Australian Children's Literature

I'm very proud of my latest edited collection with Kristine Moruzi,  Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods, which has just been published in Palgrave's Literary Cultures and Childhoods series. It was intellectually reinvigorating to think about the construction of the child in adult texts alongside of the development of children's literature and periodicals. Moreover, it was rewarding to assemble some of our favourite scholars in the field to think about this topic, including those who were heavily influential on our doctoral work about Victorian children's literature, such as Claudia Nelson, and those who are reframing the field as early-career researchers.  The volume includes chapters that consider the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. It examines how ...

As an academic, I spend a lot of my research time scouring databases for articles. Marvels & Tales is a journal devoted to fairy tales that I have always admired, and used for both teaching and research. It was an absolute pleasure to co-edit a special issue of the journal on Australian fairy tale with Dr Emma Whatman , whose doctoral work broke new ground in the study of fairy-tale adaptations and postfeminism. In postcolonial contexts, thinking about fairy tale history can be a fraught exercise, particularly when it comes to the way that Aboriginal stories were appropriate by white writers. Nevertheless, our contributors made the job of celebrating, at the same time as critiquing, Australian fairy tales, simple.  Juliet O'Conor, for example, contributes her unparalleled knowledge about Indigenous children's literature to contrast "Aboriginalist" texts such as Katie Langloh Parker's Australian Legendary Tales (1896) with stories written an illustrated by trad...