Voices Off: Texts, Contexts and Readers

Voices Off is a companion volume to the popular and successful After Alice and The Prose and the Passion, the final text in a trilogy of books devoted to children's literature, edited by Morag Styles, Eve Bearne and Victor Watson. As before, the essays bring together a deep knowledge of, and concern for, children and their reading. It features contributions from three distinguished novelists, Jan Mark, Jill Paton Walsh and John Rowe Townsend. Other new voices include the artist Satoshi Kitamura (with four colour illustrations), two booksellers (Kate Agnew and Elizabeth Hammill from Heffers Children's Bookshop, Cambridge and Waterstone's, Newcastle, respectively), Geoff Fox, Anne Rowe, Charles Sarland and many more. The writers focus on a variety of genres and issues relating to children's literature both in contemporary contexts and with reference to the past.
Voices Off seeks to understand young readers as they grapple with (or reject) texts that absorb them: Point Horror to wordless picture books; the poetry of John Bunyan to oral and physical texts created by children in drama; comics, letters and series books to Aesop's fables. It sounds a warning note to those powerful voices which would narrow, limit and control children and their texts.