This book offers a comprehensive analysis of character focalization in ten contemporary realistic children’s novels. The author argues that character focalization, defined as the location of fictional world perception in the mind of a character, is a prominent textual structure in these novels. He demonstrates how significant meanings are conveyed in a variety of forms related to characters’ personal and interpersonal experiences. Through close analysis of each text, moreover, he exposes distinctive perceptual, psychological, and social-psychological patterns in the opening chapters of each novel, which are thereafter developed by the principles of continuation, augmentation, and reconfiguration. This book will appeal to scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of narrative studies, stylistics, children’s literature scholarship, linguistics, and education.

Don K. Philpot is Professor of Reading and Literacy at Shippensburg University, USA, where he specializes in the field of children’s literature stylistics. He teaches courses on disciplinary literacy, children’s literature, and literacy instruction for diverse students. His current research focuses on resilient fictional children and their transformative effects on real children.