Record Detail

In Britain, children’s literature studies emerged in the late 1960s, largely
through the activities of what is now the Graduate School of Education at the
University of Exeter. This article uses the Catherine Storr archive to revisit some of
the contexts and concerns of those early days, many of which continue to have
relevance. Storr was involved in aspects of the initial Exeter projects. A children’s
writer known for unsettling stories that often made use of supernatural or Gothic
elements, she also spoke and wrote about the importance of fear in children’s
literature. Her work provides the focus of this discussion of the relationship between
frightening fiction for children, the interest in psychological approaches to reading
and producing children’s literature evinced in the foundational work at Exeter and
still evident today, and current concerns about the wellbeing of British children.