Dust Off The Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’S Literature At The Newbery Centennial (Children'S Literature And Culture)

The oldest and most prestigious children's literature award, the Newbery Medal has since 1922 been granted annually by the American Library Association to the children's book it deems most distinguished." Medal books enjoy an outsized influence on American children's literature, figuring perennially on publishers' lists, on library and bookstore shelves, and in school curricula. As such, they offer a compelling window into the history of US children's literature and publishing, as well as into changing societal attitudes about which books are "best" for America's schoolchildren. Yet literary scholars have disproportionately ignored the Medal winners in their research. This volume provides a critically- and historically-grounded scholarly analysis of representative but understudied Newbery Medal books from the 1920s through the 2010s, interrogating the disjunction between the books' omnipresence and influence, on the one hand, and the critical silence surrounding them, on the other. Dus