In this detailed study, John Stephens provides an expert and authoritative analysis of narratives written for children. He focuses on the ideologies pervading texts and the ways in which creative literature represents the individual both as subject and as agent. The book looks at authorial style and how this can be used to control the reader's expectations and the view of social relationships it suggests. Genre is examined, and the way that children's stories relate and are related by readers, to other forms of 'discourse' in society. The study uses a wide range of international examples of particular types of children's books: old and new fairy tales, fantasy and historical fiction and poetry.
