This chapter provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary formation of postsecular studies and briefly outlines its influence in literary studies broadly as well nineteenth-century literary studies specifically. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women then provides a case study for the demonstration of a postsecular reading attending to the production of secularity around the novel’s bifurcated but intertwined concern with playfulness and morality.

Heralded as the decade that launched the “Golden Age” of children’s literature, the 1860s saw the growth of fairy tales, fantasy, and imperial romance, and concerns about education and empire. The 1860s major children’s fantasy works, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market[GK2] [GK3](1862), Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies [GK4](1863), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [GK5](1865), share striking similarities. The trope of unstable ground in these texts offers insight into the anxieties of the era with implications for education and imperial stewardship. The unearthing of fossils along with debates over Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species[GK6] (1859) created unease about the unknown and disrupted established knowledge about the timeline for creation. Carroll’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s texts reveal uncertainties of science (especially the newly articulated domains of geology, paleontology, archeology, and geography), the inadequacies of education, and the legacy of empire. In their hands, unstable ground is not only a plot device and a metaphor, but a warning.

This chapter argues that two works of Victorian children’s literature – Alfred Elwes’s The Adventures of a Bear (1853) and The Adventures of a Dog (1854) – capture the complex politics of selfhood in relation to animality and law. They also demonstrate the trope of transformation from animal to human: the dog becomes a trusted policeman (or equivalent) and the bear ends up a blind beggar. In both cases, the choice of animals as protagonists allows for a frank discussion of violence, gender, and class conflict.

This chapter examines reference used by and with children and explores creative and playful uses of reference. Following an overview of how uses of reference develop as children’s language skills develop, we discuss the significance of the tendency for children to underspecify their intended referent in the use of referring expressions as compared to adults who do not do this, but who will sometimes overspecify the referent. Drawing on a broad range of examples, we examine evidence of how children quickly get to a stage where they can exploit reference for their own purposes or just to have fun. The atypical use of referring expressions in children’s literature is discussed and we examine the reasons for the authors’ deliberate exploitations of known conventions in relation to reference.

In their efforts to establish children’s literature as a distinct genre, eighteenth-century writers and publishers tailored their texts to the unique needs of young readers. This chapter considers how these negotiations reflect different attitudes towards children’s small bodies, limited life experience, and comparatively narrow understandings when modern conceptions of childhood were still developing. Though books for young people needed to be shorter and more syntactically straightforward than those written for adults, children’s authors were adamant that their works should not be viewed as inferior. Embracing the concept of multum in parvo (much in little), figures such as John Newbery, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Ellenor Fenn demonstrated that the simplicity of children’s literature was the product of complex aesthetic, pedagogical, and commercial underpinnings. Early children’s books regularly offered lessons in the subjectivity and mutability of scale, framing young readers as “little giants” whose unruly growth sent them skyrocketing, showing how childish egoism produced an overinflated sense of self, or using Tom Thumb as a model for how greatness might reside within littleness. This chapter also attends to the style of children’s literature, exploring stories written in words of one syllable and short forms such as fables and couplets.

This chapter tackles the translation of contemporary teenage literature through its focus on language as a problem – ambiguous, riddled with misunderstandings, clumsy, or subject to rapidly changing norms. Translating teenage literature implies navigating spaces between language as a place of both acculturation and experimentation. The first part explores elements within teenage fiction that invite the translator to treat language as resistant, alien, difficult. The next show that those literary nudges are counterbalanced by editorial drives towards naturalness and domestication. This leads to the necessity for the translator to commit not just politically but didactically to the text. The last part looks at what creative translation workshops with teenagers themselves might bring the translator in this endeavour, offering a meeting-point for aesthetic and didactic considerations in the translation of adolescent fiction.

American Revolutionaries cast themselves as metaphorical orphans, voluntarily severing ties with an overbearing empire-parent. In rendering the trauma of orphanhood as a virtue, this particular metaphor required a harsh rite of passage for protagonists to move from minor status to self-sufficiency. Only by casting off natal relations and their burdensome histories could one move into freedom, as defined by an idealized white male citizen, unencumbered by the trappings of the past. The slave trade’s project of inflicting literal orphanhood on a massive scale sets off this early republican celebration of voluntary alienation in garish relief. The author explores how the tension surrounding orphanhood structured the American Colonization Society, one of the most widely supported and well-financed failures of the time. The ACS was nonetheless the collective author of the first narrative crafted to persuade African Americans of anything: here, to convince them that severing ties to the United States was the only path to true freedom. Attending to orphanhood as imagined in the writings of slavers, the enslaved, and early antislavery legislators, the author traces how theories of early republican childhood were shaped by a shadow narrative in which slavery’s history had to be severed from the nation’s progress.

Carole Fleuret offers a vision of social injustice and racism in France during the 1980s by recounting her experience of  the denial of the languages of migration at school, including the language of her grandfather. Through her research, she fights against the loss of the linguistic capital using children’s literature, pluriliteracy repertoires and invented spelling to rethink school programs.

Chapter 23 focuses on the translation of literary prose, a broad genre that ranges across children’s literature, genre fiction, and literary and lyrical fiction, each of which presents different primary foci, from style to plot, but tends towards a narrative core of characters, setting and process. Translators of literary prose face textual and contextual practical challenges in catching the cadence, rhythm and music of a text, since stylistic variation can be crucial in characterization and plot development. Figurative language, selectional restrictions, humour, allusions and quotations tend to be culturally specific and to add to the challenges presented by indeterminacy, ambiguity, inference and implicatures, all of which rely on contextual understanding and may need to be explicitated in a translation.

