Names, Naming, Diversity, and Identity in Youth Literature

Recent years have seen a significant increase in works of fiction that champion and celebrate diversity and inclusion for young readers. At the same time, the world has witnessed a radical backlash against youth literature that positively explores issues of individual difference and group belonging. This multi-authored volume explores this growing tension and features chapters that critically examine how youth literature use names and naming to present child, adolescent, teen, and tween readers to the world’s ethnic, cultural, linguistic, neurological, religious, diversity. The contributors to this work represent themselves a kaleidoscope of cultural and linguistic backgrounds while sharing a common academic background in literature and onomastics. Although the primary geographic focus of the chapters selected for this publication is Anglo-American a supplementary call for chapter proposals has explicitly solicited additional proposals that have a broader, international, range. The editor is an internationally recognized expert in investigation of names and naming. She is the past president of the American Name Society, one of the world’s oldest and largest scholarly societies devoted to onomastic research.