This volume is the outcome of a combined international effort of scholars from Germany, Austria, Italy, South Africa and Russia working on childrens literature in English. The individual studies aim at a critical evaluation of "imagined" children and their changing worlds and cultures as transformed, debated and negotiated in literary discourse. The contributors study the fascinating ways in which ideology and aesthetics work together artistically to produce meaning for children and adults alike, if sometimes in different ways.The texts chosen move on from Victorian to Edwardian, postmodern and postcolonial. They includc Mary and Charles Lamb's Mrs. Leicester 's School, Evelyn Sharps fairy tales, Thomas Hughess Tom Brown's Schooldays, Rudyard Kiplings Stalky & Co., G.K. Chestertons poems for children and his fairy tales, Edith Nesbits Five Children and It, Kenneth Grahames The Wind in the Willows, J.R.R. Tolkiens The Hobbit, Enid Blyton's school stories, J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series, contemporary childrens fiction by Joan Aiken, Diana Wynne Iones, Anne Fine, Roald Dahl, Philip Pullman, Gerard Whelan and David Almond and, importantly enough, South African childrens books as a tradition which is marginal to the British mainstream.As a general theoretical concept and methodological frame for the volume the term 'construction' has been chosen. Proceeding from the assumption that our notions of childhood are shaped by philosophical, educational, psychological, social, cultural and religious preconceptions, childhood in children's books is seen as constructed both by general discourses and by text features particular to individual works, such as language, plot, protagonists, the implied reader and, last but not least, illustrations.