Donna R. White

Anita C. Tarr

Celebrating 100 years of Peter Pan, this fourth volume in the Centennial Studies series explores the cultural contents of Barrie's creation and the continuing impact of Peter Pan on children's literature and popular culture today, especially focusing on the fluctuations of time and narrative strategies.

A Children's Classic at 100

J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan In and Out of Time

Anita Tarr

Contributions by Torsten Caeners, Phoebe Chen, Mathieu Donner, Shannon Hervey, Angela S. Insenga, Patricia Kennon, Maryna Matlock, Ferne Merrylees, Lars Schmeink, Anita Tarr, Tony M. Vinci, and Donna R. White For centuries, humanism has provided a paradigm for what it means to be human: a rational, unique, unified, universal, autonomous being. Recently, however, a new philosophical approach, posthumanism, has questioned these assumptions, asserting that being human is not a fixed state but one always dynamic and evolving. Restrictive boundaries are no longer in play, and we do not define who we are by delineating what we are not (animal, machine, monster). There is no one aspect that makes a being human--self-awareness, emotion, artistic expression, or problem-solving--since human characteristics reside in other species along with shared DNA. Instead, posthumanism looks at the ways our bodies, intelligence, and behavior connect and interact with the environment, technology, and other species. In Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, editors Anita Tarr and Donna R. White collect twelve essays that explore this new discipline's relevance in young adult literature. Adolescents often tangle with many issues raised by posthumanist theory, such as body issues. The in-betweenness of adolescence makes stories for young adults ripe for posthumanist study. Contributors to the volume explore ideas of posthumanism, including democratization of power, body enhancements, hybridity, multiplicity/plurality, and the environment, by analyzing recent works for young adults, including award-winners like Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, as well as the works of Octavia Butler and China Miéville.

Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World

Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction

Teya Rosenberg

Martha P. Hixon

Sharon M. Scapple

Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom is a collection of scholarly essays examining the work of British author Diana Wynne Jones, whose prolific contributions to speculative fiction span the past thirty years. A contemporary of such well known fantastic authors as Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, Jones is also a clear influence on more recent writers such as J. K. Rowling. Her humorous and exciting stories, many published for children but read by all ages, are also complexly structured and thought provoking. These essays - written by academics and independent scholars from Australia, North America, Europe, and Asia - present a wide variety of approaches to and ideas about Jones's work. This book will be of interest to Jones's many admirers and to those who study or appreciate speculative fiction and children's literature.

An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom

Diana Wynne Jones

C. Anita Tarr

Celebrating 100 years of Peter Pan, the book explores the cultural contents of Barrie's creation and the continuing impact of Peter Pan on children's literature and popular culture today, especially focusing on the fluctuations of time and narrative strategies. --from publisher description

J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan in and Out of Time

Jackie C. Horne

In Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: A Children's Classic at 100, editors Jackie C. Horne and Donna R. White have assembled a collection of essays that look at the book in terms of class, gender and nationality, as well as its construction of heteronormative masculinity, the very English novel's appeal to Chinese readers, and the meaning of a text in which animals can be human-like, pets, servants, and even food.

Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows

Describes and analyses versions of the ancient Celtic myths adapted for children such as Sidney Lanier's The boy's Mabinogion, and others

A Century of Welsh Myth in Children's Literature

Ursula K. Le Guin began to provoke attention in the late 1960s with the publication of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). The former, a young adult fantasy, established Le Guin as America's foremost contemporary fantasist, a reputation which continues to this day. Both books started Le Guin on the road to being one of the most award-winning writers in America, as author of realistic fiction, historical fiction, children's literature, fantasy, poetry, reviews, and critical essays.The moral force and stylistic sophistication of Le Guin's work demand a critical reponse that reviewers and scholars have been quick to provide. As an academically trained critic in her own right, Le Guin has never shied from critical confrontation, though preferring discussion to warfare. For thirty years, she has maintained a dialogue with her critics, exploring with them her changing views on feminism, environmentalism, and utopia. Dancing with Dragons brings together for the first time the various strands of Le Guin criticism to show how the author's dialogue with the critics has informed and influenced her work and her own critical stance, and explores how her reputation as a major voice in American letters has developed.Professor DONNA WHITE teaches at Clemson University.

Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics

Dancing with Dragons

William M. Bukowski

Dolores Pushkar

Alex E. Schwartzman

Dale M. Stack

This book arises from a conference held in November 1996 designed to examine how competence can be improved in the different stages ofthe lifespan. To this end, we brought together eminent researchers in different areas of human development—infancy, childhood, and adulthood, including the late adult years. The conference was based on the premise that discussion arising from the interfaces of research and practice would increase our knowledge of and stimulate the further application of effective interventions designed to improve competence. The editors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Concordia University and the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide a la Recherche (FCAR) in providing funding and other assistance toward the conference “Improving Competence Across the Lifespan” and toward the publication of this book. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to the numerous students associated with our Centre for their help and to Gail Pitts and Lesley Husband of the Centre for Research in Human Development for their assistance. We are especially grateful to Donna Craven, Centre for Research in Human Development, for her heroic work on both the conference and the present volume. We could not have met our goals without you.

Building Interventions Based on Theory and Research

Improving Competence Across the Lifespan

Dolores Gold

Proceedings of a Conference held in Montreal, Canada, November 15-17, 1996

Donna R. White

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