Children’s Literature in Place: Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture

Children’s Literature in Place: Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture is an edited collection dedicated to individual, international, and interdisciplinary considerations of the places and spaces of children’s literature, media, and culture, from content to methodology, in fictional, virtual, and material settings. This volume proposes a survey of the changing landscapes of children’s culture, the expected and unexpected spaces and places that emerge as and because of children’s culture. The places and spaces of children’s literature are varied and diverse. By making place studies a guiding principle, this book builds on the impressive body of international research on place in children’s literature, media, and culture to bring together and provide a comprehensive overview of how to study place in children’s and young adult literature. This volume provides a wide range of approaches and international perspectives of place in children’s literature, media, and culture and contributes to this growing and relevant field by showcasing various scholarly aspects and approaches to children’s literature, and the place of children’s literature in the context of international scholarship.

Zeljka Flegar is an Associate Professor at the University of Osijek in Croatia, where she has been teaching and doing research in children’s literature, media, and drama in English. She has published articles on the linguistic and narrative aspects of children’s literature and culture, adaptations, and popular media. She co-edited the collection Children and Languages Today: First and Second Language Literacy Development (Vernon Press, 2019). Since 2020, Flegar has been a member of the editorial board of Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Longwood University, USA (2021).

Jennifer M. Miskec is a Professor of English at Longwood University in Virginia, USA, where she co-directs the Children’s Literature English Major Concentration and Children’s Literature Minor and teaches several children’s and young adult literature and culture courses. Miskec also leads children’s culture study abroad programs to Croatia and Serbia and to South Africa. Miskec’s scholarly work is primarily centered on studies of contemporary American children’s and YA literature. Miskec co-edited, with Annette Wannamaker, a collection of essays on Early Readers, The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers (Routledge, 2016). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb, Croatia (2019) and a Fulbright Specialist at Simon Fraser University, Canada (2022).