GLOSSARY

Ableism	The assumption that a non-disabled body is superior to a disabled one, and that a disability requires a ‘cure.’
Absurdism	A literary genre where characters cannot find any innate meaning or purpose in life, calling into question concepts like truth or value.
Affect theory	The analysis of ‘affects,’ which is a term sometimes used interchangeably with ‘emotions.’ Affect theory considers how these ‘affects’ are experienced subjectively and within political and social life.
Age levelling	The sorting of books into age-appropriate categories like ‘Ages 5–9’ or grade levels like ‘Middle Grade.’
Agency	Control that children have over their own navigation of culture despite their relative powerlessness in political and social life.
Alterity	‘Otherness,’ or the state of being different.
Animal studies	An emerging branch of scholarship that seeks to investigate the relationship between people and non-human animals, and the cultural representation and shaping of those relationships.
Anthropomorphism	The attribution of human traits to animals.
Avant-garde	Experimental ideas and methods in arts and literature.
Battledores	A reading technology that superseded the hornbook. Battledores were made from cardboard with a paper overlay over a paddle shape; they dropped out of production in the 19th century.
Blending	A theory of cognition developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier to describe how the brain combines different ideas, words, and images to make new meanings from these combinations in a network of ‘mental spaces.’
Carnivalesque	Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for a literary mode that challenges dominant power structures and celebrates subversive misrule through chaos and humour.
Chapbooks	Inexpensive booklets written in a wide variety of genres, including tales of adventure, folk, and fairy tales, often regarded as one of the first iterations of popular culture.
Childhood Studies	An interdisciplinary field that studies the experience of childhood historically and in the present, as well as questions of child agency and children’s rights.
Childness	Peter Hollindale’s term for the qualities that a child brings to children’s literature, and the qualities that mark a work of children’s literature as being for children.
Childist	Peter Hunt’s term for reading as far as possible from a child’s point of view. John Wall uses ‘childism’ to mean that our ethical life should be completely transformed by attending to children’s needs and perspectives.
Cisgender	Identifying with the biological sex of one’s birth.
Cognitive narratology	An interdisciplinary study drawing on the disciplines of biology, neuroscience, and psychology, as well as child development that considers the cognitive capacities that young people bring to their readings of texts, as shaped both by biology and culture.
Colonialism	The process by which a country attains control over another country, settling it and exploiting it culturally and/or economically.
Concept picture-books	Picture-books that teach children the alphabet, their numbers, and so on.
Courtesy literature	Books dealing with etiquette, manners, and behaviour; part of the didactic literature of the medieval period.
Decolonization	The undoing of colonialism, usually by a nation seeking independence and autonomy, but also all cultural practices that seek to oppose colonial domination.
Dialogism	Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that a work has a multiplicity of perspectives and voices, as seen in the novel form, and where each work is informed by and responds to other works. See also heteroglossia.
Discourse	The sum of social ideas and practices, including language and cultural representation.
Ecocriticism	The study of literature’s relationship with physical environments, particularly the natural world.
Embourgeoisement	Inculcation of middle-class ideals.
Empathy	Insight into another person’s thoughts and feelings, and sharing in those feelings.
Eurocentrism	A bias towards Western or European civilization, and the centring of Europe in scholarship and education.
Evangelical movement	Religious revival of the early 19th century that resulted in a number of religious works for children distributed by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the Religious Tract Society.
Fables	A story, usually with animals, conveying a moral.
Fan fiction	Fiction written by a fan of a particular book, television series, movie, etc. that draws on the characters and/or setting of the original work. It is rarely authorized by the author or producer of the original work.
Gender-fluid people	Gender-fluid people do not identify with any fixed gender identity.
Golden age	The period where many of the books acknowledged as children’s literary classics today were published (1865–1915).
Heteroglossia	Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for the ‘many voices’ that a text can contain, with a plurality of voices creating a polyphonic work.
Heteronormativity	The presumption that heterosexual relations are the norm.
Hornbook	A primer for study used from the 15th to the 18th centuries, where a sheet of paper with the letters of the alphabet or a religious text was mounted on a wooden frame with a protective sheet of transparent horn (or bone). The hornbook often had a hole punched in its handle so it could hang from a child’s belt or girdle.
Ideology	The normative practices of a society or group, often working on an unconscious level to shape individual subjectivities.
Ideological state apparatus	Louis Althusser’s term for social, cultural, and state structures—organized religion, law, education, and the family—that convey the state’s values through cultural means, unlike the direct violence of prisons, the military, and the police (repressive state apparatus).
Imperialism	Use of colonization, military force, or other means to exert power over another nation or group.
Indigenous people	People who inhabited a country or geographic region before the conquest or colonization of that country or region, and the people descended from them.
Interdisciplinary	Involving or drawing on more than one branch of knowledge; combining the insights of more than one discipline.
Intersectional feminism	A feminist practice that acknowledges that oppression is shaped by race, class, disability, and sexuality rather than just gender; the term was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Kinship model	Marah Gubar’s model of children’s literature where children are seen as part of a ‘family’ of readers, in a network of relationships.
Modernism	A literary movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in prose and poetry that sought to break with traditional literary forms.
Narrative prosthesis	David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s term for the ways in which disability has been used as a narrative trope, with narratives depending on disability for their literary effects
Neurodiversity	The many different ways in which cognition and perception are experienced by individuals, including conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and others.
Niche publications	Published books for a highly specialized market.
Non-binary people	Non-binary people do not identify as either a man or a woman, either because they identify as a man or woman at different times, consider themselves to be in-between the categories of man and woman, or define their gender as outside these categories altogether.
Ontologies	Pertaining to the nature of being and ways of being.
Orientalism	Exoticized fantasies held about Arab and Asian people that western scholars and travellers used to justify colonial ventures.
Pastoral	Portraying an idealized version of life in the country.
Performative	A form of utterance that effects change through the process of being spoken or written.
Postcolonial literature	The literary productions of a country after colonial rule, with attention to the legacy of colonialism and imperialism and the continued presence of colonizing forces.
Posthuman	An entity or person who exists beyond the state of being a human, or a person who is comprised of human and machine or human and non-human animal.
Propaganda	A work that contains clearly biased information specifically and consciously intended to promote a point of view or political position.
Puritans	An amorphous religious group that refused to conform to the requirements of the national religion as practised by the Church of England, feeling that its organization and forms of worship needed both reform and simplification.
Rational moralists	A group of writers in the 18th century who stressed the power of didactic children’s literature to cultivate young people’s reason.
Repressive state apparatus	Louis Althusser’s term for the arms of state power that proceed via violence, such as prisons, the army, the police, and so on.
Renaissance humanism	A cultural movement that stressed secular, as opposed to sacred, learning, as well as encouraging a return to Greek and Roman thought.
Romanticism	A movement in arts and literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, stressing subjective experience, supernatural or non-rational experiences, and attunement to the natural world.
Schemas	In cognitive narratology, a pattern of thought that helps organize information in patterns.
Scripts	In cognitive narratology, a pattern of thought to help produce a schema for routine activities.
Social model	Theory of disability that argues that the way society is organized is the cause of disability rather than an individual’s impairment or difference, with a focus on ways to change social structures to remove barriers for disabled people.
Supercrip	A stereotype where a character with a disability or illness is portrayed as having an extraordinary skill or genius that helps them ‘overcome’ their disability.
Transgender people	Transgender people identify with a gender identity and/or expression different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Trickster figures	A mischievous figure in myth or folklore who uses his or her knowledge or skill to disrupt conventions or play tricks, sometimes as a compensation for physical weakness or another disadvantage.