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What children read during the Second World War had an immense impact on how they came of age. These years were unique for British children& mdash;parental controls were often relaxed if not absent, and the radio and literature assumed greater significance than they had in the more structured past. Owen Dudley Edwards discusses reading, children's radio, comics, films, and book-related play-acti... More

What children read during the Second World War had an immense impact on how they came of age. These years were unique for British children& mdash;parental controls were often relaxed if not absent, and the radio and literature assumed greater significance than they had in the more structured past. Owen Dudley Edwards discusses reading, children's radio, comics, films, and book-related play-activity in relation to value systems, the child's perspective versus the adult's perspective, the development of sophistication, retention, and loss of prewar attitudes, and their postwar fate. British literature is placed in a wider context through a consideration of what British writing reached America and vice versa and also through an exploration of wartime Europe as it was shown to British children. Questions of leadership, authority, individualism, community, conformity, urban-rural division, ageism, class, race, and gender awareness are explored. In this incredibly broad-ranging book, covering over 100 writers, Edwards considers literary inheritance when the war broke out and asks whether children's literary diet was altered temporarily or permanently. Concerned with the effects of the war as a whole on what children could read and what they made of it, he reveals the implications for the world they would come to inhabit.