This chapter adopts, describes, and critiques three complementary perspectives on children’s literature: (1) psychoanalytic studies of and interpretations of children’s books; (2) effects of psychoanalysis on the work of children’s book authors and artists; (3) ways in which psychoanalysis might learn from the wisdom of children’s literature. Among the authors discussed are Bruno Bettelheim, Maurice Sendak, Beatrix Potter, and Elena Ferrante.

World children’s literature can be understood as a modern, transnational discursive space that formed in the late nineteenth century. Specific aspects of how this historical moment evolved internationally are explored in more detail using in particular the German, Japanese, and Anglo-American cases as examples. That we can now regard children’s literature as a cross-cultural genre characterized by widely shared notions of appropriate content or intended readership is a result that emerged from a complex, entangled set of historical and political circumstances. The first section of the essay sets the stage by tracing the historical growth of childhood as a scientific and cultural concept; the importance of this newly defined childhood to modern nation building efforts, especially as manifested in the centralization of schooling; the rise of mass media, including that tailored to children; and finally, the gradual creation of a literate child and youth population that developed its own reading culture. The next section explores the connection between education and children’s literature in more detail: it was the transnational pedagogical debate about children’s literature in the school curriculum at the end of the nineteenth century that led the genre to assume a central role in creating future citizens and imagined communities. A third section details the international boom in more popular, entertainment-oriented children’s literature around the fin de siècle, which demonstrates from an alternate perspective how the ideological goals of adults shaped -- and were shaped by -- children’s imagination of the world. The essay concludes with a reflection on how world children’s literature has continued to grow as a complex, uneven system of international exchange powered by a distinctive and paradoxical mix of didacticism and idealism on the one hand – and generosity and adaptability on the other.

Modern literature is being challenge and reinvented by fangirls who offer a model for feminist communal practice and are playing an important role in reshaping the practice of writing in public. Their influence is visible now; fandom broadly and fanfiction in particular has become a battleground, and. the visibility of women as fans and authors has brought with it violent backlash. The immediacy of online discourse and the speed with which reactions travel through social media bring the opportunity for fans to share their thoughts and creative work with the original texts’ authors and fellow fans, but this immediacy also extends to those expressing rage and dissatisfaction. Fanfiction and fan art—from “shipping,” or romantically connecting two or more characters, to the crafting of “alternate universes,” “crossovers,” and beyond—circulates on every social media network, offering new visions for whose stories can be told and who gets to tell them.

This chapter explores the variety of literature available to young people during the Harlem Renaissance, paying specific attention to the contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Effie Lee Newsome, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps. Children’s literature took shape through periodicals, community theatre, black-owned publications, and mainstream publishing houses with an interracial audience. Texts embraced a new vision of African American childhood as sophisticated, capable, knowledgeable, and courageous, because literacy rates for young people often outmatched those of adults, children were imagined through texts as cultural leaders who would help reinvent the black community. Writers also employed children’s literature as a site of community galvanization, drawing together adults and children through the veneration of black history and identity. Children were imagined as politically invested and deeply aware of the racist culture that surrounded them. Children’s literature aimed to develop readers’ racial sensibility in order to propel social change.

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction has slowly emerged since the 1970s as a significant presence in Caribbean writing, although it still constitutes an understudied group of texts and has received comparatively little critical attention from scholars and critics. This essay explores how Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction draws on Afro- and Indo-Caribbean oral traditions and folklore whilst also exploring contemporary cultural issues such as sexuality and body-image as it approaches questions around Caribbean cultural identity with different perspectives, purposes and poetics. Collectively, these works have provided an important space through which to revisit history, either to tell stories that have been left out of the official record or to retell grand historical narratives (colonial and national) from other perspectives. The presence and centrality of child narrators has been a marked feature, and their voices are frequently deployed to critique and provide fresh commentary on established narratives, historical reasonings and social questions.

In twenty-first-century psychology and self-help literature, the “inner child” refers to an original or true self that serves as a repository of wisdom for its adult counterpart. This chapter traces the modern inner child back to Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and her protégée Emma Curtis Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 1890s. Hopkins described an idealized “Man Child” within each adult woman who could lead her to spiritual serenity and worldly success. Frances Hodgson Burnett fictionalized different versions of this figure in her short story Sara Crewe (1888) and her blockbuster novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), whose eponymous child hero helps his mother achieve undreamed-of wealth and status. Little Lord Fauntleroy also serves as his mother’s proxy outside of the domestic sphere, allowing her to reach personal goals without appearing inappropriately ambitious. The novel’s enormous popularity may have stemmed from this symbiotic relationship between mother and son. Then as now, the inner child helped women reconcile social pressures to be selfless and giving with career pursuits and self-indulgent behavior. The persistence of the inner child suggests that contemporary feminism still has work to do in enabling women to embrace opportunities without guilt.

Chapter four turns to Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. New Thought offered Montgomery an escape from the rigid Presbyterianism of her rural Prince Edward Island community and helped assuage her chronic depression and insomnia. Ultimately, New Thought was not enough to save the author, who committed suicide in 1942. But New Thought pervades her fiction, particularly Anne of Green Gables (1908), which features an inspired girl child in the New Thought mold.Anne Shirley’s revitalizing influence on her adoptive parents, her healing of a dying baby, and her transformative imagination all signal her conformity to this role. So do her homosocial relationships with female “kindred spirits” like her “bosom friend,” Diana Barry. Close relationships between women were a common feature of New Thought novels, which appealed to lesbian and bisexual readers and women seeking escape from oppressive marriages. The conclusion of this chapter turns to Montgomery’s later novel, the adult-themed comedy The Blue Castle (1926), to show that New Thought was more than a passing fancy for the author. Rather, it was a coping strategy that she returned to throughout her life and explored in various genres, from children’s literature to romances for adult readers.