This is a broad-ranging discussion of wartime children's literature and its effects. What children read in the Second World War had an immense effect on how they came of age as they faced the new world. In a unique time for British children, parental controls were often relaxed if not absent. Radio and reading assumed greater significance for most children than they had in the more structured past or were to do in the more crowded future. The study is contextualised through a consideration of the British fiction exported to the USA, as well as that imported to the UK and through an exploration ... More

This is a broad-ranging discussion of wartime children's literature and its effects. What children read in the Second World War had an immense effect on how they came of age as they faced the new world. In a unique time for British children, parental controls were often relaxed if not absent. Radio and reading assumed greater significance for most children than they had in the more structured past or were to do in the more crowded future. The study is contextualised through a consideration of the British fiction exported to the USA, as well as that imported to the UK and through an exploration of wartime Europe as it was shown to British children. Questions of leadership, authority, individualism, community, conformity, urban–rural division, ageism, and gender awareness are explored. Covering over one hundred writers, the book looks at the literary inheritance when the war broke out and asks whether children's literary diet was altered in the war temporarily or permanently. Concerned with the effects of the war on what children could read and their interpretation of it, the author reveals the implications of this for the world they would come to inhabit.