The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature

Jack Zipes says that children's literature has come of age. It has long been the focus of sustained interest by practitioners and scholars, so coming of age implies that children's literature has emerged from the critical limbo and can now hold its own – critically, bibliographically, professionally – with other areas of literature. It is a passage traced also by popular fiction and popular culture. One of the signs of coming of age – and the rite of passage analogy is not accidentally given the subject – is to have a mature, comprehensive and systematic infrastructure of reference, bibliographical, and...