Animals, fairies, and toys, and their relation to concepts of childhood or the child, fill the pages of British children's fiction in the twentieth-century. While childhood as often portrayed in the Victorian period was that of "vulnerability and victimization . . . a comparatively brief, difficult step on the path to adulthood" (Gavin and Humphries), literary representations of childhood from the Edwardian period onward focus less on the child's proper relation to the adult world, and more on cultivating affective ties with a host of nonhuman others. E. Nesbit's "Five Children and It," J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan," Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows," Margery Williams's "The Velveteen Rabbit" and "The Little Wooden Doll," among many others, turn to animals, fairies, and toys, and to the natural and supernatural spaces they inhabit as companions and sites of being and becoming otherwise. In conversation with recent scholarship on animal-human studies, ecologies, and object ontologies, this panel hopes to take up the nonhuman turn in twentieth-century British children's fiction in new and exciting ways.

If interested, please send an abstract (200-250 words) and a very short bio to Shun Y. Kiang at shunkiang@gmail.com by March 1.