Critical literary perspectives on children's and young adult literature

Abstract

In this chapter we share an array of contemporary critical literary theoretical perspectives that have been productively applied to works of children's and young adult literature. As educators, we advocate for enlisting these perspectives to foster literary engagement, expand potential meanings, enrich classroom dialogue, and offer students powerful tools for navigating real world and textual spaces. Along with an overview of these literary perspectives and how they have been taken up by scholars, we provide examples of how we draw on these perspectives in our course for teacher educators to bring into focus key concepts underlying pedagogical argument—that critical engagement with literature for young people can deepen and expand students' understandings of and interactions with both texts and their everyday worlds.