Children's Literature and New York City

Pádraic Whyte is Assistant Professor of English and co-director of the Masters Programme in Children’s Literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He is author of Irish Childhoods: Children’s Fiction and Irish History (2011). In 2012, he delivered the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Lecture on American Children’s Literature at Yale University.Keith O’Sullivan lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin. He recently co-edited Irish Children’s Literature and Culture: New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing (Routledge, 2011). In 2012, he was the recipient of a David Almond Fellowship for Research in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University and Seven Stories.

• Introduction Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan 1. Bank Street and Beyond: New York City in the Here and Now Books of Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Margaret Wise Brown Joseph Stanton 2. ‘Form Follows Function’: Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet (1941–1951) Julie Anne Stevens 3. Striated Space and Smooth Space: A Deleuzoguttarian Reading of Nick McDonell’s Twelve Keith O’Sullivan 4. Navigating Adolescence through the Streets of New York: I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip Pádraic Whyte 5. ‘Cities Will Sing’: Natural New York Jenny Bavidge 6. A City Cold and Wild: Nature and Social Justice in Slake’s Limbo and Ten Mile River Suzanne Marie Hopcroft 7. ‘New York Is a Great Place’: Urban Mobility in Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature Sonya Sawyer Fritz 8. Catalysing Urban Interaction: Individual and Crowded Identities in New York City Jane Suzanne Carroll 9. Self in the City: Young Adult Fiction about New York City after 9/11 Jo Lampert 10. I Am an Island: Caribbean Immigrants to New York City in Children’s Literature Karen Sands-O’Connor 11. The View from the Top of the Bus: Curious George in Émigré New York Katie Trumpener 12. New York City: A Dystopian Utopia in Visual Narratives Valerie Coghlan 13. A Right to Music: New York and Mid-Century Liberal Imagination in The Cricket in Times Square Helen Conrad O’Briain 14. Just Kids: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Androgyne in New York Roni Natov

"In this book, urban studies and children's literature studies seem to have truly found each other. It is an inspiring volume of essays that provides conceptual frameworks for taking this research further and applying it to other cities as well" - Vanessa Joosen, Tilburg University/University of Antwerp, Bookbird, Vol, 53, No.1, 2015