The contributors interpret the theme through a remarkable performance across a diversity of children's texts and genres: poem, song, novel, picture book, computer games, and film.
Using sub-sections Words and Pictures; Gender and Race; Space and Time; Fun and Games, the end result is a seriously playful approach to textual analysis which is both stimulating and entertaining.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1: Words and Pictures
- Chapter 1 'The Play's the Thing: The Ludic and the Ludicrous in Poetry for Children
Morag Styles
- Chapter 2 Voice and Authority: Poetry by Young People in a New Zealand Newspaper in the 1980s
Jill Holt
- Chapter 3 Performing Picture books
Elizabeth Parsons
- Chapter 4 The Three Little Pigs and the Arts of Playfulness
Linda Knight
- Chapter 5 Old Tale for New People: An Indonesian Curse Folktale Retold for Children
Clara Evi Citraningtyas
- Chapter 6 Words, Rhyme, Rhythm and Song
Jennifer Rumsey
Part 2: Gender and Race
- Chapter 7 Performance of Colour: Narratives of Passing in Contemporary Settler-Colony texts
Clare Bradford
- Chapter 8 Mum's the Word: Mother as a Poetic and Pregnant Signifier
Vivienne Muller
- Chapter 9 Funny Boys Make Strange Men: Male-to-Female Cross-Dressing in Children's Literature
Victoria Flanagan
- Chapter 10 No Exit: Performing Masculinity
Roderick McGillis
- Chapter 11 Feeling a Little Queer?: Performing Lesbian Desire and Identity in Youth Texts
Kerry Mallan
- Chapter 12 Moving Bodies
Anita Jetnikoff
Part 3: Space and Time
- Chapter 13 Revitalising the Past with the Present in Arthurian Retelling for Children
Emma Yarrow
- Chapter 14 Playing in Deadly Earnest: Phillip Pulman and the Endangered Child
Lisa O'Connor
- Chapter 15 Performing Difference: Young Adult Literature Post September 11
Jo Lampert
- Chapter 16 Performing the Past: Language and Ideology in Selected Historical Novels of Katherine Paterson
Paul March
- Chapter 17 Talking in Hobbit Tongue: The Lord of the Rings and Fantasies of language
Susan Carson
- Chapter 18 The Space of Play in the Novels of David Almond
Anna Smith
- Chapter 19 Performing Adolescence: Winners and Losers
Diana Hodge
Part 4: Fun and Games
- Chapter 20 When Harry Met Lara: Performing the Quest in Blockbuster Films for young People
Sharyn Pearce
- Chapter 21 'Doing Serious Work or Just Playing?': Computer Games and Pleasure in Subject English
Donna McGrath
- Chapter 22 Playing Adrian Mole: Parody and Performative Adolescence
Heather Scutter
- Chapter 23 Children's Play as Subversive Activity
Jeri Kroll
- Chapter 24 The Harry Potter Challenge of Children's Literature
Jo Coward
- Chapter 25 Performing Politics: Children as Conscience
Margot Hillel
About the Contributors
Index