Serialisation, Commercialisation and the Children’s Classics: British Series from the 20th Century

＂An exploration of the serialization of children’s classics by contemporary publishers, this book examines the impact of the practice to provide new ways of reading 20th-century British children’s literature. Combining distant and close reading of series from Ladybird, Longman, Puffin and Walker Illustrated, it reveals how publishers’ composition, abridgement and repackaging of individual works into series has transformed classic fiction into commercial products and complicated the concept of what is even considered a classic. Demonstrating how modern classics series are marked by variation, instability and a reductive homogeneity, Webster puts forward a critical approach for classifying classics in the face of contemporary publishing practices＂--

Amy Webster is Senior Lecturer in Education Studies, Bishop Grosseteste University, UK. She is part of the University’s Literature and Literacies research unit and co-edits the university’s newsletter on children’s literature. Her articles and essays have been published in The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Children and Childhood Studies and FEAST and has presented many papers across the UK and Europe. She completed an MPhil and PhD at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge.