Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature

Minjie Chen works at the Cotsen Children's Library, Princeton University, USA.

• Introduction 1. Chinese Youth Literature: An Overview 2. The Sino-Japanese War as Depicted in Chinese Youth Literature: The Big Picture 3. The Sino-Japanese War as Depicted in Chinese Youth Literature: A Thematic 4. Family Narrative as Information Source: A Case Study 5. Ethnic Chinese Wartime Experience in American Youth Literature 6. Conclusion

'Chen's book is an interesting, much need study opening up an important interdisciplinary field of research.'Lucia Obi, International Youth Library, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature'The author demonstrates a rich and nuanced understanding of the literature and its impacts on young audiences over the last seven decades, and in so doing highlights the importance of taking a hohstic approach in trying to grasp the full implications of the momentous events of the 1930s and 1940s in Sino-Japanese relations... the book deserves to be read widely, and will appeal not only to students and teachers of East Asian history, politics, literature and society, but also to the general reader wanting to find out more about the anatomy of the ongoing and bitter dispute between China and Japan over their wartime history.' Caroline Rose, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. University of London, Vol. 80, No. 1, 2017'Minjie Chen’s volume is the first crosscultural study on the representation of the second Sino-Japanese War (SJW; 1937–45) in both Chinese and English sources available to children and young adults from 1937 to 2007. This book provides a broad overview of the portrayals of the Chinese wartime experience in Chinese and US children’s literature and offers readers rich and multifaceted information on the subject.'Xu Xu, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4, Winter 2017As the first monograph on the important topic of how the Chinese experience of the war has been presented to children, and as one of the few book-length English-language publications on Chinese youth literature since Mary Ann Farquhar’s seminal Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (1999, reissued 2015), The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature makes a valuable contribution to the international history of children’s literature and paves the way for further work.Claudia Nelson, Children's Literature, Vol. 46, 2018