Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods

A chapter by Aneesh Barai, a new member of iHuman, has come out this month in a collection that will be of interest to the iHuman community. Aneesh’s chapter is on new ideas of queer and postcolonial childhoods in 1930s children’s literature, in the collection Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods. In this collection, edited by Rachel Conrad and L. Brown Kennedy, researchers in literature examine the blossoming expressions of diverse childhoods, literary cultures and child agency that began in the first decades of the twentieth century. Looking at texts for young audiences (across genres including poetry, fiction, picture books and children’s television), the essays in this collection bring to the front the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts, explore challenges to social “norms” of childhood, and emphasise the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects.

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