CfP: Insects in Children’s and Young Adult (YA)
The most iconic bug in children’s literature must be Eric Carles’ The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), a book that has been translated into more than 60 languages and published in a wide range of forms and formats. Reading the story with a child, one of the editors of this proposed volume gained a startling new perspective on this classic tale: Expressing his love for the larva but flatly rejecting its metamorphosis into a butterfly, his interest was reserved for the gluttonous caterpillar. This call focusses on the roles of insects in texts for children and young adults, and on interpretations of these creatures by children, young adults, and adults alike. In a series of historical examples, Simon Leather (2018) argues that whereas insects in books for adults tend to be pests, “books for children that feature insects do tend to cast them in a favourable light, what is at fault tends to be the representation of insect anatomy and biology” (on the part of the illustrator). Does this general observation hold up to more sustained scrutiny?
While butterflies usually have connotations of beauty and development, flies are more often signs of dystopian decay. This is for instance the case in Emmi Itäranta’s YA novel Memory of Water (2014), where pestering horseflies are the only surviving animals after a prolonged period of drought has dried up numerous lakes and provoked extensive forest dieback. In William Golding’s classic The Lord of the Flies (1954) too, flies are an ominous presence – the book’s title is a literal translation of the Hebrew bá`al zebūb, a Philistine god often equated with the devil. Dystopian in its own way is also Melanie Watt’s picturebook Bug in a vacuum (2015), where a fly-like creature struggles to survive the filth inside a vacuum bag.
Insects in children’s books may fill many functions, from the moral to the playful or instructive. The call invites mapping and discussion of the role of insects in local and global children’s and young adult literatures, ranging from the tiny yellow beetle hiding on every page of Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go (1974), to insect metaphors (like “being a fly on the wall”) that may buzz in prose texts for young adults
In books for children, the representation of insects ranges from the entomologically accurate to the more general or anthropomorphized. Most insects have six legs and two pairs of wings, fastened to the middle part of their three-part body. They vary in size, from Kikiki huna’s miniscule 0,16 mm to Phrygranistris chinensis zhao that stretches an impressive 62.4 cm (Sverdrup-Thygeson, 2018, p. 16). Because they have exoskeletons, they grow either by shedding their skins, as do grasshoppers and dragonflies, or by metamorphosis in a chrysalis stage, as do butterflies. While there are over 200 million insect specimens on the globe, comprising around a million species populating lakes, forests, rivers, deserts, and, insects in the Anthropocene are in decline, and a number of species are nearing extinction. They are found on all terrestrial continents, and some survive in marine habitats, but only one species of insect has adapted to an oceanic existence – the sea skater, or Helobates (Grimaldi, 2026).
Paying attention to insect life in children’s and YA literature may help foreground its environmental significance. Snaddon & Turner (2007) note that while the numbers of insects are dwindling worldwide, they rarely achieve the media attention afforded large charismatic mammals, “despite their extreme diversity and functional importance in ecosystems”. Insects in fiction may draw a crowd, though. Maja Lunde gained a global readership for Bienes historie (2015), translated into English as The History of Bees (2017). The novel revolves around colony collapse disorder (CCD) and highlights the vital role of bees in food production while detailing the life of several generations of beekeepers, inspiring reflection on the consequences of bee decline from an anthropocentric perspective. Another well-received novel is Barbara Kingsolver’s climate fiction Flight Behaviour (2012), where the migration pattern of the monarch butterfly is a central topic. Sara Scotland (2022) discusses how stories such as these may “elicit empathy and lead to sympathetic identification with” bees and butterflies.
Some insects are more often foregrounded in cultural texts than others – and examples of the more common ones in children’s tales are ants, bees, butterflies, ladybugs, grasshoppers, and dragonflies. Inspired by Aesop’s tale of the ant and the grasshopper, Disney’s animated film A bug’s life (1998), which has also been made into a videogame, pits two of these popular bugs against each other: ants and grasshoppers. In children’s literature research, Nina Goga’ book-length study of ants, Gå til mauren (2014), explores educational topoi exemplified by ants in books for children, and in a discussion of reptiles and insects in Arabic children’s literature, Rafi' Yehya (2024) discusses quite a few insects from the “most popular” list, namely ants, butterflies, bees and grasshoppers. In a different mode, Elina Druker analyses children’s stories with animal or humanoid protagonists that are depicted or described in a dehumanizing manner as vermin, defined as “animals or insects that are considered harmful or a nuisance” (2021).
We aim for an anthology with broad global scope, including Indigenous perspectives. Topical questions addressed may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Analysis of examples of “charismatic” insects that recur across texts
- Tropes linked to specific insects across texts
- The cultural significance of specific insects
- Insect metaphors
- Scientific, ecological, mythological, anthropomorphic, or posthuman approaches
- Insects in Indigenous texts for young people
- Insects in films and video games for children and young adults
- Insects in fantasy, speculative fiction, dystopia, solar- and steam punk, non-fiction, picturebooks, or poetry for young people
- How has the presence and representation of insects in literatures for children changed with time?
- What lessons are insects called on to communicate to children and young adults?
-How are insects in children’s and YA literature received by child and YA readers?
- Insect poetics – how is insect language or bodily semiosis depicted in texts for children and young adults?
- Insect thinking – how does thinking with insects enable new ways of reading and writing about children’s and young adult literature
- How do insects intersect with or transform texts on structural levels, for example multimodal insects and pop-up books?
Please submit 300-word abstracts by September 1st 2026 to: Lykke Guanio-Uluru, hagl@hvl.no & Melanie Duckworth, melanie.duckworth@hiof.no.
Deadline for submission of full articles is May 1st, 2027. To be pitched with Routledge’s “Perspectives on the non-human in literature and culture” series.
Since an AI prompt requires the energy equivalent of around 40 cellphone charges and an AI chat drinks 0,5 l water, the use of AI is dissuaded in the production of this volume.