This volume brings together diverse, cross-disciplinary scholarly voices to examine gender construction in children’s and young adult literature. It complements and updates scholarship on this topic by creating a rich, cohesive examination of core questions around gender and sexuality in classic and contemporary texts. By providing an expansive treatment of gender and sexuality across genres, eras, and national literatures, the collection explores how readers encounter unorthodox as well as traditional notions of gender. Organized into four sections, it begins with historicist analyses of gender construction in classics of children’s literature fromCinderella to Paradise Lost, read against new classics such as the American Girls books and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. A second section looks more carefully at the evolution and increasing popularity of female protagonists from Anne Shirley to Katniss Everdeen. The next section tackles questions of the intersections between gender and genre, whether paratextual features of diary-style fiction or the conventions of speculative fiction aimed at young readers. Lastly, section four applies a range of critical lenses to examine texts aimed at targeted readerships including Mexican-American, trans*, and Amish texts. The key achievement of this volume is in providing an updated range of multidisciplinary and methodologically diverse analyses of critically and commercially successful children’s and young adult texts, contributing to the scholarship on children’s and YA literature, gender and sexuality, women’s studies, and other disciplines.
