Children's Publishing in Cold War France - (Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature) by Sophie Heywood (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation and its impact on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to detail how it dominated the country's new context of surveillance and control.

Using extensive new multilingual archive material including legal and business records and US State Department files, Sophie Heywood traces both the history of the French Communist Party's (PCF) and anti-comics activists' efforts to prevent American 'propaganda' reaching the hands of children, and Hachette's strategic and editorial responses. Children's Publishing in Cold War Francecovers such events as the campaign waged against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the impact of Cold War tensions on Hachette's publishing of Disney books and comics in French; and studies the translation of series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, where self-censorship could be a radical and creative process.

Children's Publishing in Cold War Francepresents a timely historical study of how states and political campaigners seek to control children's access to culture, and the legacies of such conflicts.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Reading.

About the Author

Sophie Heywood is Associate Professor in French and a founding co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading, UK. She specializes in the history of comparative children's literature and publishing. Her first monograph was a literary and publishing history of iconic French children's author, the Comtesse de Ségur (2011). She has published numerous articles and book chapters in English and French in internationally rated history journals, international children's literature publications. Her research has been funded by prestigious grant bodies including the Carnegie Trust, the Institute for Historical Research and the Leverhulme Trust.