Ciara Ní Bhroin is a founding member and former president of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature. She lectured for many years in English language, literacy and literature at the Marino Institute of Education, an associated college of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. She has published a range of articles and book chapters on children's literature and is co-editor of What Do We Tell the Children? Critical Essays on Children's Literature (2012).

In the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children¿s fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and of unprecedented growth in Irish children¿s literature. Close readings of selected texts by five award-winning authors are linked to social, intellectual and political changes in the period covered and draw on postcolonial, feminist, cultural and children¿s literature theory, highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of home and the value of children¿s literature as a lens through which to view culture and society as well as an imaginative space where young people can engage with complex ideas relevant to their lives and the world in which they live. Examining the works of O. R. Melling, Kate Thompson, Eoin Colfer, Siobhán Parkinson and Siobhan Dowd, Ciara Ní Bhroin argues that Irish children¿sliterature changed at this time from being a vehicle that largely promoted hegemonic ideologies of home in post-independence Ireland to a site of resistance to complacent notions of home in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

CONTENTS

1   Introduction

2   Home Childhood and Children¿s Literature

     Changing Concepts of Home

     Home, Homeland and Childhood

     Irish Children¿s Fiction: Home, Homeland and Decolonization

3   Recovery of Origins: Myths of Homeland and Return in the Fantasy Fiction of         O.R. Melling

     Nostalgia and Essentialism

     Mother Ireland and the Female Returnee

     Unity and Duality

     The Viability of Ireland as Home

4   Continuity and Change: The Tradition / Modernity Dialectic in the Construction of Home in Kate Thompson¿s The New Policeman and Creature of the Night

     Positioning Thompson in an Irish Literary Tradition

     Tradition, Modernity and the Unhomely

5   Internationalization or Globalization? Myth Technology and Mobility in Eoin Colfer¿s Artemis Fowl Series

     Globalism, Internationalism and Cosmopolitanism

     Technology and Power

     Mobility and Privilege

     Home, Boundedness and Surveillance

6   Inclusions and Exclusions: Debunking Myths of Home and Homelessness in the Fiction of Siobhán Parkinson

     Re-visioning the Past

     Debunking the Myth of the West as Home

     Voices from the Edge

     Sameness and Difference

7   Unhomely Secrets in the Work of Siobhan Dowd

     Transgressive Females, Home and the Close-Knit Community

     Borders, Partition and Male Subjectivity

     Myths of Mother(land) and Return

     Secrets, Revelations and the Possibility of Home

8: Conclusion

Index