“Children recognize so much now,” Peter Pan as soon as instructed us. A century later, within the Age of data, they recognize much more. So shouldn’t their literature stand up to fulfill them? Isn’t it time for children’s literature to develop up?

First conceived as her doctoral dissertation at Harvard college, with this huge exam of J. okay. Rowling’s sequence, Christina Phillips-Mattson argues that with the Harry Potter books we witness the start of a brand new period of children’s literature. Marking a departure from informal handbooks to the Harry Potter sequence, Phillips-Mattson presents the reader with a scholarly exam of Rowling’s novels—as good as different modern fictions for kids by way of such novelists as Philip Pullman, Lemony Snicket, Catherynne Valente, and Neil Gaiman—that is additionally interesting and available.

In order to illustrate that modern fictions for kids are as complicated, multifaceted, and helpful of great educational inquiry as grownup literature, Phillips-Mattson takes the reader on a thrilling trip via a hugely certain historical past of children’s literature and indicates us how Rowling’s novels belong to a wealthy and sundry literary culture via putting Harry Potter along Greek mythology, vintage fairy stories, Golden Age texts like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, Jane Austen’s Emma and satisfaction and Prejudice, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury stories. making use of the feedback of Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, Phillips-Mattson responds to Rowling’s detractors and offers facts of Rowling’s stylistic sophistication and complicated narrative constitution that underwrite the believability of her characters and her fictional global. an enticing, thought-provoking learn for students, academics, common readers of children’s literature, and Harry Potter fanatics, Children’s Literature Grows Up contains interesting new learn on spell language, intertextuality, ethical corporation, and mental realism.