Engagements with Children’s and Young Adult Literature offers an accessible guide to studying Children’s and Young Adult (CYA) Literature, teaching readers how to read critically. This book introduces this dynamic field encompassing diverse genres, audiences, and interpretations. Lydia Kokkola and Sara Van den Bossche examine its historical, cultural, and ideological dimensions while addressing adult perspectives and the ambivalence of child agency. Tools for critical analysis, genre-specific insights, and emerging research trends enhance readers’ engagement with CYA literature and its broader implications.

The book approaches CYA literature from various complementary angles:

• Historical: the influence of religious and philosophical convictions on its development;
• Thematic: commonly-occurring genres and types of CYA literature, such as realism versus speculative fiction;
• Narratological: plot, time, tension, character, and setting;
• Visual: the main principles for “reading” images in picturebooks, graphic novels, and comics;
• Ideological: power dynamics and common constructions of childhood;
• Social: questions of identity politics related to race, gender, and orientation, and offers tools to read critically.

Engagements with Children’s and Young Adult Literature brings together established theories and new perspectives on CYA literature, combining engagement with theory with hands-on analytical, interpretive, and methodological tools for budding scholars of CYA literature. Exploring a diverse range of writing, this dynamic introduction is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of these vibrant fields.

Lydia Kokkola is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Oulu, Finland. She has worked on fiction portraying the Holocaust, sexuality in YA fiction, literature set in Sápmi (‘Lapland’) and a range of projects related to reading in a second language. Her current interests focus on plant sentience in CYA literature.

Sara Van den Bossche is Assistant Professor of Youth Cultures at Tilburg University, Netherlands. Her main interests are queer, feminist, ethnic-cultural, and cognitive criticism, canonisation, and adaptation. She has contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture (2023) and The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature (2011).