Dust Off the Gold Medal

<p>The oldest and most prestigious children’s literature award the Newbery Medal has since 1922 been granted annually by the American Library Association to the children’s book it deems most distinguished. Medal books enjoy an outsized influence on American children’s literature figuring perennially on publishers’ lists on library and bookstore shelves and in school curricula. As such they offer a compelling window into the history of US children’s literature and publishing as well as into changing societal attitudes about which books are best for America’s schoolchildren. Yet literary scholars have disproportionately ignored the Medal winners in their research. This volume provides a critically- and historically-grounded scholarly analysis of representative but understudied Newbery Medal books from the 1920s through the 2010s interrogating the disjunction between the books’ omnipresence and influence on the one hand and the critical silence surrounding them on the other. <i>Dust Off the Gold Medal</i> makes a case for closing these scholarly gaps by revealing neglected texts’ insights into the politics of children’s literature prizing and by demonstrating how neglected titles illuminate critical debates currently central to the field of children’s literature. In particular the essays shed light on the hidden elements of diversity apparent in the neglected Newbery canon while illustrating how the books respond—sometimes in quite subtle ways—to contemporaneous concerns around race class gender disability nationalism and globalism.</p>