Critical Approaches to Children's Literature

Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds explores cultural and historical aspects of the representation of plants in Australian children’s and young adult literature, encompassing colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous perspectives. While plants tend to be backgrounded as of less narrative interest than animals and humans, this book, in conversation with the field of critical plant studies, approaches them as living beings worthy of attention. Australia is home to over 20,000 species of native plants – from pungent Eucalypts to twisting mangroves, from tiny orchids to spiky, silvery spinifex. Indigenous Australians have lived with, relied upon, and cultivated these plants for many thousands of years. When European explorers and colonists first invaded Australia, unfamiliar species of plants captured their imagination. Vulnerable to bushfires, climate change, and introduced species, plants continue to occupy fraught butvital places in Australian ecologies, texts, and cultures. Discussing writers from Ambelin Kwaymullina and Aunty Joy Murphy to May Gibbs and Ethel Turner, and embracing transnational perspectives from Ukraine, Poland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Storying Plants addresses the stories told about plants but also the stories that plants themselves tell, engaging with the wide-ranging significance of plants in Australian children’s and Young Adult literature.

If you were building a world from scratch, what would you do with disability? This book explores representations of disability in speculative young adult literature published in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada from 1987-2024. Key texts include Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn novels, Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White. Drawing from literary, queer, and critical disability studies, Crip Worldbuilding interrogates key tropes and disability metanarratives, such as miracle cures, blind prophets and disability hierarchy, and protagonist exceptionality. 

The concept of speculative worldbuilding is reconsidered as a form of accessible (or hostile) architecture. In doing so, fictional worlds become environments to which models of disability may be applied. Kavanagh-Ryan asks: how does speculative fiction for young adults imagine crip futures? What can the tropes and narrative expectations of the genre tell us about current and future ways of being crip in the world?