'Nobody knows how to write'. Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the 20th century, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them, Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, either human or technological. Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud. This volume – with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford – contextualises Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

Reading picture books with infants and toddlers facilitates their early language development, with far-reaching benefits for their later reading abilities and academic achievement. While the importance of reading books with children aged from 3 to 5 years is widely recognised, the benefits of reading with much younger children from 0 to 3 years, who are still engaged in learning their first language, are less well understood. This book will explore the seemingly simple practice of reading picture books with infants and toddlers aged 0–3 years, from a range of perspectives. Not only do book-focused adult–child interactions support language and early literacy development in multiple ways, such interactions can also, at the same time, foster intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual growth. By weaving together in an accessible manner the insights from several different discipline areas, this book will explain how and why reading with infants and toddlers has such power to enrich their lives. Providing an evidence-based, theoretically informed account, Reading Picture Books with Infants and Toddlers supports educators, parents, and caregivers with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to provide frequent, enjoyable, and language-rich reading experiences with infants and toddlers.

The connection between childhood and poetry runs deep. And yet, poetry written for children has been neglected by criticism and resists prevailing theories of children's literature. Drawing on Walter Ong's theory of orality and on Iain McGilChrist's work on brain function, this book develops a new theoretical framework for the study of children's poetry. From Tongue to Text argues that the poem is a multimodal form that exists in the borderlands between the world of experience and the world of language and between orality and literacy – places that children themselves inhabit. Engaging with a wide range of poetry from nursery rhymes and Christina Rossetti to Michael Rosen and Carol Ann Duffy, Debbie Pullinger demonstrates how these 'tactful' works are shaped by the dynamics of orality and textuality.

As in previous editions, this book approaches the study of child development from an inside/outside perspective, looking at children from an abstract or research-based point of view as well as from a personal or experiential perspective. The whole child is addressed at each stage of development in a chronological format with each stage presenting physical, cognitive, social, and emotional facets of the child. Strong coverage of research, theory, and issues in developmental psychology is augmented with examples to show their implications to students.