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Books and Boundaries: Writers and their Audiences. Edited by Pat Pinsent. Lichfield, Staffordshire: Pied Piper Publishing, 2004.
The 1999 publication of Sandra Beckett's collection of essays, Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, brought together some of the emerging scholarship on the difficulties of defining audience, rooted in both contemporary and historical examples. Overnight, it seemed, the discussion of children's and young adult books as complicated by their adult writers and/or readers achieved critical mass and has since found many forums, including a day-long annual conference held at Roehampton Institute in London. This volume contains the proceedings of that conference, held on November 15,2003 and co-sponsored by the British section of IBBY and the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature (NCRCL).
In this printed collection, fifteen papers join talks by authors and publishers, reorganized from their place on the conference schedule into three catch-all sections. The majority of the papers are by writers who have some affiliation with the University of Surrey Roehampton, either as current or past students in the master's or doctoral program or as faculty members. The informal talks that frame the collection of papers add the insights of authors, publishers, critics, and a lone bookseller.
In the first section on picture books, Penni Cotton introduces the European Picture Book Collection, more thoroughly documented in her book Picture Books sans Frontières (2000). Funded by the European Union and available as an online resource, this project was designed to create a collection of books...