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RR 2005/196 International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (2nd edition) Edited by Peter Hunt Routledge London and New York, NY 2004 2 volumes ISBN: 0 415 29053 8 £195
Keywords Literature, Children (age groups), Encyclopaedias
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120510596319
This work first appeared in 1996, with the same title, from Routledge. It moved us on substantially from Carpenter and Prichard (1984), above all by capturing the critical ethos of the mid-1990s and applying it, in an extended and coherent way, to a wide range of national and international issues about children's literature. This is the level of scholarship that we expect from Peter Hunt, whose own critical studies of children's literature are well known and widely used on courses (usually in higher education) where children's literature is taught. The new (second) edition of the International Companion Encyclopedia has been greatly extended and now comes in two volumes.
Piece for piece, it is twice as much but still value for money. Its current rivals in the field include Cullinan and Person (2001), which is distinct because of its heavy emphasis on American (US) English-language children's literature (where it is good), and Watson (2001), which is particularly good on the English-language literatures of countries like Australia and Canada. For a library short of cash, already possessing Hunt mark one and Watson, there may be a dilemma about choosing the work under review. For any collection, public or private, aspiring to be cuttingedge and on top of things, then Hunt mark two is a must-have. Not that its perfect, but its definitely full of excellent things.
Anyone with the first edition will be interested to know that some of the earlier entries remain (like Gifford on comics and Sarland on ideology, Martin on book design and Bottigheimer on religious writing), but that 51 new chapters have been written, "either to extend the range of topics, or to replace chapters in the first edition where the original author was unable to update the work" (Hunt's preface). The broad design of the work in five sections (critical approaches, forms and genres, contexts, applications, national and international approaches) remains unchanged.
Hunt and his colleagues (consulting editors include Kimberley Reynolds, Sheila Ray, and Jack Zipes, while contributors include David Buckingham and...