Children's Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe / Critical Approaches to Children's Literature (PDF)

ANDREW O'MALLEY Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University, Canada. He is the author of The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century. His research and teaching interests include children's literature and culture, popular culture, and the eighteenth century.

'This is a beautifully researched and intricately thought-out work of scholarship, whose apparently modest scope is deceptive, since the book ultimately pushes towards a far-reaching and provocative conclusion: that Robinson Crusoe, by heralding the future 'as modernity' and evoking the past 'as nostalgia', performs 'the kind of fundamentally contradictory cultural work into whose service the idea of childhood itself has been called for at least the last two centuries'' - Louise Joy, University of Cambridge, UK

'O'Malley's recognition of Robinson Crusoe as an enduring media event will, one hopes, spur other scholars to revisit the history of

this western classic and consider that Crusoe's legacy may not be built upon the power of Defoe's prose or narration, but rather on derivatives and adaptations that were frequently revised to reflect the ideas and values of a rapidly evolving society.' - Jordan Howell, University of Delaware, USA

'Weaving together social history, textual analysis, impressive archival research, and lucid theoretical argument, Children's Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe is a tour de force of scholarship.' - Susan Naramore Maher, Children's Literature Association Quarterly

'O'Malley's study is interesting, insightful, and enjoyable.' - The Year's Work in English Studies