Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Literature

The most accessible approach yet to children's literature and narrative theory, Telling Children's Stories is a comprehensive collection of never-before-published essays by an international slate of scholars that offers a broad yet in-depth assessment of narrative strategies unique to children's literature. The volume is divided into four interrelated sections: "Genre Templates and Transformations," "Approaches to the Picture Book," "Narrators and Implied Readers," and "Narrative Time." Mike Cadden's introduction considers the links between the various essays and topics, as well as their connections with such issues as metafiction, narrative ethics, focalization, and plotting. Ranging in focus from picture books to novels such as To Kill a Mockingbird, from detective fiction for children to historical tales, from new works such as the Lemony Snicket series to classics like Tom's Midnight Garden, these essays explore notions of montage and metaphor, perspective and subjectivity, identification and time. Together, they comprise a resource that will interest and instruct scholars of narrative theory and children's literature, and that will become critically important to the understanding and development of both fields. Mike Cadden is a professor of English, the director of childhood studies, and the chair of the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Journalism at Missouri Western State University. He is the author of Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults. Contributors include Nathalie op de Beeck, Holly Blackford, Mike Cadden, Elisabeth Rose Gruner, Martha Hixon, Dana Keren-Yaar, Alexandra Lewis, Chris McGee, Maria Nikolajeva, Danielle Russell, Magdalena Sikorska, Susan Stewart, Andrea Schwenke Wyile, Angela Yannicopoulou, and Angelika Zirker.