure story, Indian romance, or travel narrative affiliated with a multiethnic frontier community. Negotiating the dynamics of colonialism through the economy of its central trope, the Manichean allegory which creates boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, the paper argues that Cooper’s novel, modeled on seventeenth-century captivity narratives, aims to exterminate or marginalize the Indigenous American subaltern or associate him/her with a status of cultural decadence and savagery. The paper also illustrates that Cooper’s fiction blends the legacies of the colonized and the colonizer to reconstruct a biased narrative integral to the author’s vision of the confrontations between the Native Indian community and the European settlers during the American colonial era. Reluctant to introduce a balanced view of the situation on the western frontier, Cooper emphasizes crucial colonizer/colonized constructs engaging cultural trajectories which lead to conflict rather than dialogue between both sides.

No Heaven for Gunga Din is a semi-autobiographical novella about Gunga Din (Ali-Mir Drekvandi) when he used to serve the British soldiers in and after the Second World War in Iran and Britain. However, his duty in this fictional work is to follow the dead soldiers up to heaven. This article attempts to present a critique of the network of power in and about the book based on the socio-historical circumstances of post–Second World War Iran. Drawing on Robert Young and Homi Bhabha’s theories of hybridity and mimicry, the authors of this article conclude that Mir-Ali Drekvandi has written the book as an ironic cry at all the mistreatments of the colonial powers in Iran during and after the Second World War, even though he was seemingly absorbed in a language and culture which the colonial center provided for him.

Based on an analysis of Dickinson’s “frog” poems, which are less commented and annotated, this essay aims to illustrate the poet’s reflection on life philosophy and her spiritual pursuit in a seemingly eventless life of intense seclusion. Dickinson’s letters on frogs and toads are employed as further evidence on the analysis. The essay, from a historical viewpoint, makes a tentative speculation on the relationship between Dickinson’s frogs and the ones in Grimms’ fairy tales and Aesop’s fables. Furthermore, the classical Chinese poetry is employed to highlight Dickinson’s poetics and metaphorical communication in the “frog” poems. Finally, borrowing such terms as “secret nobility” and “negative identity, the essay points out, after a detailed discussion on Thoreau’s influence on Dickinson in terms of the texts on frogs, that, though there exists an apparently paradoxical expression between her poetic and the epistolary texts, Dickinson articulates in her works an envy of frogs, which are made emblems of her aspiration for a serene and contented life which proves more rewarding and meaningful to her.

In this article, the role of nationalism and postcolonialism in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is explored. The novel is used to reveal the political and postcolonial layers of Joyce’s oeuvre and to depict how colonization works through politics. This research endeavors to find a clearer answer to the question of whether Joyce was a real nationalist or not. Regarding the theoretical framework of the research, Attridge and Howes’s methodology plays a key role in analyzing the main discussion. The references of Joyce in his rich text are drawn out, analyzed, and discussed to achieve a clear conclusion. The significance of this study is to show how an author from a colonized nation is influenced by colonial forces and cultural invasions. This research concludes that Joyce was a part of nationalistic movements such as the Irish Revival; however, he had major conflicts with some individuals and movements that claimed to be nationalists. Therefore, Joyce is a semicolonial writer who has his own specific mode of nationalism.