KERRY MALLAN is Professor in Education at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She co-edited Youth Cultures: Texts, Images, and Identities (2003), an IRSCL Honour Book. Her most recent book, New World Orders in Contemporary Childrens Literature: Utopian Transformations (2008), is co-authored with Clare Bradford, John Stephens, and Robyn McCallum.

Gender Dilemmas in Children's Fiction is a lively and engaging study that examines how fictional texts -- picture books, novels, and films -- produced for children and young adults are responding to the tensions and dilemmas that arise from new gender relations and sexual differences. In discussing a diverse range of international children's fiction published between 1990 and 2008, Kerry Mallan offers an insightful discussion of some of the key dilemmas that emerge from the texts' treatment of romance, beauty, cyberbodies, queer, and comedy. This text confirms the importance of children's fiction for offering its readers and viewers varying, imagined accounts of how children and young people see the world and their place in it. By drawing on an extensive knowledge of children's texts and critical works, this book makes a significant contribution to productive dialogues about children's fiction, theory, and contemporary debates around issues of gender and sexuality.