Marketing Chinese Children's Books: Paratext and the Politics of Authorship (Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature)

An exploration of the marketing, presentation and construction of popular Chinese children's authors for their youthful audience, parents and teachers, Marketing Chinese Children's Books surveys the internal and international dissemination of children’s books and of international influences in the marketing of children’s literature. Focusing on the paratextual elements of contemporary Chinese literature written for children such as author photographs, this book reveals the political constraints on the position of popular children's author in the People's Republic of China after the Cultural Revolution. Taking the publications of Cao Wenxuan (the first Chinese recipient of the Hans Christian Anderson Award), Yang Hongying, Shen Shixi and Gerelchimeg Black Crane as case studies, Frances Weightman considers how the marketing of these authors presents them as academic and political authorities to be emulated and trusted, how they are demonstrative of the commercialism in children's literat