Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: Challenging the Mythology of Home in Children’s Literature

“My Two Homes”Children’s Picture Books and Non/Normative Imaginaries of Home in Post-Divorce/Separation Families

“…Since children's literature is largely written and published by adults, it is widely accepted to reflect adult constructions of childhood and to be shaped by their hopes and fears about this life stage at a particular time (Wilson and Short 2012). Stott and Francis (1993, 223) revealed how modern stories for children shared a moral concern with the main character's relation to 'home' and 'not home', with home being 'a place of comfort, security, and acceptance -a place which meets both physical and emotional needs'.…”

“…Stott and Francis (1993, 223) revealed how modern stories for children shared a moral concern with the main character's relation to 'home' and 'not home', with home being 'a place of comfort, security, and acceptance -a place which meets both physical and emotional needs'. Writing almost twenty years later, Wilson and Short (2012) identify a shift in postmodern children's literature to plots in which this traditional motif -of a journey away from home and back again to safety -has been recast. Instead: 'the child protagonist constructs a new home because of an absence of home at the beginning or because the home in untenable… children in these stories can't go home again because their home isn't where they want to dwell.…”

Construing the Child Reader: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of the Opening to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

“…Melissa Wilson and Kathy Short (2012) argue that postmodern children's literature dispels the nostalgic myth of home as a safe and comforting place. Home should then be understood as ''failed or absent,'' and a point of departure for the transformation into a better self.…”

Good grief: bereavement literature for young adults andA Monster Calls

“…Wilson and Short have argued that a new pattern in children's literature, which they call a ‘postmodern metaplot’, begins with the child being abandoned and usually ends with the child leading the adults to a hopeful ending 26. The proliferation of orphans in children's literature serve both to enable a quest narrative free from parental interference and, as Kimball found,27 to explore the pain of isolation.…”