Seriality and Texts for Young People

Wed. Feb. 4, 2015

Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat, edited by Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and Melanie Dennis Unrau, is now available from Palgrave Macmillan.

Seriality and Texts for Young People is a collection of thirteen original, scholarly essays about series and serial texts directed to children and youth. Each begins from the premise that a basic principle of seriality is repetition and explores what that means for a range of primary texts, including popular narrative series for children, comics, magazines, TV series, and digital texts. Contributors featured include internationally-recognised scholars such as Perry Nodelman, Margaret Mackey and Laurie Langbauer, and the essays cover texts such as the Harry Potter novels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Anne of Green Gables. The introduction provides a framework for the detailed explorations, reviewing some of the most important contemporary theories of repetition, pointing to some key criticism on series, and speculating on the significance of the series form for the field of young people’s texts.

Read a review of the book by Maria Nilson.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Compulsion to Repeat; Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and Melanie Dennis Unrau

1. Off to See the Wizard Again and Again; Laurie Langbauer

2. “Anne repeated”: Taking Anne Out of Order; Laura M. Robinson

3. Kierkegaard’s Repetition and the Reading Pleasures of Repetition in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle Series; Rose Lovell-Smith

4. Harry Potter Fans Discover the Pleasures of Transfiguration; Eliza T. Dresang and Kathleen Campana

5. Girls, Animals, Fear, and the Iterative Force of the National Pack: Reading the Dear Canada Series; Charlie Peters

6. “But what is his country?”: Producing Australian Identity through Repetition in the Victorian School Paper, 1896-1918; Michelle J. Smith

7. Serializing Scholarship: (Re)Producing Girlhood in Atalanta; Kristine Moruzi

8. “I will not / be haunted / by myself!”: Originality, Derivation, and the Hauntology of the Superhero Comic; Brandon Christopher

9. Michael Yahgulanaas’s Red and the Structures of Sequential Art; Perry Nodelman

10. The Beloved That Does Not Bite: Genre, Myth, and Repetition in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Debra Dudek

11. Roy and the Wimp: The Nature of an Aesthetic of Unfinish; Margaret Mackey

12. MP3 as Contentious Message: When Infinite Repetition Fuses with the Acoustic Sphere; Larissa Wodtke

13. The Little Transgender Mermaid: A Shape-Shifting Tale; Nat Hurley