Seriality and Texts for Young People The Compulsion to Repeat

Seriality and Texts for Young People is a collection of thirteen original, scholarly essays about series and serial texts directed to children and youth. Each begins from the premise that a basic principle of seriality is repetition and explores what that means for a range of primary texts, including popular narrative series for children, comics, magazines, TV series, and digital texts. Contributors featured include internationally-recognised scholars such as Perry Nodelman, Margaret Mackey and Laurie Langbauer, and the essays cover texts such as the Harry Potter novels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Anne of Green Gables. The introduction provides a framework for the detailed explorations, reviewing some of the most important contemporary theories of repetition, pointing to some key criticism on series, and speculating on the significance of the series form for the field of young people's texts.

Mavis Reimer is the Canada Research Chair in Young People's Texts and Cultures and the Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. She is the co-author, with Perry Nodelman, of The Pleasures of Children's Literature (3rd ed.), and lead editor of the scholarly journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.

Nyala Ali holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. She has been published in Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN.

Deanna England graduated with an honours degree in Psychology in 1998 and her Master's degree in Cultural Studies in 2012. She is a Graduate Studies Officer at The University of Winnipeg, Canada, and a regular contributor to the University of Venus, a blog featured on the Inside Higher Education website.

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a former editor of Geez magazine. Her first full poetry collection, Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems, was published by The Muses' Company in 2013. Her academic work has been published in the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement. She is a doctoral student in English at the University of Manitoba, Canada.

Introduction: The Compulsion to Repeat; Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and Melanie Dennis Unrau
1.Off to See the Wizard Again and Again; Laurie Langbauer
2.'Anne repeated': Taking Anne Out of Order; Laura M. Robinson
3.Kierkegaard's Repetition and the Reading Pleasures of Repetition in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle Series; Rose Lovell-Smith
4.Harry Potter Fans Discover the Pleasures of Transfiguration; Eliza T. Dresang and Kathleen Campana
5.Girls, Animals, Fear, and the Iterative Force of the National Pack: Reading the Dear Canada Series; Charlie Peters
6.'But what is his country?': Producing Australian Identity through Repetition in the Victorian School Paper, 1896-1918; Michelle J. Smith
7.Serializing Scholarship: (Re)Producing Girlhood in Atalanta; Kristine Moruzi
8.'I will not / be haunted / by myself!': Originality, Derivation, and the Hauntology of the Superhero Comic; Brandon Christopher
9.Michael Yahgulanaas's Red and the Structures of Sequential Art; Perry Nodelman
10. The Beloved That Does Not Bite: Genre, Myth, and Repetition in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Debra Dudek
11. Roy and the Wimp: The Nature of an Aesthetic of Unfinish; Margaret Mackey
12. MP3 as Contentious Message: When Infinite Repetition Fuses with the Acoustic Sphere; Larissa Wodtke
13. The Little Transgender Mermaid: A Shape-Shifting Tale; Nat Hurley
Index