New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature: Utopian Transformations (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)

Children's texts are highly responsive to social change and to global politics, and are implicated in shaping the values of children and young people. New World Orders, now in paperback for the first time, shows how texts for children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic and political movements of the last fifteen years. With a focus on international children's texts produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures to child readers. The book considers what these texts have to say about globalization, neocolonialism, environmental issues, pressures on families and communities, and the idea of the posthuman. This fascinating volume is the first thorough study of how children's books imagine and propose possible worlds and societies.