Literary Worlds of Childhood analyses texts written in English for children from the beginning of the eighteen century to the twenty first, including writers such as Isaac Watts, Sarah Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, Lewis Caroll, Rudyard Kipling, A.A. Milne, David Almond, Suzanne Collins, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowling and many others. The book, spanning the boudaries of cultural and literary studies, is divided into seven thematic chapters which examine the fictional child in the contexts of religion, education, nature, play, the supernatural, the past, and politics. Each chapter also has a generic focus (from religious hymns to dystopia). Semiotic and narratological tools allow to delineate the understanding of the child and childhood inscribed in individual texts as well as in genre patterns.
