Producing Children: Critical Studies in Childhood Creativity (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies)

Producing Children imagines the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of a creative relation between children as producers and consumers by revising the long-established, hierarchical relation between adults and children. The chapters in this collection reveal that studying child-produced culture complicates our received understandings of children’s culture as culture by adults, for children, about children. They also underscore “children’s literature” as a cultural phenomenon that moves across and beyond genres, forms, and media. As a whole, this collection reveals that attention to child-produced culture invites dialogue and collaboration across fields and disciplines invested in the critical understanding of children as embodied beings and childhood as both a stage of development and discursive construct with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions and influence. With the ongoing vibrancy of childhood studies as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, studies of child-produced culture provide scholars with an exciting opportunity to complicate, enrich, and expand theorization of childhood creativity, children’s culture, and even children themselves.

PETER C. KUNZE is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press).

VICTORIA FORD SMITH is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She is the author of Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature.