Children's literature has recently produced a body of criticism with a highly distinctive voice. The book consolidates understanding of this area by including essays published in the field in the last five years, demonstrating the links between literary criticism, education, psychology, history and scientific theory. It includes Peter Hollindale's award-winning essay "Ideology and Children's Literature", topics from fiction and post-modernism to fractal geometry, and the examination of texts ranging from picture books to "The Wizard of Oz" and the Australian classic "Midnite". Sources are as disparate as "Signal" and the "Children's Literature Association Quarterly", and the international community is represented by writers from Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and Germany. Each essay is set in its critical context by extensive quotation from different articles.

Peter Hunt (born 1945) is a British Scholar who is Professor Emeritus in Children's Literature at Cardiff University. His books include works of criticism, novels, and stories for younger children. The Children's Literature courses that he ran at Cardiff were the first to treat children's literature as a subject of academic study in the UK. He has lectured on the subject at over 120 universities in 20 countries, from Finland to New Zealand; the International Society for the Fantastic in the Arts presented him with its Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1995, and 2003 he won the International Brothers Grimm Award for services to children's literature from the Institute for Children's Literature, Osaka.