Now We Are Six at One Hundred: Affect, Atmosphere, and Ordinary Feeling in A. A. Milne's Hundred Acre Wood

Edited Collection for the Children's Literature Association Series: Centennial Studies

Call for Abstracts

In 2027, A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six reaches its centenary. This is the second collection of children's verse and the third book in the Pooh sequence, following When We Were Very Young (1924) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). It contains 35 poems, all illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. Unlike the prose Pooh books, it is a collection of self-contained poems. The poems move between several interconnected worlds:

• the imaginative world of Christopher Robin
• the domestic world of nursery life
• the emerging world of Pooh and his friends
• fantasy adventures inspired by children's play
• reflections on growing older and being "six"

Rather than telling a continuous story, the collection creates a mosaic of childhood experiences. Although the poetry collection occupies a central place within the Pooh tetralogy, critical attention has overwhelmingly focused on Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, leaving the verse comparatively underexamined. This collection seeks to redress that imbalance by placing Now We Are Six at the centre of contemporary children's literature scholarship.

Rather than revisiting familiar debates surrounding nostalgia, biography, or Disney adaptation, Now We Are Six at One Hundred asks a different question: what does the Hundred Acre Wood feel like?

The volume brings together scholars interested in affect, atmosphere, mood, embodiment, childhood, disability, and literary form to examine the diffuse textures of feeling that circulate through Milne's writing. Across the Pooh books, emotions are rarely dramatic or explicitly named. Instead, Milne constructs a world of repetition, ritual, waiting, wandering, comfort, uncertainty, and quiet companionship. This collection argues that these ordinary affects deserve sustained critical attention.

Affect theory provides the volume's principal methodological throughline, while welcoming dialogue with children's literature studies, disability studies, ecocriticism, cognitive literary studies, narratology, poetics, translation studies, adaptation studies, material culture, education, and book history. Critical Neurodivergent Studies is included as one productive interpretive framework among several, particularly where contributors wish to explore neurodivergent-coded affect without reducing characters to retrospective diagnosis.

We invite original chapter proposals that engage with Now We Are Six, the wider Pooh tetralogy, or the affective afterlives of Milne's work.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• affect theory and ordinary feeling
• atmosphere, mood, and literary texture
• poetic representations of childhood feelings - repetition, rhythm, and poetic form
• negotiating independence, curiosity and imagination
• childhood temporalities - counting, age, ritual, and developmental narratives
• boredom, waiting, comfort, and everyday life
• melancholy, flat affect, and emotional ambiguity
• neurodivergent readings of the Hundred Acre Wood
• landscape as emotional infrastructure
• embodiment and sensory experience
• space, enclosure, and domestic atmospheres - the domestic world of the nursery
• the emotional texture of being six - wandering, wondering, waiting, playing, and belonging
• friendship, care, dependency, and kinship
• animality and more-than-human feeling
• humour and affect
• translation and the transmission of mood
• adaptation and emotional transformation
• Disney and the commercial afterlife of Pooh
• illustration and visual affect
• pedagogy and classroom encounters with Milne
• nostalgia and the politics of remembering childhood
• archives, manuscripts, and publishing history
• ecocritical and environmental readings of the Wood
• queer, feminist, or posthuman approaches to affect in Milne's work
• illustrations as emotional achitecture, visual memory,
• everyday rituals of walking, eating, collecting, playing
• the imaginative world of Christopher Ronin
• interwar Britain and emotional cultures
• pastoral landscapes and environmental feeling after industrialization
• Englishness and national identity
• post-war emotional cultures
• slow time, seasonal rhythms, and ordinary temporality
• phenomenological approaches to childhood and everyday experience
• sound, sensory and auditory worlds
• material cultures – objects and things
• food and domestic rituals

Interdisciplinary perspectives are especially welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit:

• an abstract of 250–300 words
• a short biography of 100 words

Abstract submissions should be made via the online submission form:

Qualtrics Submission Form:
https://unesurveys.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0UkEiFpPg3M4PfU

Selected contributors will be invited to submit chapters of approximately 6,500–8,000 words, including references (Chicago author-date).

All chapters will undergo editorial review prior to inclusion in the manuscript.

Timeline

Abstract submissions: 1 November 2026
Notification of acceptance: 15 November 2026
First chapter drafts due: 15 February 2026  
Peer review and revisions: 15 March 2027
Final chapters due: 15 April 2027

About the Collection

Now We Are Six at One Hundred is being developed for the Children's Literature Association Series' Centennial Studies imprint. The collection marks the centenary of Milne's 1927 poetry collection while offering the first sustained affect-theoretical examination of the Pooh corpus. By attending to the subtle moods, atmospheres, and ordinary feelings that animate the Hundred Acre Wood, the volume seeks to open new directions for Pooh scholarship and children's literature studies more broadly.

Queries and Abstracts

For enquiries, please contact: jo.coghlan@une.edu.au at the University of New England, Australia