Serialization, Commercialization and the Children’s Classics

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A01=Amy Webster
A01=Dr Amy Webster
abridgement
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Amy Webster
Author_Dr Amy Webster
automatic-update
book materiality
British educational policy
Category1=Kids
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Category=DSY
Category=KNTP
Category=KNTP1
Category=YFA
children's classics
children's publishing
classic literature
commercialization
contemporary publishing practices
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Pre-order
distant reading methods
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_non-fiction
individuality
Ladybird
Language_English
Longman
PA=Not yet available
paratext
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Forthcoming
publishing industry
Puffin Books
quality
quantitative research methods
reader experience
seriality
softlaunch
The Wind in the Willows
uniformity
Walker

Product details

  • ISBN 9781350434103
  • Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
  • Publication Date: 23 Jan 2025
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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An exploration of the serialization of children's classics by contemporary publishers, this book digs into the impact of the practice and provides new ways of reading the corpus of British children's literature from the 20th century. Amy Webster demonstrates how publishers select texts for their series, which texts they omit, which outliers are sometimes included and how a core group of works from the golden age of children's literature emerged. The text also examines how texts are abridged and transformed from publisher to publisher through close readings of The Wind in the Willows and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and how the repackaging of works within a series highlight issues and choices tied to key paratextual elements. Analysing data through distant reading and close reading of series from Ladybird, Longman, Puffin and Walker Illustrated editions, this book sheds light on how modern classics series are marked by variation and instability but also a reductive homogeneity.

Through her use of quantitative and text-focused research, Webster reveals how commercial motivations have created a gulf between the canonical concepts of the classic and how the term functions as a marketing tool in British children’s publishing. With notions of what counts as a classic compromised and complicated, this book leads the call for a critical approach towards both the term ‘classic’ and to reading children’s classics that acknowledges how they are tied to the commercial enterprises of the children’s book business.

Amy Webster is Senior Lecturer in Education Studies, Bishop Grosseteste University, UK. She is part of the University’s Literature and Literacies research unit and co-edits the university’s newsletter on children’s literature. Her articles and essays have been published in The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Children and Childhood Studies and FEAST and has presented many papers across the UK and Europe. She completed an MPhil and PhD at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge.