Vol. 4 No. 2 (2013)

The current issue of "Children's Readings" is devoted to contemporary children's literature, genres of mass literature, and mass culture in general. An article by the authoritative American researcher Jack Zipes about the work of W. Disney acquaints readers with Western approaches to the analysis of works addressed to a children's audience. The articles of the "Research" block reflect the whole spectrum of literary approaches to the object of study: an academic interpretation of the work of a modern writer for children, the history of vampire literature and the reasons for its popularity among readers, a study of the graphic novel (comics) genre, the genesis of the Slavic fantasy genre and the mechanisms of constructing ideologemes in modern mass culture, a functional analysis of fanfiction, balancing on the borderline between literary creativity, subcultural practices, and graphomania. The dominance of mass cult topics in the issue is largely due to the fact that the beginning of the study of genres of mass literature addressed to children and adolescents in Russian literary criticism was laid not so long ago and is now in a phase of active development, largely shaping the scientific mainstream in the field of studying children's literature.