Ogre Downstairs

When a disagreeable man with two boys marries a widow with three children, family adjustments are complicated by two magic chemistry sets which cause strange things to happen around the house.

When a disagreeable man with two boys marries a widow with three children, family adjustments are complicated by two magic chemistry sets which cause strange things to happen around the house.

Includes indexes.

First Published in 1995. Dedicated to furthering original research in children's literature and culture, the Children's Literature and Culture series will include monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children's literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. This volume looks at ‘undiscovered’ children’s literature.

British author Diana Wynne Jones has been writing speculative fiction for children for more than thirty years. A clear influence on more recent writers such as J. K. Rowling, her humorous and exciting stories of wizard's academies, dragons, and griffins-many published for children but read by all ages-are also complexly structured and thought provoking critiques of the fantasy tradition. This is the first serious study of Jones's work, written by a renowned science fiction critic and historian. In addition to providing an overview of Jones's work, Farah Mendlesohn also examines Jones's important critiques of the fantastic tradition's ideas about childhood and adolescence. This book will be of interest to Jones's many admirers and to those who study fantasy and children's literature.

Four British Fantasists explores the work of four of the most successful and influential of the generation of fantasy writes who rose to prominence in the "second Golden Age" of children's literature in Britain: Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Penelope Lively.

Children's publishing is a huge international industry and there is ever-growing interest from researchers and students in the genre as cultural object of study and tool for education and socialization.

This book explores representations of girlhood and young womanhood in recent English language children's fantasy by focusing on two fantastic body transformation types: invisibility and age-shifting. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory, the study discusses the tropes of invisibility and age-shifting as narrative devices representing gendered experiences. The transformations offer various perspectives on a girl's changing body and identity and provide links between real-life and fantastic discourses of gender, power, invisibility and aging. The main focus is on English-language fantasy published since the 1970s but the motifs of invisibility and age-shifting in earlier tales and children's books is reviewed; this is the first study of children's fantasy literature that considers these tropes at length. Novels discussed are from both critically acclaimed authors and the less well known. Most of the novels depicting invisible or age-shifting girls are neither thoroughly conventional nor radically subversive but present a range of styles. In terms of gender, children's fantasy novels can be more complex than they are often interpreted to be.