The Future of Post-Human Children’s Literature
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is children’s literature really so modern in origin that Philippe Ariès once confidently asserted that “in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist”? (WK 2015)

This claim about the idea of childhood was rejected by Nicholas Orme, who wrote that “Aries’s views were mistaken: not simply in detail but in substance. It is time to lay them to rest.” (WK 2015)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), children’s literature (in relation to maturity and immaturity) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe

But this questioning of the opposing views does not mean that children’s literature is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to children’s literature)—like literary studies, children’s studies, children’s geographies, children’s media studies, visual arts, cartoons, animation, mythology, folklores, performing arts, children’s culture, history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, theology, education, political science, library science, information science, and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2014) Indeed, neither of these extreme views is plausible.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of children’s literature in regard to the dialectic relationship between maturity and immaturity—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the mutative theory of children’s literature) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way, and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about children’s literature (in relation to the dialectic relationship between maturity and immaturity) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.