Alt Kid Lit
Alt Kid Lit
What Children's Literature Might Be
Contributions by Kristopher Alexander, Amanda K. Allen, Brianna Anderson, Catherine Burwell, Katharine Capshaw, Negin Dahya, Gabriel Duckels, Paige Gray, Gabrielle Atwood Halko, Natasha Hurley, Kenneth B. Kidd, Erica Law-Montes, Derritt Mason, Brandon Murakami, Tehmina Pirzada, Cristina Rhodes, Cristina Rivera, Jakob Rosendal, TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Vivek Shraya, Victoria Ford Smith, Joshua Whitehead, and Shuyin Yu
How do we think about children’s and young adult literature? Children’s literature is often defined through audience, so what happens when children are drawn to and claim genres not built expressly “for” them? To what extent do canonical formations tend to overwrite or obscure less visible efforts to create and promote material for the young? These are the driving questions of Alt Kid Lit: What Children’s Literature Might Be.
Contributors to the volume offer theoretical meditations on the category of children’s and young adult literature as well as case studies of materials that complicate our understanding of such. Chapters attend to a diverse array of subjects including the “non-places” of children’s literature; child mediums; Black theater for children; children’s interpretive drawings; fanfiction; Latinx, Indigenous, and silkpunk speculative fiction; environmental zines; shōnen anime; Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal; South Asian television; and “emergency children’s literature.” The book also features interviews with two experimental writers about genre and alt-publishing and a roundtable conversation on video games and children’s digital engagements. Building on diverse approaches including queer theory and postcolonial studies, Alt Kid Lit shines light on materials, methodologies, and epistemologies that are sometimes underacknowledged in the field of children’s and young adult literature studies.
Alt Kid Lit is precisely what the field of children’s and young adult literature scholarship needs: a bold, provocative, and exciting collection of essays that embrace nuanced, self-interrogating perspectives. It takes a necessary cannon to the concept of the canon.
A vital provocation for scholars of children’s and young adult literature, in which twenty-three sharp thinkers challenge us to expand our definitions, center the underrepresented, and redraw the boundaries that haunt the field. As the essays in Alt Kid Lit demonstrate, if you want to change the paradigm, you first need to take the risks that lead to new ways of thinking. So. Accept that challenge. Start by reading this book.
Alt Kid Lit asks us to think nimbly as it explores and challenges the borders of an evolving field, the study of texts for young people. This collection entices readers to consider the ways in which we delineate our discipline, what counts as scholarship, what makes a text worthy of critical attention, and which texts and young people are relegated to the margins. In the process, it complicates existing definitions of child agency, authorship, and readership by offering up new approaches and modes of thinking that expand, nuance, and trouble current assumptions about young people’s texts and cultures.
Kenneth B. Kidd is professor of English at University of Florida. He is author of three books, most recently Theory for Beginners: Children’s Literature as Critical Thought,and coeditor of four essay collections. With Elizabeth Marshall, he coedits Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture series. Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. They are author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture. Kidd and Mason are coeditors of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality.
